Dangerous grafting
recently in Sonapur, Assam, heart surgeon Dhaniram Baruah and his team, including Jonathan Ho of Hong Kong, transplanted a pig's heart into Purno Saikia, a 32-year-old heart patient. Saikia survived for less than a week and fell to the grotesque experiment of an overambitious doctor.
Saikia, a terminally-ill patient, would not have lived longer in any case, but does that justify baseless experimentation? No scientific procedure that Baruah followed was disclosed and the whole exercise was more like the plot of a horror movie. Baruah, who is now behind bars, claims that it was an historic achievement as the patient lived for five days on a pig's heart, kidneys and lungs.
Transplant surgeons take organs from one body and integrate them into another, granting the lucky recipient a longer, better life. But the sad part is that every year thousands of less fortunate people die waiting for suitable organs to be found. The terrible constraint on organ transplantation is that every life extended depends on the death of someone young enough and healthy enough to have organs worth transplanting. Such donors are few and the waiting list is getting longer and longer.
Every transplant surgeon would like to be free from this constraint. So far attempts to make artificial organs have been disappointing: nature is hard to mimic. Hence there is a renewed interest in trying to use organs from animals.
Pressure to increase the number of such