For the first time in medical history, a team of doctors in the United States has successfully implanted a pig’s heart into a human being. Dr Mansoor Mohiuddin, a Pakistani-American physician, played a key role in this remarkable breakthrough.

David Bennett, a 57-year-old heart patient, was first judged ineligible for a regular human heart transplant due to his poor health. At that point, Dr Mansoor, who has been studying xenotransplantation for some years, was contacted. Xenotransplantation is a medical procedure that involves the transplantation of organs from different species.

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Dr Mansoor and a team of doctors from the University of Maryland applied to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for a special permit to perform xenotransplantation, as it appeared to be Bennett’s only shot of survival.

The operation was performed by Dr Mansoor and his team in a hospital in Baltimore. David Bennett is in stable condition and is presently recovering under special care, despite the seven-hour treatment.

In this sense, Dr Mansoor Mohiuddin revealed that he has been researching the transplantation of genetically altered organs, including the heart, between animals for many years. He attempted to transplant the hearts of many animals, including monkeys, into humans, but it failed miserably. But a pig’s heart is the most comparable to a human heart, so he chose to do more tests on a pig’s heart in order to genetically modify it and transplant it into a human.