The news of the first transplant of a pig heart into a human being has hit the media. David Bennett is the name of the patient. The surgeons who performed the operation, doctors from the University of Maryland Medical Center, are optimistic about his progress. If they really manage to prolong his life, it will be great news not only for him, but also for all the patients on the endless waiting lists for organ recipients. In time, this could become one of the most promising solutions to the shortage of donations.

But we must be cautious. There are many things that can go wrong. This is not the first xenotransplantation to be performed that does not show immediate rejection. The pig heart has been genetically modified and it remains to be seen whether such modifications are really useful to deceive the immune system and also to do so without adverse effects. On the other hand, the medication being administered to the patient is also in the experimental phase. However, his status was desperate and promising the surgical procedure offered to him, C by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration of the United States). From an ethical point of view and as far as we know (because the details of the intervention have not yet transcended), the decision taken seems reasonable. But let this statement be understood in the context of volunteers participating in medical research. Because, when a patient decides to participate in a clinical essay , he/she should know that the chances that the new therapy will improve the benefits of the conventional therapy (if any) are very small. That is why researchers always make, or should make, special emphasis on informing the volunteer of the altruistic nature of his or her potential participation. And it is not always easy to get this message across to a person who is between life and death and who, perhaps because of this, is grasping at straws.

The good of the patient takes precedence over potential collective goods. article So reads the eighth paragraph of the Declaration of Helsinki, one of the most important international documents on the ethical regulation of the research on human beings. That is why I do not mind insisting, first of all: the physician must ensure that the patient is well informed so that his or her decision is truly free. But this serious obligation is compatible with the firm belief that medicine needs the generosity of patients, that it advances thanks to them. That is why we should be enormously grateful for all the knowledge that will be derived from the decision made by David Bennett, whether the intervention is a success or not. This has always been the path of the best progress, the path traced by the most lucid minds and the loftiest souls.

The controversy that has been less widely discussed in other times is the one that is being raised today by the defenders and detractors of the transhumanist current. Not three days have passed since the intervention and we already find voices that take advantage of this potential milestone to question the classical idea of human nature. They see here yet another example of how the term natural is becoming obsolete, displaced by a technology that seems to take us beyond what our ancestors would have ever recognized within the limits of a supposed humanity. Men with the heart of a pig? But why not? There are those who dare to dream of even more exhilarating chimeras, such as the generation of monkeys with human brains. Look for these imaginings associated with the appearance of the also recent news in the press about the research of Juan Carlos Izpisúa's team.

I do not share their dreams. All these visionaries do not realize that today the pig transplant is, without waiting any longer, a new triumph of nature. The most sophisticated artificial hearts we have been able to create, and we have been designing them for a long time (the first transplant of that subject was performed back in 1969) do not even come close to the architectural beauty and functional miracle hidden in a humble pig heart. We are too far from understanding and imitating nature to want to surpass it. And we are talking about what only apparently appears to be a mechanical pump. Of course, this does not mean agreeing with those who have not taken hours to label the pig heart transplant as a sacrilegious aberration, monstrous or unnatural act. The polarization of discussion seems to be an evil of our time. The latter also forget that many of our elders already have an endless number of synthetic prostheses incorporated into their bodies: hip, auditory, endovascular... And almost all of them are made of much less noble and mysterious materials than those offered by living organisms. Technology, properly used, does not dehumanize, but quite the contrary.