Rabin, Roni Caryn. “Second Maryland Man to Receive an Altered Pig’s Heart Has Died.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 31 Oct. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/10/31/health/pig-heart-transplant-faucette.html.
The article “Second Maryland Man to Receive an Altered Pig’s Heart Has Died.” by Roni Caryn sheds light on a 58-year-old man from Maryland who received a heart transplant from a genetically modified pig. The man died about six weeks later and is the second man ever to get the transplant. The first patient passed away after two months. The transplant took part at the University of Maryland Medical Center, involving genetically modified pigs to make their organs more suitable for humans. It seems to be a solution for the lack of human donors, but it has little success and still needs to be worked on.
Based on the information from the article, it shows negative factors to APES towards pigs and biodiversity. If or when the treatment is successful, it could kill even more pigs, leading to dramatic decreases in biodiversity due to not as many pigs being there to support ecosystems. The treatment is sustainable in the future if it is successful as it will lead to less need from human donors and having pig organs to rely on as a main source of hearts for humans.
Interesting to read about this, especially considering my uncle just had a heart transplant about 6 months ago, but with a human heart. Hopefully they will keep evolving the technology so those organs don’t get rejected by humans.
One thing though- genetically modified pigs are not in the wild. It seems like that’s what you implied in your follow up paragraph… the pigs are raised in captivity so it’s not altering the food chain or anything of an ecosystem. Of course raising pigs does have other env. impacts.
Hope you found your topic to be interesting, Stephen. Lots going on with biotech for sure. Thanks for all the abstracts you delivered.
I hope your uncle is okay now. Biotech/genetic engineering has been a fascinating topic for me. I’m glad I had the opportunity to learn more about it, as the articles behind genetically engineering humans, plants, and animals to cure or solve diseases, cancer, etc, by mutating DNA. I hope biotech research continues as I have noticed that over time/history, the discoveries seem to get better and better, being more enjoyable for me to read about.