Pale on its bed of crushed ice, the lung looks like offal from a butcher’s counter. Just six hours ago, surgeons at the University of Maryland’s medical school in Baltimore removed it from a hefty adult pig and, with any luck, it will soon be coaxed back to life, turning a rich red and resuming its work in the chest of a six-year-old baboon.
An assistant brings the lung to Lars Burdorf and his fellow surgeons, who currently have their hands in the baboon’s splayed chest. The team then begins the painstaking process of connecting the organ to the baboon’s windpipe and stitching together the appropriate arteries and blood vessels. But this 5-hour, US$50,000 operation is just one data point in a much longer experiment — one that involves dozens of labs and decades of immunological research and genetic engineering to produce a steady and safe source of organs for human transplantation. If the baboon’s immune system tolerates this replacement lung, it will be a sign that the team is on the right track.
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