The story of transplants has always been one of altruism. After all, organs can be neither sold nor purchased. They can only be donated as a gift of life.
It is a story that started in 1954, when Dr. Joseph Murray performed the world’s first successful organ transplant at Boston’s Peter Bent Brigham Hospital between identical twin brothers Ronald and Richard Herrick. Richard had been discharged from the US Coast Guard after being diagnosed with end-stage kidney disease, and his identical twin brother, Ronald, was a willing donor. Although they had no certainty it would work, the transplant resulted in eight more years of life for Richard, successful in part because they had the same DNA.
When Ronald died in 2010, Dr. Murray remembered him in a statement published in the American Journal of Transplantation, saying: “we should never forget that he not only saved his brother Richard’s life, but also paved the way for thousands of other transplant recipients throughout the world.”
It is this same ethos that is now pushing forward the burgeoning field of xenotransplantation – the practice of using animal organs for human transplant
For the past two years, I’ve spoken with surgeons, genetic engineers and patients who have all told me of the hope of using genetically engineered pig donors to help end the organ shortage crisis. In the United States alone, there are more than 100,000 people waiting for an organ at any given moment – most of them in need of a kidney. Every day, 17 people on that list will die, just waiting.
“This paradigm that someone has to die in order for somebody to live is, a broken paradigm. It just doesn’t work,” said Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute. As both a transplant surgeon and a heart transplant recipient himself, he knows how agonizing the wait can be. It’s why he’s relentlessly pushing for a new source of organs.
“Because less than 1% of the people who die every year die in a way that they could ever even be considered as organ donors, we need a sustainable, renewable source of organs from something else other than humans dying,” Dr. Montgomery told me.
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