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Comment by garren | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why a pig heart rather than one from another primate? The article mentions a baboon heart in an earlier attempt at xenotransplantation with an infant. Is a pig’s heart as, or more, compatible or is it more a matter of availability?

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At age 2, I was a candidate for a monkey heart transplant, as I had a perforated aortic valve and surgery on tissue with the consistency of wet-toilet paper in an infant had a very high mortality rate (the girl on the table before I went in had died). My parents declined the monkey transplant. Good thing. The intended recipients of multiple attempts at the monkey hearts, died. I eventually received a primitive mechanical implant, which I quickly outgrew. By the 80s I had another surgery to replace it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B6rk%E2%80%93Shiley_valv...). This had it's own dangers, as the strut would fail along 2 ends of a sizing graph (most people were at the larger size end). I sat safely on the bell curve. I kept that into my 30s which caused various problems with the aortic stem and thickening of the left ventricle.

Now I'm rocking the On-X, which is superior in innumerable ways.

When I read stories like yours I can't believe how lucky 99.999% of us are. You were born just in time to catch this wave of improvements.

People love primates, specially big ones, and will get angry if in the future thousands of primates are used for organ harvest.

Pigs? People will make jokes like "If I pay for the heart transplant, do I get a free bacon?"

(Also, pigs have the correct size to get an organ usable in humans.)

Also, while pigs are naturally curious and definitely aren't dumb, I suspect our primate cousins are closer to us on the conciousness scale.

And yes, bacon. Combine the transplant with an offer on cheap pork, and we'll soon have heart transplants and bacon deliveries as a service. :D

Pigs are very anatomically similar to humans but due to being a food source there were probably also fewer ethical concerns compared to using primates.

It's really quite fascinating -- they aren't particularly close to us genetically, but because they're a similar sized mammal with an omnivore diet, you can teach their macro-biology from the same textbook.

Yep, back in high school we had a few days devoted to dissecting and documenting the anatomy of a fetal pig. It was really surprising how similar they actually were.

Because they're suitable enough (size, pump performance, etc) and also mass produce-able. The rest is for the same reason we don't eat Monkey bacon via mass farming of monkeys.

IANAD, but from what I remember back when trans-species heart transplant research started in the 80's, it was that pig heart tissue is most similar to human heart tissue.

Hopefully there is a D on HN who can explain better.

It would probably have to be a gorilla, chimp, or orangutan to be big enough to work in an adult human, and those are all endangered species.

From what I’ve read, the additional biological advantages are small but the additional ethical issues are large.

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