A biotech breakthrough to avoid dialysis

WonderfulEngineering.com | Ali Vaqar | Nov. 19 2017

…This bio-hybrid uses living kidney cells along with a series of specialized microchips powered by the human heart to filter waste from the blood-stream. The artificial kidney can bypass the complication of matching donors and tissue rejection. …The artificial kidney has 15 microchips built one atop the other and they act as filters. They will hold living renal cells which will eventually grow around the microchips and mimic a real kidney. Engineers are currently working and testing every single detail of the device to make sure the device can safely let the blood run through without the formation of clots or damaging the kidney in any way…

2019 UPDATE: Implantable artificial kidney achieves preclinical milestone

"…Following promising studies in large animals, The Kidney Project's hemofiltration system is currently awaiting FDA approval for an initial clinical trial to evaluate its safety. The bioreactor technology has been tested in laboratory experiments but so far had not been implanted into animals…" Read more.

Iran has a legal market for the organs, but the system doesn't always work

LATimes.com | Shashank Bengali and Ramin Mostaghim | 15 October 2017

Gran Mezquita de Isfahán, Isfahán, Irán, 2016-09-20, DD 71-73 HDR.jpg
By Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link
The advertisements are scrawled in marker on brick walls and tree trunks, and affixed to telephone utility boxes, sidewalks and a road sign pointing the way to one of Iran’s leading hospitals.

“Kidney for sale,” read the dozens of messages, accompanied by phone numbers and blood types, splashed along a tree-lined street opposite the Hasheminejad Kidney Center in Tehran.

New ads appear almost daily. Behind each is a tale of individual woe — joblessness, debt, a family emergency — in a country beset by economic despair.

“If I could sell my kidney, I could get out of debt,” Ali Rezaei, a bankrupt 42-year-old air-conditioning installer, said in the shade of a tree across from the kidney hospital. “I would sell my liver too.”

In fact, Iran offers people a legal way to sell their kidneys — and is the only country in the world to do so. A government foundation registers buyers and sellers, matches them up and sets a fixed price of $4,600 per organ. Since 1993, doctors in Iran have performed more than 30,000 kidney transplants this way.

But the system hasn’t always worked as it’s been billed. Sellers have learned that they can cut side deals … Read more...

Angel fish
Public Domain, Link

...and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind ... the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind ...the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. -Genesis 1

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A SistersSite eBook

Flesh and Bone and The Protestant Conscience is an e-book on Amazon.com. It is 99¢ and in the Amazon lending library as well. It is also available here in PDF format. The book description follows.

Would you let your conscience be your guide?

Does God care if the skin and bone of the dead are passed along to the living for medical uses? Is organ donation OK with God? Should you sign a Living Will?

Did you know that dead organ donors are often anesthetized before their organs are removed? Do you know the current definition of death? The conscience cannot function without facts.

As we ponder the ethics of in vitro fertilization, stem cell research and man-made chimeras, our thoughts trail off. How then should we live? (Ez 33:10)

How should a Christian think about euthanasia by starvation when doctors and the state attorney general all agree it is time to withhold feeding from a brain injured patient? Some things are family matters, but someday it may be our family.

Here is a small book to help you think about whether you want to sign your driver's license, donate a kidney, cremate your loved one, and many other practical questions that may arise in the course of your healthcare decisions or watch over others.

It offers a special focus on the doctrine of the Resurrection that is related to such decisions. Sunday School classes and Bible Study groups could use this book to facilitate discussion about the issues covered.