zlacker

>>iamthi+(OP)
Pretty fascinating science.

The "hundreds of thousands of dollars" cost is a bit concerning to me. I'm also guessing it will difficult to bring the cost down since it requires a donor uterus.

>>LeoJiW+U6
Transplants are expensive (not just the procedure, all the after-care for the rest of the life), and leading-edge medical treatment will continue to be expensive, even if we can get the cost of transplantation itself down (my hunch is that most of the hundreds of thousands is in the cost of the surgeons, the cost of the medical facility, and all the intense recovery from extremely invasive surgery stuff).

In a reasonable universe, things like this would be discussed openly in terms of public-vs-private health care coverage, limits of cost, and liability for "uncaused" stuff (genetic bad luck, etc) vs "caused" stuff (e.g. alcoholic or obeseity-caused cirrhosis) so that we weren't simply writing blank checks with future people's money. Especially with the potential to grow organs - now your rate limiter on the costs is potentially gone! But in the US we can't even decide that people deserve health care access at all, so discussing the limits of it will have to wait for later, I suppose.