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In World-first Transplant, Man Gets Pig Heart

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In World-first Transplant, Man Gets Pig Heart
Dr. Bartley Griffith, left, performed the operation on David Bennett Sr. to receive a new heart from a genetically modified pig. Credit...University of Maryland School of Medicine

A United States man has become the first person in the world to get a heart transplant from a genetically-modified pig.

David Bennett, 57, is doing well three days after the experimental seven-hour procedure in Baltimore, doctors say.

The transplant was considered the last hope of saving Mr Bennett’s life, though it is not yet clear what his long-term chances of survival are.

“It was either die or do this transplant,” Mr Bennett explained a day before the surgery.

“I know it’s a shot in the dark, but it’s my last choice,” he said.

Doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center were granted a special dispensation by the US medical regulator to carry out the procedure, on the basis that Mr Bennett – who has terminal heart disease – would otherwise have died.

READ ALSO: New Route For Regulating Blood Sugar Levels Independent Of Insulin

He had been deemed ineligible for a human transplant, a decision that is often taken by doctors when the patient is in very poor health.

The pig used in the transplant had been genetically modified to knock out several genes that would have led to the organ being rejected by Mr Bennett’s body, the AFP news agency reports.

For the medical team who carried out the transplant, it marks the culmination of years of research and could change lives around the world.

Surgeon Bartley Griffith said the surgery would bring the world “one step closer to solving the organ shortage crisis”. Currently 17 people die every day in the US waiting for a transplant, with more than 100,000 reportedly on the waiting list.

Dr Christine Lau, chair of the Department of Surgery at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, was in the operating theatre during the surgery.

“He’s at more of a risk because we require more immunosuppression, slightly different than we would normally do in a human-to-human transplant. How well the patient does from now is, you know, it’s never been done before so we really don’t know,” she told the BBC.

“People die all the time on the waiting list, waiting for organs. If we could use genetically engineered pig organs they’d never have to wait, they could basically get an organ as they needed it.

“Plus, we wouldn’t have to fly all over the country at night-time to recover organs to put them into recipients,” she added.

The possibility of using animal organs for so-called xenotransplantation to meet the demand has long been considered, and using pig heart valves is already common.

In October 2021, surgeons in New York announced that they had successfully transplanted a pig’s kidney into a person. At the time, the operation was the most advanced experiment in the field so far.

However, the recipient on that occasion was brain dead with no hope of recovery.

This watershed moment provides hope of a solution to the chronic shortage of donor human organs. But there is still a long way to go to determine whether giving people animal organs is the way forward. Pig hearts are anatomically similar to human hearts but, understandably, not identical. It’s not ideal, compared to swapping in a human donor heart. But it is possible to plumb them in and get them working.

The bigger issue is organ rejection. These pigs are bred to lack genes that can cause rejection.

They are cloned with certain genes “knocked out” and reared until they reach an age where their organs are big enough to be harvested for transplantation.

It is too soon to know how Mr Bennett will fare with his pig heart. His doctors were clear that the surgery was a gamble. The risks are huge, but so are the potential gains.

Mr Bennett, however, is hoping his transplant will allow him to continue with his life. He was bedridden for six weeks leading up to the surgery, and attached to a machine which kept him alive after he was diagnosed with terminal heart disease.

“I look forward to getting out of bed after I recover,” he said last week.

On Monday, Mr Bennett was reported to be breathing on his own while being carefully monitored.
But exactly what will happen next is unclear.

Mr Griffith said they were proceeding cautiously and carefully monitoring Mr Bennett, while his son David Bennett Jr told the Associated Press that the family were “in the unknown at this point”.

But he added: “He realises the magnitude of what was done and he really realises the importance of it.”

“We’ve never done this in a human and I like to think that we, we have given him a better option than what continuing his therapy would have been,” Mr Griffith said. “But whether [he will live for] a day, week, month, year, I don’t know.”

.BBC

 

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Elon Musk Looks For Twitter CEO ‘Foolish Enough’ To Succeed Him

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Elon Musk Looks For Twitter CEO 'Foolish Enough' To Succeed Him

Elon Musk said late Tuesday that he plans on remaining as Twitter’s CEO until he can find someone willing to replace him in the job.

Musk’s announcement came after just over 57 per cent of responses indicated that he should step down from the role, in an unscientific poll the billionaire himself created and promised to abide by the past weekend.

“I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!” Musk tweeted. “After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.”

Since taking over San Francisco-based Twitter in late October, Musk’s run as CEO has been marked by quickly issued rules and policies that have often been withdrawn or changed soon after being made public.

Twitter users vote yes to Elon Musk’s poll of whether he should step down as CEO

He has also alienated some investors in his electric vehicle company Tesla who are concerned that Twitter is taking too much of his attention.

