You cannot transplant an animal's heart into a living person
The core idea stands, but key numbers or details have changed.
TaughtTransplants come from human donors. The human immune system destroys animal organs within minutes to hours, 'hyperacute rejection', so putting a pig's heart into a living person is a fantasy that has never been, and may never be, achieved.
NowOn 7 January 2022, surgeons at the University of Maryland transplanted a genetically modified pig heart into David Bennett, a living man with end-stage heart failure. The organ was not rejected on the table; it beat and sustained him for two months.
What actually happened
The barrier was real, and getting past it took genetic engineering, not surgery alone. The donor pig had ten genes edited, knocking out the sugars and growth genes that trigger human rejection and adding human regulatory genes, so the immune system did not immediately attack the organ.
The honest weight of this belongs on the card: Bennett died about two months later, and later analysis pointed to a latent pig virus and his own fragile condition among the factors. This is not a solved therapy, which is why it is 'updated,' not a triumph. But the flat statement generations were taught, that an animal heart cannot be transplanted into a living human, is no longer true. A second patient followed, and pig-kidney transplants soon after.
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Who was taught this
Still standard through 2022, so anyone who finished school between 1950 and 2022 learned the earlier version.