Vox: Pig kidney transplants are cool. They shouldn’t be necessary.

Tuesday, 2 April, 2024 — transplant

Dylan Matthews, writing for Vox

But the Mass General researchers went a step further when they transplanted a pigney into Rick Slayman, a 62-year-old Weymouth, Massachusetts, man who was very much alive. He luckily remains alive as of this writing and is producing urine through the piece of pork that some doctors put in him.

This is unquestionably good news for Slayman, and while routine pig kidney transplants are still a few years off, it’s obviously good for people with kidney failure to have more options.

We shouldn’t let the news distract us, however, from an uncomfortable fact: Humans could, if we wanted to, end the kidney shortage right now without any assistance from our porcine friends.

All of this.