Last night, there was a sad news from the American medical community:
Richard Slayman, the world's first man to receive a kidney transplant from a genetically modified pig, has died at the age of 62.
That's nearly two months after he implanted a genetically modified pig kidney.
（Slayman去世）
为他实施猪肾脏移植手术的麻省总医院（Massachusetts General Hospital，MGH）昨日发表声明称：
There is no indication that Slayman's death was the result of a transplant......
However, neither the media nor the medical community has any harsh criticism of this operation.
After all, even if the operation only lasted Slayman's life for two months, it would be enough to go down in medical history:
Slayman was the first person in the world to survive two months on a pig kidney.
In fact, Slayman has been seriously ill for more than a day or two, and he has been suffering from type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure for years, and his kidneys have been getting worse.
As early as 2011, he started dialysis, and doctors diagnosed that his kidney was failing rapidly and needed a kidney replacement to be cured.
In the years since, Slayman has been on dialysis while waiting for his kidneys to originate.
In 2018, Slayman finally waited for someone else to donate a kidney, and he was able to recover after a kidney transplant.
But even the kidneys of others have only been functioning intact in Slayman's body for five years.
(Slayman has already had a kidney replaced)
Later, the transplanted kidney began to fail, and Slayman lived his life waiting for the kidney to come up and dialysis.
This time the wait was extraordinarily long.
In 2023, Slayman's kidney is on the verge of complete death, and the attending doctor warns him that a kidney replacement is urgent.
If he continues to queue up, he may have to wait another five or six years, and by then, he will probably be gone.
Desperate, the team at Massachusetts General Hospital studying cross-species organ transplantation reached out to Slayman and decided to take the plunge with the latest technology – transplanting genetically modified pig kidneys for Slayman!
This experience we reported earlier that the transplanted pig kidney was provided by the Massachusetts biotechnology company "eGenesis".
(Genetically modified pig kidney)
To avoid being attacked by the human immune system after transplantation, the researchers genetically modified the pig kidney 69 times, deleted three pig genes, added seven more human genes, and also managed to inactivate the pig's endogenous retrovirus, thereby eliminating the risk of human infection.
After careful preparation, Slayman was wheeled into the operating room on March 16.
The operation lasted for 4 hours, and the process was not easy, because Slayman's blood vessels were weakened due to long-term damage in addition to diabetes and high blood pressure, but fortunately he was successful.
As a result, Slayman became the first living person in history to receive a pig kidney transplant.
(Slayman performs pig kidney transplant)
Slayman's recovery went smoothly, and after the initial rejection period, the pig kidney began to function steadily in his body.
On 3 April, Slayman was discharged from the hospital and returned home for recuperation.
（Slayman出院回家）
On the day he was discharged from the hospital, Slayman was thrilled:
"The moment I came home from the hospital was the happiest moment I've had in more than a decade!"
For the next two months, Massachusetts General Hospital kept track of Slayman's condition.
He had blood and urine tests three times a week and a doctor every two weeks for a thorough check-up.
As the first person to transplant a pig kidney, Slayman was well aware that the surgery he was going through was experimental and prepared for the risks he might encounter.
In the days since, Slayman has expressed his gratitude to the team at Massachusetts General more than once:
"I have been a patient here for 11 years and have the utmost trust in the medical team here, whether it is the doctors, nurses, staff who care about me very much."
"The kidney transplant has not only helped me prolong my life, but also brought hope to thousands of people waiting for a kidney transplant! Be grateful for everything they do. ”
(Slayman and staff take a group photo to say goodbye)
As a result, Slayman has been actively cooperating with the hospital's treatment measures and providing valuable and relevant data.
The president of Massachusetts General Hospital also praised:
"Without Slayman's will and courage, we would not have been able to complete this surgery, let alone embark on a new journey in medicine."
However, the path forward for medicine was never easy, and Slayman was not one of the lucky ones to be the experimental surgery.
Two months after the transplantation of the genetically modified pig's kidney, Slayman still failed to defeat death and passed away not long ago.
The cause of his death has not yet been announced, and Massachusetts General Hospital said in a statement yesterday that there is no indication that his death is related to a pig kidney transplant.
Either way, Slayman made an important contribution to the advancement of medicine, and he will be immortalized in medical history as the first person to perform cross-species organ transplantation.
(Pisano, the second pig kidney transplanter, recuperates at home)
Today, another person who has had a pig kidney transplant, Lisa Pisano, is still recuperating at home, and she is the only patient left to have a pig kidney transplant.
While the media and netizens mourned Slayman, they also sent their best wishes to Pisano.
Hopefully, Pisano can create a miracle and represent humanity's success and open up a new path for cross-species organ transplantation.