See through the pig’s eyes | The history of transplantation
In 1838, when the Irish Surgeon Dr. Bigger, after doing several transplantation experiments suggested that a pig’s cornea would be the best possible match for a human being it was no less than a fiction.
Fast forward now, this has become a reality as researchers in California have created human-pig chimeric embryos as part of a project to grow human organs for transplantation.
Although it might look strange, we have been trying to use pigs for parts for nearly 200 years. Let’s have a look!
Dr. Richard of New York took the suggestion of Bigger and transplanted the cornea of a 6-month old pig into a young man, who temporarily regained his sight.
An 1875 promotional leaflet for the Glasgow Ophthalmic Institution claimed that Dr Wolfe, its founder had treated a man whose eye had been “totally destroyed” in an accident with molten iron. By “cutting from a live rabbit the corresponding portion of the eye which the man had lost” Wolfe had apparently returned “fair sight” to a “wonderfully grateful” patient (it’s worth pointing out that when this was reported in the Lancet the editors were clearly very sceptical about
the claims).By 1885 five attempts had been made to transplant a whole eye from an animal into a human face. Four of those attempts used dog eyes, but the only initially successful one, by Dr HW Bradford of Boston, used a rabbit’s eye.
Liquid animal products were even more widely used then. The transfusion of animal blood into humans started at least as early as the 17th century and demonstrations in the 1660s at the Royal Society in London, and in France resulted in deep disquiet, open mockery, and possibly a murder. Both the French government and the Royal Society banned human-animal blood transfusion in response.
In 1889, when Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard reported his results on the use of extract of guinea pig and dog testicles to restore his lost virility, the response was in part a mixture of disbelief and disgust. Insulin, extracted at first from dogs (and later pigs and cows) was less controversial and before the hormones oestrogen and progesterone could be cost-effectively synthesized, drugs were made from extracts of ovaries from slaughterhouses, or the urine of pregnant mares. Most infamously, in the 1920s and ’30s the Russian surgeon Serge Voronoff promoted the transplantation of primate testicular materials (and thyroids) into adult men to treat a range of ageing and other disorders. His attempts to do the same with primate ovaries and women and then to inseminate monkeys with human sperm, were even more controversial, and less successful.
Of course the major difference between these historical examples and the new stem cell research is that the historical practices are about putting animal products in human beings, not about putting human products in animals.
Safe transplantation of whole organs required innovations in microsurgery and an understanding of the immune reaction; the corneal transplants were undertaken without anaesthesia, the eye transplants without antibiotics, so they were difficult and dangerous interventions. The scarcity of human body products was enough to prevent much experimentation, leaving aside any social or religious taboos that might have discouraged the transfer of human materials into animal bodies.
Making animals more human was discussed in fiction, however. HG Wells’ 1896 novel The Island of Dr Moreau is often used as a morality tale against genetic engineering, but in the book the transformation of the animals into man-like hybrids is more physical. Moreau is a vivisector, he grafts skin, cuts and manipulates flesh, sets bone. For the rest, he relies on what we’d probably call neuroplasticity.
We’ve been using animals for spare parts and as medicine for centuries. If we’re uncomfortable about the idea of growing spare organs in pigs, it can’t just be because this crosses a species barrier. Perhaps, instead, it’s because human-pig hybrids are a rather uncomfortable reminder of how closely related we are to the animals we use.
