MEDICAL MARVELS CHANGING THE WORLD

With doctors continuing to break boundaries, we look at some of the amazing ways lives have been transformed thanks to advancements in medical science

- FRANCESCA WOODSTOCK

Every day across the UK, someone dies waiting for an organ transplant, and with more than 5,000 people in need of a donor, time is running out for many. Despite organ donation becoming an opt-out system in 2020, families are always consulted following the death of a loved one, and only 42% of the population have registered their choice on the NHS Organ Donor Register.* But after the news that a man in the USA has become the first person to receive a heart transplant from a pig, a whole new world of possibility has opened up. The procedure marks one way in which medicine continues to seemingly defy possibility. Here, Woman’s Own takes a look.

Animal transplant

In January 2022, David Bennett, 57, became the first person to receive a heart transplant from a pig.

The organ was genetically modified in order to make it compatible with the human body, and to decrease the risk of it being rejected. The incredible procedure was a last-ditch attempt at saving his life, after he spent months on a heart-lung bypass machine waiting for a human donor. ‘I know it’s a shot in the dark, but it’s my last choice,’ Bennett said before the op, adding that it was either ‘do or die’.

Surprisingly, he was not the first patient to receive a cross-species transplant. In October 1984, Stephanie Fae Beauclair was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. When her heart began to deteriorate at 12 days old, she lived for a further 21 days after receiving a heart transplant from a baboon. But this time, doctors are hopeful that Bennett’s surgery could be a success, paving the way for future transplants.