2025-03-10
22 分钟I'm Ronni Karen Rabin, and I'm a health writer on the science desk of the New York Times.
This story is about a moonshot scientific experiment.
It's almost like a little bit science fiction.
One of the scientists that I interviewed asked me to imagine this.
You have kidney disease.
You know your kidneys are going to fail,
and it so happens that you have a kidney from a pig waiting for you, and you never see dialysis.
For the past three years or so,
I've been writing about patients who received hearts and kidneys from pigs.
It's been a dream of scientists for hundreds of years to try to do this.
Take organs or tissue or blood from animals and transplant them into humans who need them.
These were all experimental procedures.
So far, six people have received pig organs.
Two received hearts, four received kidneys.
Four of them died shortly afterwards.
But it wasn't the fault of the organ necessarily.
They were already very, very sick.
But the two most recent recipients are doing really well.
Tawana Looney got a pig's kidney in November, and Tim Andrews got one in January.
Both have gone home from the hospital.