Animal Organs Won't Solve the TRANSPLANT SHORTAGE.

• Author: BERGER, ALAN H.

Imagine a world where anyone who needs a new heart, liver, or kidney can get it, a world in which there is no waiting list for an organ transplant or a problem with rejection. If this sounds too good to be true, it's because it is. Nevertheless, that is the picture the proponents of xenotransplants--the transplanting of animal organs into humans--want you to believe. They maintain that there is an unlimited supply of fresh organs, available to anyone in need. What they don't tell you is the downside of xenotransplants--the cost to the animals whose organs are used and to the humans who pay for it financially and ethically.

The Food and Drug Administration Xenotransplant Advisory Subcommittee has recommended the approval of "limited" human clinical trials for xenotransplantation. With the chronic shortage of human donor organs--the list of patients waiting for transplants is more than twice the number of organs available every year--the medical community has looked for a new source, and thinks it has found it in animals.

Imagine a world with a new kind of factory farming, where animal organs are "harvested" for hospitals and clinics, where genetically engineered pigs (now favored over non-human primates) only weeks old are taken away from their mothers and raised in antiseptic surroundings. Obviously, the medical community takes little interest in the animals' welfare. The sole value animals have is to be genetically altered to make them more "human," then used for spare parts. This appears to go completely against the medical community's own basic protocols of using "the fewest animals to benefit the most humans."

Despite what its supporters say, xenotransplants will not be available to everyone. Current transplant costs range from $116,000 for a kidney to more than $300,000 for a liver. Factoring in five years of follow-up charges puts the expense at nearly $400,000 for a liver transplant, with heart, heart-lung, and lung transplants running more than $300,000 each. According to the Institutes of Medicine, annual expenditures for transplants are about $2,900,000,000 annually. The IOM estimates that including animal-to-human transplants will push that figure to $20,300,000,000 a year, and it can only rise from them.

Billions of dollars that might have been directed to preventive medicine and education, to teaching healthy lifestyle practices such as diet and exercise and what to avoid--prevention that could save thousands of lives--instead...