通过阅读学词汇CET-6（35）
Unit thirty-five
Xenotransplantation
Transplant surgeons work miracles. They take organs from one body and integrate them into another, granting the lucky recipient a longer, butter life. Sadly, every year thousands of other people are less fortunate, dying while they wait for suitable organs to be found. The terrible constraint on organ transplantation is that every life extended depends in the death of someone young enough and healthy enough to have organs worth transplanting. Such donors are few. The waiting lists are long, and getting longer.
Freedom from this constraint is the dream of every transplant surgeon. So far attempts to make artificial organs have been disappointing: nature is hard to mimic. Hence the renewed interest in trying to use organs from animals.
Doctors in India have just announced that they have successfully transplanted a heart from a pig into a person. Pressure to increase the number of such “xenotransplants” seems to be growing. In Europe and America, herds of pigs are being specially bred and genetically engineered for organ donation. During 1996 at least two big reports on the subject – one in Europe and on in America – were published. They agreed that xenotransplants were permissible on ethical grounds, and cautiously recommended that they be allowed. America’s Food and Drug Administration has already published draft guidelines for xenotransplantation.
The ethics of xenotransplantation are relatively unworrying. People already kill pigs both for food and for sport; killing them to save a human life seems, if anything, easier to justify. However, the science of xenotransplantation much less straightforward.
Import an organ from one animal to another and you may bring with it any number of infectious diseases. That much is well known. Howe