Transplanting a pig's heart into a human being sounds like an experiment only a mad scientist would dream up. But researchers at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina believe they are quite sane -- and getting closer to making such a bizarre operation possible. In the journal Nature Medicine last week, they reported overcoming some of the obstacles that Mother Nature has put in the way of transplanting organs between species. By altering the genetic makeup of a strain of pigs, Duke's team, led by Dr. Jeffrey Platt, was able to fool the immune systems of three baboons into accepting...
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