Fifty-seven-year-old David Bennett Sr from Maryland just got a new heart. It wasn’t a human heart, rather a “genetically modified” heart from a pig. And it’s obviously working, as Mr. Bennett is alive and reportedly in good spirits. This is first and foremost a story of medical miracles, of technological advancement. But dealing as it does with a human being getting an organ from an animal transplanted into his body it also broaches the subject of animal-human relations (that didn’t sound quite right, did it?) and where precisely the line between the one and the other is to be drawn. Because technically speaking, Mr. Bennett is now an animal-human hybrid.
Suffering from terminal heart disease that left him incapable of receiving a human heart, the pig heart was Bennett’s last chance at life. The process of Xenotransplantation was his only hope for survival. But how did they get his body not to reject the pig’s heart, when said organs are “similar in size to human hearts and have an anatomy that is similar, but not identical”? By tweaking the genes. “We have modified 10 genes in this pig heart. Four genes were knocked out, three of them responsible for producing antibodies that causes rejection,” said the surgeons. Amazing. We wish Mr. Bennett a full and speedy recovery.
