One of the worst situations in life is that of the patient waiting for an organ transplant. According to the United States Department of Health and Human Services, there were about 120,000 Americans waiting for organ transplants in 2013, and only about 29,000 of them actually received a transplant. The main reason the discrepancy is so large is that there aren’t many ways to get transplant-worthy organs.
The lack of organ donors has always perplexed me. The way that I have always thought of the situation is that once I am dead, my organs can either rot in the ground or save someone’s life. To me, the choice is extremely clear. I am an organ donor.
The problem is that not enough people feel the same way as I do. Duke University professor Dan Ariely hosted a TED Talk in which he explained that this mainly happens because the forms that we fill out to become organ donors are not designed properly. The idea is that if you had to check a box that said, “I do not wish to be an organ donor” fewer people would opt out of it — however, if the box says, “I wish to be an organ donor,” fewer people overall would agree to be donors.
But according to an Oct. 18 piece in The Economist, there is another way to give sick patients transplants: we can give them organs from animals. A liver does what a liver does, regardless of what species it belongs to. Obviously, the liver of a 40-pound dog won’t perform well inside a human adult, but other species that are more genetically similar have organs that would work very well — specifically pigs, which are very similar to us in size and genetic composition.
So the doctor takes a pig’s liver and plugs it into a human and voila? Not exactly. While this could technically work if the patient was lucky, it is not nearly safe enough to be used as common medical practice. There are two main problems with using animal organs on humans. The first is that the recipient can reject the organs, and the second is that diseases can spread from those animals to humans. Rejection of an organ can also occur when humans receive human organ transplants, so that problem is not necessarily exclusive to interspecies transplants.
Animals have a host of diseases that could be devastating to humans. Swine flu originally affected swine, and HIV originally affected primates in Africa. All living creatures are subject to the same biology that we are, so this shouldn’t really comes as a surprise. The reason that this is such a formidable obstacle to interspecies transplants is that some diseases in pigs, known as porcine endogenous retroviruses or PERVs, are lodged within the genetic makeup of the pigs’ DNA.
There is new research, however, that could help us overcome the problem of PERVs. George Church, of the Harvard Medical School, used the CRISPR/Cas9 method of gene editing to manipulate the genes of pigs to rid them of PERVs. The CRISPR process is a way for scientists to manipulate viruses to attack specific strands of genome in DNA. You can think of these viruses as robot scissors that are sent by scientists to cut out specific malfunctions and then serve no other purpose.
Back in 1984, doctors in California transplanted a baboon’s heart to an infant, who became known as Baby Fae, as a means of keeping her alive until a human organ was found. Fae lived with a baboon’s heart in her chest for three weeks until she died, as no organ transplant was found. In that sense, the idea of interspecies transplants is not new, but there are still some ethical questions concerning the patient, as well as the source of the organs.
In my opinion, these questions are baseless. If we can breed and kill pigs to fry their skin and sell it in a gas station, we can also breed PERV-free pigs and kill them to save human lives. I also think that a recipient would always prefer having a pig’s organ over death, and if they don’t want a pig’s organ they can refuse to receive one. While this new research won’t lead to interspecies transplants any time soon, at least there is now a possibility of finally doing away with that awful transplant waiting list.
