Doctors recently performed a surprising breakthrough in organ transplant technology when they transplanted a gene-edited pig heart into the body of a human being. The patient, 53-year-old Towana Looney of Alabama, had been on dialysis and in failing health the last eight years and was willing to try the surgery, which has been deemed successful so far. The experimental transplant was conducted at NYU Langone Medical Center, where Dr. Arthur Caplan is a professor of bioethics. Dr. Caplan appeared on the WOR Morning Show to explain what this research means for people on an organ transplant waiting list.
“We had a real breakthrough in an effort to try and find more organs for people who need transplants,” Dr. Caplan told hosts Larry Mendte and Laura Curran. “We inserted an engineered heart from a pig into a woman who had no other alternatives. She only had one kidney- she’d given away a kidney, believe it or not, to her sister about ten years earlier- and then she got pregnant, suffered kidney failure… and we tried to match her to human donors and, for various medical reasons, she’s incompatible. So, she’s at the end of the line; it’s either try the pig heart or there’s nothing and she’ll die.”
Dr. Caplan broke down some of the science and ethics behind raising organs from another animal to function inside the human body. “The way that works is, the pig hearts, you can’t just out them in people. You’ve got to try and raise the pigs and then genetically engineer their hearts. I won’t do the details, but it’s doable, and once you modify that, then the pig hearts won’t be rejected by the human. So, in it went; seems to be going great. She’s up, she’s around, she’s talking, she’s doing pretty well. Are there ethics issues- yeah. Some people say it’s wrong to kill pigs, because you have to take their organs out in order to give them to humans. I don’t buy that; I think human life is higher value than pig life, and the pigs don’t suffer. This is not animal farming.”
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