Being able to chat with your dog or finally understand what your cat wants would be a dream come true for many pet owners.
But this scientist, dubbed ‘the real life Doctor Dolittle’, says he already can.
Dr Arik Kershenbaum, an expert in animal communications from the University of Cambridge, says that everything from a dog’s whine to a dolphin’s whistle is packed with meaning.
But, has Dr Kershenbaum really cracked the animal code or is he barking up the
A Maryland man with a terminal heart disease has become the second-ever patient to receive a genetically modified pig heart.
This week, Lawrence Faucette, 58, underwent transplant surgery after being deemed ineligible for a human heart transplant due to peripheral vascular disease, which reduces blood circulation.
The procedure, known as a xenotransplant, has only been performed once before on an ex-convict who died two months later. Both historic procedures were performed at the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC).
Mr
Pig heart transplants could be offered more widely to patients in the US as health chiefs consider green-lighting clinical trials of the controversial operations.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is said to be drawing up plans to make it easier for researchers to study a larger number of patients.
So far there have only a handful of one-off xenotransplantations, which are seen as a potential fix for the deadly shortage of human donors.
There was excitement earlier this year
A few months ago, Candice Matthis and Debbie Nichols sat down with their husbands to have some bacon. It was an unremarkable scene, except for two details.
First, there were the EpiPens, which Matthis and Nichols both had ready in case of emergency. The two women can’t eat red meat, not after they were each diagnosed with a dangerous red-meat allergy that develops, oddly enough, after tick bites. They had bonded as friends over their strange shared fate, where a
Transplant patients could routinely be given animal organs within years, according to the surgeon behind the world’s first operation to give a dying man a pig heart.
Many experts see the field – known as xenotransplantation – as a solution to a global shortage of human organ donors that is expected to get worse as we live longer.
Last week, a genetically modified pig heart was transplanted into a terminally ill heart failure patient and the organ appears to be
