This is the Guardian. Earlier this month a team of doctors in the US did something extraordinary.

For the first time ever a man with a life-threatening heart disease successfully received a new heart from a genetically modified pig.

In an experimental procedure lasting seven hours, surgeons from the University of Maryland

transplanted a pick heart into a patient called David Bennett, a 57-year-old man who was considered

too ill to receive a human organ replacement.

He had had previous heart surgery, so it took a while to prepare the operative site such that we could remove his heart and replace it with that of the animals.

So with hundreds of thousands of people around the world in need of new organs are animals

set to be the future of transplantation.

And how exactly do you get a working pick-heart into a living human being?

I'm the operation is very, very significant. You have a combination of a genetically engineered animal organ, the heart, new immune

suppressive drugs being used so I'd say did this really do well, surprisingly

well for a first try yes. This is Professor Art Kaplan,

Director of Medical Ethics at New York University's Grossman School of Medicine.

He's been working in the field of organ transplantation for decades, so I wanted to get his take on the operation in Maryland.

I started by asking him why we want to use organs from animals in the first place.

There are simply not enough human organs from those who die to transplant those who need them.

There are literally thousands of people dying every month around the world from want of an organ.

The other reason is demand is up partly because proficiency in doing transplants, just the surgical skills are improved and you have a

population in many parts of the world the US Japan Italy where the population is aging that leads to more organ failure

sometimes that can be responded to with a transplant and we try to encourage and

I would encourage people to sign their donor cards, but for decades that has not given us an adequate supply.

And why is the whole effort focused on pigs?

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