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’.