David Bennett, a 57-year-old Maryland handyman, has become the first person to get a heart transplant from a genetically-modified pig on January 7, 2022 in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. The transplant was considered the last hope of saving Mr. Bennett's life, though his long-term chances of survival are yet to come. Doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center were granted a special dispensation by the US medical regulator to carry out the procedure, on the basis that Mr Bennett - who has terminal heart disease - would otherwise have died.

Surgeon Bartley Griffith said the surgery would bring the world "one step closer to solving the organ shortage crisis". Currently 17 people die every day in the US waiting for a transplant, with more than 100,000 reportedly on the waiting list. Doctors were clear that the surgery was a gamble. The risks are huge, but so are the potential gains. Prior attempts at such transplants have failed, largely because patients' bodies rapidly rejected the animal organ. Notably, in 1984, Baby Fae, a dying infant, lived 21 days with a baboon heart. In 1997, the two surgeons - Dr. Dhani Ram Baruah and Dr. Jonathan Ho kei-Shing - conducted a pig-to-human heart and lung transplant on a 32-year-old farmer, Purno Sakia, but not from a gentrified pig. Unfortunately, Sakia could not make it and died a week later from an infection.

If successful, the breakthrough may lead one day to new supplies of animal organs for transplant into human organs.

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