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Uterus transplants + When did humans start experimenting with alcohol & drugs? - C C - Aug 2, 2021
When did humans start experimenting with alcohol and drugs?
https://theconversation.com/when-did-humans-start-experimenting-with-alcohol-and-drugs-161556
EXCERPTS: . . . Given humanity’s love of drugs and alcohol, you might assume getting high is an ancient, even prehistoric tradition. Some researchers have suggested prehistoric cave paintings were made by humans experiencing altered states of consciousness. Others, perhaps inspired more by hallucinogens than hard evidence, suggest that drugs triggered the evolution of human consciousness. Yet there’s surprisingly little archaeological evidence for prehistoric drug use.
African hunter-gathers – Bushmen, Pygmies and the Hadzabe people – likely live their lives in ways similar to ancestral human cultures. The most compelling evidence for the use of drugs by such early humans is a potentially hallucinogenic plant !kaishe, used by Bushmen healers, which supposedly makes people “go mad for a while”. Yet how much Bushmen historically used drugs is debated, and otherwise, there’s little evidence for drug use in hunter-gatherers.
The implication is that, despite Africa’s diverse plants and fungi, early humans used drugs rarely, maybe to induce trances during rituals, if at all. Perhaps their lifestyle meant they rarely felt the need for escape. Exercise, sunlight, nature, time with friends and family – they’re powerful antidepressants. Drugs are also dangerous; just as you shouldn’t drive drunk, it’s risky to get high when lions lurk in the bush, or a hostile tribe waits one valley over.
[...] Archaeologists have found evidence of opium use in Europe by 5,700 BC. Cannabis seeds appear in archaeological digs at 8,100 BC in Asia, and the ancient Greek historian Herodotus reported Scythians getting high on weed in 450 BC. Tea was brewed in China by 100 BC.
It’s possible our ancestors experimented with substances before the archaeological evidence suggests. Stones and pottery preserve well, but plants and chemicals decay quickly. For all we know, Neanderthals could have been the first to smoke pot. But archaeology suggests the discovery and intensive use of psychoactive substances mostly happened late, after the Neolithic Revolution in 10,000 BC, when we invented farming and civilisation... (MORE - details)
Uterus transplants hit the clinic
https://www.the-scientist.com/features/uterus-transplants-hit-the-clinic-69002
EXCERPTS: . . . With the help of immunosuppressant drugs, Dingle’s body accepted the uterus [...] For nearly 37 weeks she experienced an anxiety-ridden but uneventful pregnancy, and on February 19, 2018, she underwent a Cesarean section to welcome her daughter Jiavannah ... among the first dozen such babies in the world.
[...] Despite its short history, uterus transplant is now becoming clinically available. This past April, Baylor surgeons performed the country’s, and possibly the world’s, first uterus transplant outside the context of a clinical trial, and the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) is beginning to screen patients for its brand-new uterus transplant program. “It has been very fast,” says transplant surgeon Paige Porrett, who is spearheading the UAB program. “This is a tempo that we don’t usually see in medical innovation.”
Some doctors urge caution in recommending uterus transplantation to patients when gestational surrogacy is legal in many countries and most US states, providing people lacking a uterus the means to have children who are biologically their own. Meanwhile, ethicists are actively discussing factors such as the use of living donors, who are putting themselves at risk, and the value people place on carrying the pregnancy themselves. Patients must also consider the price tag—just under $300,000 for the donor’s and recipient’s surgeries and care—and the fact that uterus transplantation is not currently covered by health insurance companies.
The transplant surgeons and obstetrician-gynecologists involved in developing and trialing the procedure express passionate beliefs that uterus transplant is safe, effective, and addresses a need felt by hundreds of thousands of people. In addition to MRKH, which affects roughly 1 in 4,500 XX individuals worldwide, more than 600,000 people undergo hysterectomies each year in the US alone, and many of them are still of reproductive age. Uterus transplant could provide a way for those people to carry their own children even after having their own wombs removed. Some in the uterus transplant field even envision a future in which transgender women will be able to carry their own children.
“It’s going to be a transformative transplant,” says surgeon Cristiano Quintini, who runs the Cleveland Clinic’s uterus transplant trial, the first of three clinical studies to be launched in the US. “It’s a life-creating, life-enabling type of transplant.”
[...] Performing uterus transplants in the clinic is not without its dissenters. And unlike new drugs and medical devices, surgical interventions don’t require approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), so there are no hard-and-fast rules about when it is acceptable to go from doing clinical trials with the oversight of institutional review boards to offering a surgical intervention widely to patients in need. “Surgical research is known as the wild West of medicine for a reason, and that’s because there is so little ethical guidance,” says Lancaster University bioethicist Nicola Williams.
As a result, some physicians are hesitant to recommend uterus transplant to patients at this stage, with the technique being so new and with so much research ongoing. “My concern is about the safety of this approach,” says Eric Forman, a reproductive endocrinologist at the Columbia University Fertility Center. “I’m not saying [uterus transplantation] shouldn’t be explored or shouldn’t be done. . . . This is an exciting area, and it’s pretty amazing that some women who could not have delivered otherwise were able to. But again, I think there should be transparency about the unknowns, the potential risks, and the alternatives.” The ASRM, for now, seems to agree. In June 2018, the society put out a position statement recommending that uterus transplant remain an area of research, not clinical practice.
Undeterred, the researchers and clinicians involved in uterus transplant are moving forward with this transition. Porrett notes that there have been 32 uterus transplants performed to date at three independent centers in the US—enough, she argues, to give doctors have a good sense of the procedure’s safety, efficacy, and reproducibility. “That to me is grounds to move out of the research realm.”
[...] Uterus transplants also raise additional ethical concerns, such as challenges in evaluating the intangible value of pregnancy itself, notes Williams, who has published on the ethics of live versus deceased donation in uterus transplantation. “There’s a really important balance to strike between exploring . . . social norms and values that we think might valorize biological parenthood [and devalue its alternatives] yet also recognizing the harm that women with [absolute uterine factor infertility] experience” as a result of not being able to carry a child. Laura O’Donovan, who is finalizing her PhD at Lancaster on the legal and ethical analysis of uterine transplant, adds that racial and social inequalities must also be considered as the medical community considers offering the procedure to the general population. “We are at the stage now where we’re thinking about clinical translation of uterine transplantation. . . . It’s probably about time that researchers came together to develop a concrete framework.”
However widely the procedure is offered, experts who spoke with The Scientist agree that research must continue. This will involve tracking not just the success of the procedure itself, but medical and psychological outcomes for the children born from transplanted wombs and for the people undergoing these procedures. Last year, Brännström’s group published on two- and three-year follow ups with uterus transplant recipients in Sweden. “This is a new chapter in the literature that has already been written about the psychological trauma of infertility.” (MORE - details)
RE: Uterus transplants + When did humans start experimenting with alcohol & drugs? - Magical Realist - Aug 11, 2021
Quote:Drugs are also dangerous; just as you shouldn’t drive drunk, it’s risky to get high when lions lurk in the bush, or a hostile tribe waits one valley over.
Yeah, one would never want their tribe's best warriors and hunters tripping out just when the threat of danger became real. The shaman otoh? It was probably standard practice to get used to the local kook running around hallucinating demons and such.
RE: Uterus transplants + When did humans start experimenting with alcohol & drugs? - Zinjanthropos - Aug 12, 2021
Perhaps drugs provided courage to fight and nothing better than soldiers operating without fear or mercy. IOW easier to kill or face death when in altered or calm state. Rum ration please, can’t go over the top without it.