Humans With Pig Hearts Some Day
fN.Z. Press Association) DUNEDIN, Jan. 17. One way of successfully tackling the transplanting of animal hearts, particularly of pigs, into humans, might be to treat everyone so that they would accept animal tissue, according to Professor V. MacFarlane, professor of physiology at the University of Adelaide, at present visiting Dunedin. Professor MacFarlane considered such a procedure “more or less possible” but, since it would have to be done in advance there would be a great deal of trouble persuading everyone to accept iL Asked if he thought the successful transplanting of pig's hearts into humans
was possible, he replied, "Yes, ultimately.” Pigs’ hearts, he said, were the right size, and a fact indicating the possibility that there would be no rejection by the human body of an animal heart was that after the last war, when there were many skull injuries, pieces of animal bone were used to replace missing bone. In these cases, the animal bone was eventually replaced by the patient's own bone, by a natural process in which body cells dissolved away the animal bone. However. Professor MacFarlane doubted if this would happen with hearts. “It would be a matter of living with the animal heart for life,” he said.
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Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31580, 18 January 1968, Page 10
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209Humans With Pig Hearts Some Day Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31580, 18 January 1968, Page 10
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