Getty Image / Cristophe Gateau
Think about how advanced people living 100 years ago thought we would be now. They probably thought we’d have flying cars, teleportation, robots that did all of our chores for us. Instead, we have pig hearts being successfully put into humans.
Yes, you read that right. An American male was given a genetically modified pig’s heart in a heart transplant, and is communicating with loved ones. It is either a sign of the apocalypse, or a modern miracle, depending on what side you come down on.
This particular patient is actually the second patient to undergo such a procedure, though the first did not live long. Here is the New York Times with more details.
Surgeons in Baltimore have transplanted the heart of a genetically altered pig into a man with terminal heart disease who had no other hope for treatment, the University of Maryland Medical Center announced on Friday.
It is the second such procedure performed by the surgeons. The first patient, David Bennett, 57, died two months after his transplant, but the pig heart functioned well and there were no signs of acute organ rejection, a major risk in such procedures.
The second patient, Lawrence Faucette, 58, a Navy veteran and married father of two in Frederick, Md., underwent the transplant surgery on Wednesday and is “recovering well and communicating with his loved ones,” the medical center said in a statement.
The heart was pretty heavily genetically modified, taking out some pig genes that would’ve meant the human body rejected it, and adding some human genes to help the body not reject it.
Is this guy going to live long from a pig heart transplant? Probably not. Is it a miracle he even woke up from surgery? Absolutely. And, the long-term ramifications of learning about these kinds of procedures are really important. So many people die each year on the transplant list waiting for organs. Prolonging the lives of these people until they can get to the top of the list, or solving their issues altogether, would improve the lives and lifespans of thousands.