Chas Newkey-Burden

Why are we such swine to pigs?

(Getty images)

We all know the nursery rhyme about “this little piggy”: one little piggy went to market, one little piggy stayed home and so on. A modern rewrite could also include the little piggy that got injected into a rich man’s body.

The “super-rich” are using pigs brains to try and “biohack their way to immortality,” according to a report in the Daily Telegraph. Wealthy coffin-dodgers have regular injections of Cerebrolysin, a mixture of compounds taken from pig brains, to boost their brain health.

Wealthy coffin-dodgers have regular injections of Cerebrolysin, taken from pig brains, to boost their health

This isn’t the only way that pigs are being exploited in modern healthcare. Over the past three years, surgeons in the US have transplanted a genetically edited pig heart into three human patients, two of whom died within months.

I’m vegan so I wouldn’t go within a mile of any of those treatments on ethical grounds alone, but I can see why some would be tempted.

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Written by
Chas Newkey-Burden

Chas Newkey-Burden is co-author, with Julie Burchill, of Not In My Name: A Compendium of Modern Hypocrisy. He also wrote Running: Cheaper Than Therapy and The Runner's Code (Bloomsbury)

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