“The 360” shows you diverse perspectives on the day’s top stories and debates.
What’s happening
Doctors in Maryland earlier this month completed the world’s first heart transplant using a heart that came from a genetically modified pig. The experimental procedure, performed on a 57-year-old man with a terminal heart condition, is seen as a major breakthrough in the burgeoning field of cross-species organ transplants.
The heart transplant came just a few months after two teams of scientists broke new ground in separate experiments testing the viability of pig kidney transplants conducted on brain-dead bodies that had been donated to science.
The theory of animal-to-human transplants, known as xenotransplantation, dates back hundreds of years.