Modern medicine has reached a new milestone,
very exciting milestone to save a man's life.
Doctors at the University of Maryland actually replaced his failing
heart with a pig's heart and days later, the guy is still alive.
It's working.
So here's CNN's John Berman completely gigging out over this.
And with good reason, he's talking to Dr Jonathan Reiner,
who's explaining the significance of this new medical advancement.
Joining us now, Dr Jonathan Ryan, our CNN medical analyst and
professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University.
Dr Ryan when I read the headline, a pig heart in a human being, I'm like,
nothing else matters.
This is everything that matters today.
How big of a deal is this?
>> Well, it's potentially a really big deal, not just for heart transplantation,
but for the 100,000 or so, folks who are on the waiting list now for
other kinds of organ transplants in the United States.
So there are a lot of people waiting for organs.
Only about 40,000 people actually get an organ transplant every year.
So there's great demand for donor organs, kidneys, hearts, livers and this
is sort of proof of concept or at least the initial steps towards proving that.
You can modify an animal's organs to make it suitable for
transplantation in the human,
it's really a remarkable engineering, bioengineering feet.
>> It really is and the patient here David Bennett says that he decided to gamble
on the experimental treatment because he would have died without a new heart.
He had exhausted other treatments and was too sick to qualify for
a human donor heart.
Family members and doctors said in fact he was quoted as saying it was either die or
do this transplant.
I want to live. I know it's a shot in the dark, but
it's my last choice.
So think about how brave you need to be really to do this
because if it doesn't work, you're gone.
But he felt like this is it, this is really my last shot and
I got to go for it and I'm really happy that it worked.
Hopefully it continues to be a functioning heart and
hopefully this kind of advancement moves on to other organs.
I know from personal experience with a family member,
kidney organs are in short supply.
A lot of people in this country around the world need kidney donations.
And so this is exciting news and I'm really happy to see it.
>> Yeah so about a dozen people die every single day because they didn't
get a transplant, an organ transplant that they needed.
So a guy like this I give him a lot of credit
as well, but he was going to die.
He didn't make the list. Isn't that amazing?
Some people just don't make the list and we know they're going to die and
then they do.
And so he's like, well, since I'm definitely gonna die,
I'll try the pig heart instead.
And so imagine they're about to put you under for surgery and
you have no idea if you're gonna wake up.
In fact, the chances aren't good, right?
And then you wake up, look holy cow, it worked or holy pig in this case it worked.
And so it did and God bless science,
[LAUGH] science again for the win.
Because guys obviously if they can perfect this,
then those dozen people don't die every single day.
We saved thousands and thousands of lives when people extend their lives for
potentially decades on end.
And you don't look usually in these type of stories,
some fundamentalist religious folks object, that's not what God intended.
I don't give a damn what you think some other entity intended but
if I'm gonna die tomorrow, even if God intended it, I'm going to disagree.
Okay, I'll go with science and I'll try to save my life and
we can argue about it later when I'm still alive.