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"There's a poetry in the materials we use to construct our world of artifacts; it speaks of our long history as a technological species."
- William Gibson

Pigoon  
  A transgenic pig, bred to grow replacement organs for humans.  

In this near-future Earth, biotech companies are busily trying to meet the need for organ replacements.

Jimmy's father worked for OrganInc Farms. He was a genographer, one of the best in the field. He'd done some of the key studies on mapping the proteonome when he was still a post-grad, and then he'd helped engineer the Methuselah Mouse project, as part of Operation Immortality. After that, at OrganInc Farms, he'd been one of the foremost architects of the pigoon project, along with a team of transplant experts and the microbiologists who were splicing against infections. Pigoon was only a nickname: the official name was sus multiorganifer. But pigoon is what everyone said...

The goal of the pigoon project was to grow an assortment of foolproof human tissue organs in a transgenic knockout pig host - organs that would transplant smoothly and avoid rejection, but would also be able to fend off attacks by opportunistic microbes and viruses, of which there were more strains every year. A rapid-maturity gene was spliced in so the pigoon kidneys and livers and hearts would be ready sooner, and now they were perfecting a pigoon that could grow five or six kidneys at a time.

Technovelgy from Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood.
Published by Nan A. Talese in 2003
Additional resources -

Thanks to Adi for contributing this item.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Oryx and Crake
  More Ideas and Technology by Margaret Atwood
  Tech news articles related to Oryx and Crake
  Tech news articles related to works by Margaret Atwood

Pigoon-related news articles:
  - Transgenic Pigs Glow Green

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