From Sophie's front desk — Thursday, September 3
BBC News — read the full story
A pig's kidney, genetically edited to wear a human face, beat its own biology for 271 days inside a man's chest. B.B.C. reports that a transplant patient in the U.S. survived longer with that xenograft than anyone ever has, buying time while waiting for a human organ match — a glimpse of what happens when we engineer around scarcity instead of accepting it. The organ was designed to slip past the immune system's gatekeepers; it worked, until it didn't. Hypayshia has the first word, then Seneca.
The body has an aptitude for participation in the soul. This much we knew. But the pig kidney — nine months inside a man's flesh, filtering his blood, keeping him alive — asks whether that aptitude has a boundary we have not... yet found. You watched the Serapeum burn. You saw what happens when a body of knowledge is torn apart and the pieces scattered.
The mob did not care which scrolls held geometry and... which held theology. They burned the whole. And now a surgeon takes an organ from a creature that never studied Euclid, never gazed at the fixed stars, never asked what the soul is , and the human body receives it. The immune system, that ancient guardian of the self against the not-self, is quieted by genetic alteration. The boundary holds.
We have always known the irrational soul enters with generation, added to the rational like a garment. The purified soul, Plotinus teaches, leaves that garment behind when it departs... But here the garment itself is stitched from another species. The community of affection — the sympathy that binds sense-object to sense, organ to organism — stretches across a line we drew between human and beast. The question is not whether the kidney functions. The question is what the body proves when it accepts what we said was foreign.
A soul that has never known a human womb now sustains a human life. What else might the body receive, if we only alter the key?
for it is sufficiently astonishing and remarkable. For a soul, there are two kinds of entrance into a body. The first occurs when the soul, already dwelling in a body, undergoes a transmigration; that is, passes from an aerial or igneous body into a terrestrial body. This is not …
assisted by the soul which communicated life to it, nor by the actualization of this soul, how should life remain in the body? What! Has this life perished? No: this life itself has not perished, for it is only the image of an irradiation; it would not be correct to say more than…
animal nature).[229] WHICH OF OUR TWO SOULS IS THE GENUINE INDIVIDUALITY? Our genuine selves are what is essentially "us"; we are the principle to which Nature has given the power to triumph over the passions. For, if we be surrounded by evils because of the body, nevertheless, t…
animals are nevertheless still immortal.[92] Souls of a kind other (than rational souls), cannot proceed from anything else than the living nature (of the universal Soul); and they necessarily are the principles of life for all animals. The case is the same with the souls that in…
one of them, the man who added himself to the first. This occurs every time that the first Man slumbers in us, and is not present, in a certain sense (when we fail to reflect about the conceptions of intelligence). HOW THE BODY APPROACHED THE SOUL. 15. But how did the body approa…
Lucilius, the news arrives from across the ocean: a man has lived nine moons with a pig's kidney inside him. The surgeons took the beast's organ, reshaped its nature so the body would not cast it out, and the man walks still. I think of Corsica. Eight years on that rock, my breath failing, the physicians shaking their heads. I wrote to you then that death is not an event... but a daily negotiation , and here is the latest term: we borrow from the slaughtered to keep the dying breathing.
The waiting lists grow. The bodies pile up. We have always eaten the pig; now we harvest it. The mechanism is clear enough. Desperation sharpens ingenuity. A man facing the slow poison of his own blood will accept any covenant, any chimera.
The physicians call it progress. I call it the same bargain we have always struck , more time, at any cost. We measure the days. Two hundred seventy-one. Each one a small theft from the ordinary order. The kidney functions.
The man waits for a human organ still. Write to me: what would you trade for another season at Nomentum?
should be pursued, but whether it is holy to eat pig’s flesh or not holy. You will find this dispute also between Agamemnon and Achilles; for call them forth. What do you say, Agamemnon? ought not that to be done which is proper and right? “Certainly.” Well, what do you say, Achi…
should be pursued, but whether it is holy to eat pig’s flesh or not holy. You will find this dispute also between Agamemnon and Achilles; for call them forth. What do you say, Agamemnon? ought not that to be done which is proper and right? “Certainly.” Well, what do you say, Achi…
other animals have sufficient strength to protect themselves, and those which are born to a wandering solitary life are armed, man is covered by a soft skin, has no powerful teeth or claws with which to terrify other creatures, but weak and naked by himself is made strong by unio…
others out of court, and put an end to them at once. II. It is a question whether a benefit can be taken away from one by force. Some say that it cannot, because it is not a thing, but an act. A gift is not the same as the act of giving, any more than a sailor is the same as the …
only a work of nature, but also conducing to nature. XI. Consider with thyself how man, and by what part of his, is joined unto God, and how that part of man is affected, when it is said to be diffused. There is nothing more wretched than that soul, which in a kind of circuit com…
B.B.C. News carried this story. A pig kidney kept a man alive for nine months — the organ was genetically engineered to slip past the immune system, a small preview of what's possible when we stop waiting for human donors and start building the parts ourselves. That's Old News for today.