A human body beats an animal’s heart

It was in 2017, when I went to the doctors when my health deteriorated, it was sadly diagnosed that my brother-in-law, Imtiaz Rahman, was suffering from liver cancer. He was treated at cancer hospitals in Lahore and Islamabad, but could not recover.

Doctors said that the only treatment for this condition is liver transplantation. The whole family tried to find a healthy liver from somewhere but failed. Imtiaz Sahib passed away the following year leaving his four children, Begum and all of us crying.

Similarly, my cousin’s daughter’s husband became a victim of kidney disease at a young age. His damaged kidney was removed and his brother’s kidney was transplanted. But every week they have to undergo dialysis so that one kidney is not overburdened and it continues to function.

All of us at one time or another have to deal with a time when a loved one loses their kidneys, heart, liver or lungs due to a serious illness. These are important organs of the human body. A person dies if he stops doing even one thing.

Treatment is provided, but often the only solution to save life is to replace the defective organ. But a healthy organ is not easy to find. Usually, a family member or a close relative does this organ donation. Even if the organ is found, the next steps are difficult. The first difficult step is getting the patient’s body to accept the new organ.

Various medicines are given to the patient to induce it. Even after a successful organ transplant, some medicines have to be taken for life. Therefore, organ transplantation is a very difficult and difficult process.

Every year, millions of patients around the world, including Pakistan, die due to not getting a healthy organ in time. Thus, they leave their loved ones in sorrow. The tragedy shatters many survivors and they do not recover for years. Scientists, doctors and pharmacists in America are now trying to adopt a new process to remove the shortage of new organs in the world so that millions of human beings can save their precious lives.

This process is termed as “Xenotransplantation”. Through this process, an animal organ is implanted in the human body. It should be noted that in humans, apart from important organs, the cornea of ​​the eye, uterus, intestines, thymus, bones, blood vessels, veins, skin and heart valves are also transplanted.

Interestingly, alien transplantation was officially started in India during 1886 and 1887. At that time, a British doctor, HWM Kendall, was working in Bengal. In those days, some men lost skin on their legs due to ulcers. Dr. Kendall then removed the skin from the frogs and attached it to human legs. The experiment was successful. Thus the series of foreign transplants started.

In the 1960s, hearts, livers and kidneys were removed from chimpanzees and baboons in Europe and America and transplanted into humans. Some people died soon, some lived for a few months. Then an infection or a malfunction of the immune system killed them. The human immune system plays a key role in transplant rejection. Even a small attack of it causes a defect in the new organ and renders it ineffective.

In the next two decades, immunosuppressive drugs were invented. With their help, on October 26, 1984, a twelve-day-old American girl, Baby Fae, was implanted with a baboon heart. She lived for twenty one days. Later, the girl died due to defects in her immune system.

Scientists now realize that it is not enough to create drugs that suppress the immune system, they need techniques that can eliminate genes in humans and animals that cause various defects in the human body and immune system after foreign transplants. They stop the whole project.

Meanwhile, the attention of medical experts focused on pigs. The reason is that the organs of this animal are similar in size to human organs. This animal is easy to raise so its organ is readily available when needed.

Gradually, genetic engineering developed and methods were discovered to modify (edit) the desired genes in the animal body. However, some companies in the United States have started raising mice whose genes can be altered if needed.

The aim was that their organs would be accepted by the human body’s immune system and not cause any damage. Go-Khinzis are not ideal animals either. The reason is that this animal lives an average of twenty-seven years. Therefore, some scientists believe that the age of his organs will be less than human organs, that the average age of a human being is quite high.

In 2020, the specialists of the biotechnology company Revivicor in the United States finally developed a miner heart that could be implanted in place of a human heart. Both hearts are almost equal in size. What the experts did was to insert six human genes into the hearts of pigs with the help of genetic engineering.

The aim was to make the heart easily accepted by the human immune system. Four genes were then inactivated in the hearts of the pigs. One gene activated a sugar in heart cells that would have been rejected by the human immune system. The rest of the genes also played their part in this rejection.

The genetically engineered heart was first implanted in January 2022 to an American citizen, David Bennett. He was suffering from a life-threatening disease that made his heart fail. The thing about gold is that it could not be loved by any human being. It was then decided to remove David’s heart and replace it with a genetically modified pig heart.

The operation was performed at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, USA. Interestingly, Cardiac Xenotransplantation Program is going on in the hospital. Under this project, research and experiments are going on in relation to implanting the hearts of different animals into humans. The director of this program is a surgeon of Pakistani origin, Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin.

Dr. Mohiuddin was born in Karachi. MBBS from Dow Medical College in 1989. Then they went to America. There you were awarded a Transplantation Biology Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. Later he was able to get a bone marrow transplantation fellowship at the Institute of Therapeutics, Drexel University.

David Bennett underwent a pig heart operation by the hospital’s chief surgeon, Dr. Bartley Griffith. Dr. Mohiuddin assisted him during the surgery. The operation lasted for nine hours.

David Bennett was successfully implanted with an animal heart. He lived again for two months. Experts could not be 100% sure why the animal’s heart stopped working. The disorder is believed to be caused by a variety of factors, including: the presence of a virus in the animal’s heart, increased inflammation in the patient’s body, an overactive immune system, and the idea that David Bennett had become so weak and incapacitated. The heart could not harmonize with his body.

However, from this experiment, the experts gained valuable information about how the animal heart works in the human body and what are the defects that can occur in its way. In September 2023, Dr. Griffith and Dr. Mohiuddin successfully implanted a genetically modified heart into another American citizen, Lawrence Faucette, 58. He is still alive. Not only this, his health is gradually recovering. Lawrence also suffered from an incurable heart condition.

Inspired by these operations, hundreds of medical scientists in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and China began to develop animal organs through genetic engineering that could be transplanted into humans.

In fact, the human population is constantly increasing, but the number of donated organs is not increasing significantly. That’s why medical scientists are attracted to foreign transplants so that with its help severe shortage and rarity of organs can be removed. In this context, they are doing special research and experiments on pig organs.

Pigs are forbidden animals in Islam. Therefore, his organs cannot be used under normal circumstances. But the jurists say that if a Muslim’s life cannot be saved in any case, if necessary, as a last resort, he can take the organs of this animal. The source of this argument is the following Qur’anic verses which mean something like this:

“He has forbidden you carrion, blood, and minerals, but if one becomes helpless and does not cross the limit, there is no sin.” (Al-Baqarah 173)

“He has forbidden you carrion, blood, and blood, but if one is compelled by hunger without committing any sin, then surely Allah is Forgiving and Merciful.” (Al-Ma’idah 3)

“If a person kills another person on earth without cause, it is as if he has killed the whole of humanity, and whoever gives life to one person, then he has revived the whole of humanity.” (Al-Ma’idah 32)

It is clear from these verses that in the world of severe compulsion (jurisprudential term of emergency) Allah has also declared forbidden things as permissible. Therefore, if the life of a Muslim patient is in danger and there is no way to save him, then in such a case, he can get the organs of forbidden animals in order to save the life of the patient and protect the entire humanity.