The transplant raised ethical concerns among animal rights activists, who believe animals should not be sacrificed for human benefit. Bennett had served time in prison for stabbing a man with a knife.
KAREN WEINTRAUB: David Bennett, 57, who received a pig heart in January in place of his own failing one, died. It’s not yet clear precisely what caused Bennett’s death, according to the University of Maryland Medical Center, where he received the transplant Jan. 7 and had been recovering since. He began deteriorating in recent days and the hospital announced his death Wednesday.
Bennett was the first patient ever to receive an animal organ genetically modified to prevent rejection in a person. There was no obvious cause identified at the time of his death, hospital spokeswoman Deborah Kotz said, and researchers plan to conduct a thorough review of his death and publish the results in a peer-reviewed journal…
The history of medicine is filled with examples of experimental procedures that did not make a substantial difference in the first few patients but eventually transformed medicine. Organ transplantation itself remained largely experimental from the 1950s until the mid-1980s and now about 40,000 are performed annually in the United States.
The transplant raised ethical concerns among animal rights activists, who believe animals should not be sacrificed for human benefit, and among some who objected to Bennett, who had served time in prison for attacking a man with a knife, receiving a life-extending procedure. SOURCE…
RELATED VIDEO: