Mar 18
1 min read
Follow Up to Pig Heart
David Bennett died last week. Bennett was the man who had a genetically modified pig heart transplanted at the University of Maryland after being rejected for a human heart transplant. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/09/health/heart-transplant-pig-bennett.html?smid=url-share
It was unclear whether the heart was rejected; there was no clear cause of death. Bennett’s death was a disappointment to his medical team, but it was not necessarily unexpected. There have been other tranplants of porcine (a fancy college-boy way of saying “from a pig”) organs, in the most successful cases the patient lasted only a few days to mere hours. Those earlier transplants were performed on brain-dead subjects.
