Welcome to Cool Stuff Ride Home.

Rare Saturday edition, my name's Marcus Paff.

Coming up on this episode, a gene-edited pig lung has been transplanted into a brain-dead patient for the very first time.

What are the implications of this remarkable occurrence?

Plus, a fisherman in Ireland was stunned after catching a

quote-unquote dinosaur fish thought to be extinct for nearly four decades now. That, plus a quick

look at this day in history coming up on cool stuff. Well, in case you missed it, here's a story

courtesy of the Stat publication and author Megan Maltini. In a milestone

for the newly resurgent field of xenotransplantation, a 39-year-old brain-dead person in China

has become the first human to receive a lung from a pig. With consent from the person's family,

researchers took the organ from a crispered pig, trimmed it, and stitched it into their chest, where it remained for nine days.

The procedure was intended to test whether pigs that have been gene-edited to make their organs less recognizable to the human immune system, and thus less prone to rejection, could one day be used to supply hospitals for transplants.

In the past few years, surgeons in the U.S. have transplanted pig hearts and kidneys into both living patients and people who had been declared clinically dead because they lacked brain function.

Last year, doctors in China became the first to attempt a similar

procedure with a liver from a pig. This is the first time anyone has tried it with a lung.

The clinical need for donor lungs is enormous. According to the Global Observatory on

Donation and Transplantation, 8,236 lung transplants were performed worldwide in 2024, an increase of 6%

over the previous year, but tens of thousands more patients remain on wait lists.

Speaking to stat, experts in the field said the results of the experiment, which were published

a few weeks back in the journal Nature Medicine, are exciting

because they suggest that lung zetotransplantation could, one day in the future, become an option for patients.

But they also point out how much work has to be done before that day can arrive.

...