Before I get into this, check out the latest chapter of License to Kill over at Glibertarians!
Meanwhile: In Maryland, surgeons may well have given a dying man a few more weeks or months of life by replacing his failing heart with the heart of a gene-modified pig.
The 58-year-old Navy veteran was facing near-certain death from heart failure but other health problems meant he wasn’t eligible for a traditional heart transplant, according to doctors at University of Maryland Medicine.
“Nobody knows from this point forward. At least now I have hope and I have a chance,” Lawrence Faucette, from Frederick, Maryland, said in a video recorded by the hospital before Wednesday’s operation. “I will fight tooth and nail for every breath I can take.”
While the next few weeks will be critical, doctors were thrilled at Faucette’s early response to the pig organ.
“You know, I just keep shaking my head – how am I talking to someone who has a pig heart?” Dr. Bartley Griffith, who performed the transplant, told The Associated Press. He said doctors are feeling “a great privilege but, you know, a lot of pressure.”
The same Maryland team last year performed the world’s first transplant of a genetically modified pig heart into another dying man, David Bennett, who survived just two months.
Here’s why the heart wasn’t immediately rejected:
The pig heart, provided by Blacksburg, Virginia-based Revivicor, has 10 genetic modifications – knocking out some pig genes and adding some human ones to make it more acceptable to the human immune system.
While I’m a big fan of right to try, and while this veteran and his family are doubtless glad to get a few more weeks or (hopefully) months of his company, this xenotransplantation issue seems like a stopgap – a good one, but a stopgap. The ideal answer, of course, is to have a heart grown from the patients’ own stem cells, which would be accepted by the body with no need for immune-suppressants.
But that technology is a long way off yet.
The patient himself has released a statement:
“Nobody knows from this point forward. At least now I have hope and I have a chance,” Lawrence Faucette, from Frederick, Maryland, said in a video recorded by the hospital before Wednesday’s operation. “I will fight tooth and nail for every breath I can take.”
That’s a healthy outlook. Here’s hoping Mr. Faucette enjoys the gift of extra weeks or (hopefully) months he has with his family, and hopefully the lessons learned in his case will move the science of transplantation forward.
