APsplainin medical pig ethics for ex-con recipients
US researchers test pig-to-human transplant in donated body corpse*

the quest to save human lives with organs from genetically modified pigs.

This time around, surgeons in Alabama transplanted a pig's kidneys into a brain-dead man -- a step-by-step rehearsal for an operation they hope to try in living patients possibly later this year.

"The organ shortage is in fact an UNMITIGATED CRISIS  and we've never had a real solution to it," said Dr. Jayme Locke of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who led the newest study and aims to begin a clinical trial of pig kidney transplants.
[...]
After hearing this kind of research "had the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives, we knew without a doubt that that was something that Jim would have definitely put his seal of approval on," said Julie O'Hara, Parsons' ex-wife.
[...]
Hurdles remain before ["]formal["] testing in people begins, including deciding who would qualify to test a pig organ, said Karen Maschke, a research scholar at the Hastings Center who will help develop ethics and policy recommendations for the first clinical trials under a grant from the National Institutes of Health [BWAH!].

* whole-ass chapter in Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (2006) dedicated to Georgia, USA, medical colleges' traffick in freshly buried, emancipated "bodies" from Afro-Am cemeteries. And others on state-sanctioned experiments on imprisoned subjects and SCHIP-insured children.