“The first weeks of Mr. Musk’s Twitter ownership have raised questions about possible violations of securities or other laws, including whether Mr. Musk is funnelling Tesla resources into Twitter,” Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren said in a letter, made public, to Robyn Denholm, Tesla’s board chair.

READ  ALSO: Mass Sacking As Elon Musk Completes Takeover Of Twitter

Tumultuous first weeks Some of Musk’s actions have unnerved Twitter advertisers and turned off users. They include laying off half of Twitter’s workforce, letting go contract content moderators and disbanding a council of trust and safety advisors that the company formed in 2016 to address hate speech, child exploitation, suicide, self-harm and other problems on the platform.

Musk, who also helms the SpaceX rocket company, has previously acknowledged how difficult it will be to find someone to take over as Twitter CEO.

On Sunday, Twitter owner Elon Musk joined comedian Dave Chappelle on stage and was roundly booed. Musk responded on Twitter saying, “Technically, it was 90% cheers,” and that “It’s almost as if I’ve offended SF’s unhinged leftists … but nahhh.”

Musk has said that he’s politically a centrist, but the tweet is just one recent example of how he’s adopted partisan language in a social media culture war. Musk has distributed Twitter records that are supposed to reveal biased censorship, indulged in far-right talking points about COVID-19 and unbanned white nationalist accounts.

Bantering with Twitter followers last Sunday, he said that the person replacing him “must like pain a lot” to run a company that he said has been “in the fast lane to bankruptcy.”

“No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor,” Musk tweeted.

As things stand, Musk would still retain overwhelming influence over platform as its owner. He fired the company’s board of directors soon after taking control.

.CBC

 

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WhatsApp To Get Additional Features For Better Interaction

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WhatsApp To Gets Additional Features For Better Interaction

By John Michael Ojo
WhatsApp users will henceforth get more value for their money from the Meta-owned messaging platform following the launch of new features, including expansion  of size of group video calls to accommodate 32 people, increasing the group size to 1024 from 512 and allowing users to carry out polls in group chats.

The announcement of the new features was made known on Thursday by  Mark Zuckerberg.

“Today, we are excited to share our vision for a new feature we are adding to WhatsApp called Communities. Since WhatsApp launched in 2009, we’ve been focused on how we can help people have the next best thing to an in-person conversation when they want to talk to an individual or a group of friends or family,” Mr Zuckerberg said.

He added, “We also frequently hear from people who are using WhatsApp to communicate and coordinate within a community.”

The communities feature changes in admin controls, and introduces support for sub-groups and announcement groups. The feature will also allow 32-person voice and video calls, larger file sharing, emoji reactions, and polls.

READ ALSO: Users Stranded As WhatsApp Goes Down

When the feature is launched, admins of existing group chats will be able to transition their group to ‘Communities’ or opt to re-create their group as a ‘Community’.

Mr Zuckerberg noted that the encryption aspects of the ‘Communities’ feature was to “raise the bar for how organisations communicate with a level of privacy and security not found anywhere else.”

The ‘Communities’ feature has been in testing with over 50 organisations in 15 countries to gain early feedback.

 

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BREAKING: Mass Sacking As Elon Musk Completes Takeover Of Twitter

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Elon Musk Looks For Twitter CEO 'Foolish Enough' To Succeed Him

The $44 billion (£38.1 billion) Twitter deal begun by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has been completed with his takeover of the company.

This was disclosed by an investor in the firm who tweeted “the bird is freed”, in an apparent reference to the deal closing.

A number of top executives, including the boss, Parag Agrawal, have reportedly been fired.

It brings to a close a saga that saw Twitter go to court to hold the multi-billionaire to the terms of a takeover deal that he had tried to escape.

Twitter has not yet confirmed the takeover, but an early investor in the company told the BBC that the deal had been completed.

Mr Musk, a self-styled “free speech absolutist”, has been critical of Twitter’s moderation policies and the news will be greeted with mixed feelings by Twitter users and employees.

READ ALSO: Elon Musk Offers to Proceed With Twitter Deal At Original Price

Many people on the right of US politics will celebrate the exit of Agrawal as chief executive. They view people like Agrawal, and his predecessor, Jack Dorsey, as liberals who are curtailing free speech.

They also think that under their stewardship, Twitter has censored conservative voices – an accusation that Twitter denied.

Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal, and the firm’s top legal and policy executive, Vijaya Gadde, are no longer with the company, according to US media reports.

Agrawal and Segal were escorted out of Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters after the deal closed, the Reuters news agency reported.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone thanked Agrawal, Segal and Gadde for their “collective contribution” to the business.

READ ALSO: Elon Musk Considers Buying Coca Cola To Remake With Cocaine

Meanwhile, Bret Taylor – who had served as Twitter’s chairman since last November – updated his LinkedIn profile to indicate that he was no longer in the post.

 

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