Today we recognize a truly monumental milestone when we hope is a giant leap forward.

Dr David Brown of Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital.

Advancing transplant surgery to provide viable readily available organs to patients who so desperately need them.

For the first time a genetically modified pigs kidney was transplanted successfully into a living person.

This was a couple of weeks ago.

The patient, Richard Slaeman, is 62 years old.

He's recovering well so far, expected

to be discharged from the hospital today. The new

kidney inside Sleiman comes from a cloned pig that was genetically modified

nearby in Massachusetts by a company named e-Genesis.

It's one of many biotech companies racing to develop a supply of cloned pigs whose DNA has

been genetically altered so their organs will not be rejected by the human body or

cause other complications.

NPR Health Correspondent Rob Stein recently became the first journalist to tour one of the research farms where pigs are being bred, cloned, and gene edited in the hope of providing organs to people who need life-saving transplants.

We have 22 buildings and a census of pigs around 300 pigs,

all for research purposes.

That is David Ayers.

He runs Revivocor, a biotech company in southwest Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains.

Before meeting the pigs, heirs had our colleague Rob change into hospital scrubs.

That's the barrier facility, so it's, we're trying to protect colleague Rob, change into hospital scrubs. Okay.

We're trying to protect the pigs, not us.

Okay, protect the pigs from us.

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