"Transplant or die."
The road in front of the 57-year-old David of United States is currently only two ways, and he is suffering from heart disease, and he also understands that if he does not have a transplant, there is only a dead end waiting for him.
It's just a transplant, so you shouldn't be so scared. But what if the heart of this transplant is the heart of a pig!
Faced with such a difficult choice, David had no choice but to choose the transplant of "human face and beast heart", and he also became the world's first "strange person" to transplant a pig heart!
After a desperate fight, David survived perfectly with the pig's heart, thinking that David could start his beautiful retirement life, but what he didn't expect was that in just two months, something terrible happened......
The uncle from United States is named David · Bennett, and in 2022, David, who is over half a hundred years old, already suffers from a serious heart attack, but unfortunately relapses.
David's son immediately sent his father to the hospital for rescue, but on the way to the hospital, his father was already unconscious, and his condition was very serious.
After arriving at the hospital, the doctor examined him in all aspects, and then told the family that the patient's condition was very unoptimistic and that he needed to prepare for the transplant immediately.
However, at this time, a problem arose, that is, 57-year-old David, with his current physical condition, is simply not enough to support the major operation of transplantation.
Not only that, but the limitations of some external factors also made it impossible for David to complete this surgical plan, which undoubtedly gave David a "death notice" in advance.
You must know that David does not have much time left, and it is not easy to find a human heart that is completely suitable for David in such a short period of time.
However, what is surprising is that at such a critical juncture, a doctor actually came up with an extremely bold idea, that is, to transplant a pig heart for David!
The attending doctors present were stunned, after all, there had been no successful cases before, not to mention that there were many unknown factors in the pig's heart, such as some viruses hidden, and David's family also strongly opposed this plan.
However, after the doctor's persuasion, David also had no choice but to accept the transplant. So how did the doctor convince David to accept the transplant in the end?
It is important to know that pigs and humans are not biological systems, and it is very difficult to combine the two perfectly.
After a series of psychological construction, David was also pushed into the operating room, and as the light at the door of the operating room turned on, the hearts of David's family members were immediately pinched.
Fortunately, the operation was a success, and after more than 9 hours of life-and-death struggle, David also managed to renew his life.
And the most surprising thing is that this pig heart in David's body actually beat again, which is simply a miracle in the medical field!
This also makes everyone wonder, how can two different biological systems be combined? Will there be any change in David's temperament after the transplant?
In fact, if you want to do this, you have to rely on "genetic modification" technology, which is simply to remove the pig gene from the pig heart and add the human gene, so as to prevent some rejection reactions.
It is worth mentioning that in order to prevent the pig heart from growing bigger and bigger in the human body, the doctor has completely removed the relevant growth genes before the operation.
In addition, six human genes were specially implanted in the pig's heart, so that the two can adapt to each other smoothly.
It is understood that this pig heart, as well as the pig itself, are donor pigs bred for the purpose of organ transplantation, and have undergone nearly ten genetic modifications before being transplanted into the human body.
And the success of David's transplant operation also seems to indicate that some animal organs will be successfully transplanted into humans.
Within three days of the operation, David's life was still very optimistic, and his eating was no different from that of a normal person, so David was successfully discharged from the hospital.
It is said that after "changing the heart", people's temperament will change greatly, and some patients who have undergone heart transplantation have changed from the original sloppy life to love neatness and cleanliness; Originally, he was an uneducated truck driver, but he suddenly picked up a pen and wrote poems after surgery.
There have been cases of this in clinical practice, but there is no accurate statement in the medical community at present. This also has to make people wonder whether David, who transplanted a pig heart, will also change his temperament in the future.
However, two months after he was discharged from the hospital, something terrible happened to David......
It is important to know that David, who was 57 years old before this, had poor physical resistance and immunity, so after the transplantation of pig hearts, David's body had begun to have rejection.
Although the pig's heart had undergone genetic elimination, David's body still couldn't resist it and began to show endothelial damage.
In this regard, in order to prevent the recurrence of related infections in the heart, the doctor injected David with immunoglobulin to help resist the invasion of foreign genes in the pig's heart.
However, two months later, the transplanted pig's heart stopped beating again, and David died.
In order to find out the cause of David's death, United States doctors conducted an autopsy on his body, but after the autopsy, it was found that the cause of David's death this time was because of the presence of a virus in the pig's heart!
Studies have found that the name of this type of virus is "porcine cytomegalovirus", and once it enters the human body, it will be activated to attack the human body.
It can also be seen that there is still a need for improvement in the current technology of transplanting pig hearts into human bodies, but why do so many animals choose pig hearts?
In fact, pigs have many advantages over other animals, not only some genes are almost close to humans, but also compared to those "primates", pigs are easier to reproduce.
After many considerations, replacing the human heart with a pig heart has become the consensus of most medical scholars.
However, judging from David's case alone, there are still many problems to be solved in order to truly realize the transplantation of pig hearts, not to mention that there are not a few such cases.
But in any case, such xenotransplantation technology also sets a precedent, and whether this "cross-species" transplantation operation is for the benefit of mankind or unethical needs to be examined from multiple aspects.
However, there are still many difficult problems worth discussing about this technology, and I believe that in the future, there will be a breakthrough in this transplantation technology.
Information sources:
Two months after the world's first pig heart transplant failed, scientists: or died because pig hearts carried the virus"
CCTV "57-year-old patient regains "heart" life! Netizen: Will your personality change? 》
Beiqing.com's "The world's first case! In order to live, he transplanted the heart of a pig! Why are pigs not primates? 》