The pig heart has long been viewed as an ideal substitute because of its many similarities to the human heart, and pig heart valves are already used in humans procedures.
LIZZIE JOHNSON: Leslie Shumaker Downey was at home babysitting her two grandchildren Monday when a message pinged on her cellphone. Her daughter had sent a link to a news article about a 57-year-old man with terminal heart disease. Three days earlier at the University of Maryland Medical Center, he had received a genetically modified pig heart. The first-of-its-kind transplant was historic, saving the man’s life and offering the possibility of saving others.
What a great breakthrough for science, Downey thought, reading the headline. Then her phone pinged again. “Mommmmmmm,” Downey’s daughter wrote. She told her to look at the man’s name. Downey froze. The man being heralded as a medical pioneer, David Bennett Sr., was the same man who had been convicted in 1988 of stabbing her younger brother seven times, leaving him paralyzed. Edward Shumaker had spent the next 19 years using a wheelchair, before he had a stroke in 2005 and died two years later — one week before his 41st birthday.
“Ed suffered,” said Downey, who lives in Frederick. “The devastation and the trauma, for years and years, that my family had to deal with.” After Bennett got out of prison, she said, he “went on and lived a good life. Now he gets a second chance with a new heart — but I wish, in my opinion, it had gone to a deserving recipient”…
University of Maryland Medical Center officials declined to say whether they knew about Bennett’s criminal past. In a written statement, officials said the Baltimore hospital provides “lifesaving care to every patient who comes through their doors based on their medical needs, not their background or life circumstances. “This patient came to us in dire need,” the officials added, “and a decision was made about his transplant eligibility based solely on his medical records”…
Nearly 34 years ago, on April 30, 1988, Bennett walked into the Double T Lounge in Hagerstown, where 22-year-old Edward Shumaker was drinking and talking with Bennett’s then-wife, Norma Jean Bennett. The two men had gone to high school together. Shumaker was a handsome guy, his sister said, with blue-gray eyes and hair so dark it was practically black. His arms were muscled from working in construction, and he had a weakness for expensive cologne and nice clothing.
Bennett’s wife sat on Shumaker’s lap, according to an Oct. 6, 1989, article in the Daily Mail, a Hagerstown newspaper. After that, Bennett, then 23, attacked Shumaker as he was playing pool. According to court testimony, Shumaker had reached down to grab some coins when he felt a blow to his back, causing him to lose feeling in his legs. Bennett then stabbed him repeatedly in the abdomen, chest and back…
Bennett was sentenced to 10 years in prison and ordered to pay $29,824 in restitution to Shumaker. The state’s Division of Corrections said Bennett served six of those years and was released in 1994. Shumaker and his family also sued Bennett, who was ordered to pay $3.4 million in damages. Records show that for years — even after Shumaker’s death in 2007 — the court kept renewing its judgment and ordering Bennett to pay what he owed. Downey said her parents never received a dime from the lawsuit…
For decades researchers have chased the tantalizing prospect of using animal organs to save humans…The pig heart has long been viewed as an ideal substitute because of its many similarities to the human heart, and pig heart valves are already used in humans procedures… Doctors have practiced implanting genetically edited pig hearts into baboons. But no human has been kept alive before with a heart from a gene-edited animal, making the prognosis for Bennett’s survival unknown. SOURCE…
PETA’s statement (partial): Pig heart transplant raises a red flag
Researchers from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have raised serious concerns about the potential to introduce infections across species barriers when transplanting organs from one species into another. Swine influenza and porcine endogenous retrovirus are just two zoonotic viruses that have been identified in pigs. This cruel folly could expose the entire human population to a new — and deadly — pandemic.
Animals are sentient beings who feel pain, love, loneliness and fear. They value their lives just as we value ours. Even if we have the stomach to treat them as if they were nothing more than warehouses for human spare parts, do we want to risk suffering through another pandemic? SOURCE…
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