Category: Medical Breakthrough

Thanks to genetically engineered pigs, the donor-organ shortage could soon be a think of the past.

ANCHORING A ROW of family photos in Joseph Tector’s office is a framed, autographed picture of Baby Fae, the California newborn who made headlines in 1984 when she received a baboon’s heart to replace her own malfunctioning organ.

It’s inscribed “To Joe” by Leonard L. Bailey, the surgeon who turned to the monkey heart as the only option to keep his patient alive. Bailey snapped the picture about five days after the operation, while Stephanie Fae Beauclair was sleeping. A strip of surgical tape runs down the center of her chest from neck to diaper, marking the incision line where her rib cage was pulled apart to make the swap. Baby Fae would die less than three weeks later.

It’s an unsettling image to come upon while glancing over snapshots of someone’s dutifully smiling children. But to Tector, who was 19 at the time of Baby Fae’s surgery, the cross-species organ transplant was the most inspiring thing he’d ever heard of. “I remember where I was when the news broke,” he says. “At that moment I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life.” What he wanted to do with his life, though he may not have articulated it precisely this way, was to become a surgeon-scientist trying to crack the problem of xenotransplantation — the placing of animal organs into human bodies.

Continue reading… “20 Americans die each day waiting for organs. Can pigs save them?”