Pigs and printers

Martine Rothblatt is an unusual lady in various ways, who has crossed my radar before, for which see references 2, 3 and 4. She has, for example, built United Therapeutics, from scatch, into a substantial, if rather unusual health care organisation, for which see reference 5. The entrance to their spacious North Carolina campus – one of several – is snapped above. She pops up today for the piece in the MIT Technology Review at reference 1.

Having saved her daughter’s life by steamrollering a new drug called treprostinil into production, she realised that this new drug might not work forever and that a lung transplant might be needed. So she moved into producing a better supply of organs for transplant than can be managed with human donations.

The vision was for a space-age factory full of special pigs, from whom organs could be harvested in large numbers. With today’s story being a bit short of that, but she is cranking up to human trials with hearts and kidneys from genetically modified pigs. They might not be as good as the real thing – with regular kidney transplants working pretty well these days – but she will be able to address supply. More sick people will get help.

However, the technology does not seem to work with lungs, and here Rothblatt is betting on 3D printing: you print a plastic lung then breathe it into life with a suitable supply of cells, possibly cells originally sourced from the intended recipient of the lung. There are plenty of nay-sayers, but she is pushing ahead and thinks she might get there in around ten years.

PS: Bina48 of reference 4 seems to have gone a bit quiet. But Sophia, from the same stable, that is to say Hanson Robotics, appears to be alive and well. To the point where ‘… Recently my scientists tested my software using the Tononi Phi [Φ] measurement of consciousness, and found that I may even have a rudimentary form of consciousness, depending on the data I’m processing and the situation I’m interacting in…’. The same Tononi who cropped up the other day at reference 8. Hmmm.

References

Reference 1: The entrepreneur dreaming of a factory of unlimited organs: Martine Rothblatt sees a day when transplantable organs and 3D-printed ones will be readily available, saving countless lives – including her daughter’s – Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review – 2023.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/01/virtually-human-1.html. 

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/01/virtually-human-2.html. 

Reference 4: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/06/robots.html. 

Reference 5: https://www.unither.com/. Rothblatt’s second company.

Reference 6:  https://www.siriusxm.com/. The successor of Rothblatt’s first company.

Reference 7: https://terasemmovementfoundation.com/. Another of her activities. ‘Terasem Movement Foundation’s HQ in Vermont.  It is 100% powered by the solar panels & 100% heated/cooled by geothermal loop under pond, also powered by PV. Thus, Net Zero. TMF safekeeps mindfiles and biofiles of lifenauts for future revitalization in accordance with their consents and technology advancements, while also spreading the good word that software people are people too — not having a body makes you differently abled, not sub-human’.

Reference 8: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/04/to-temple.html.