Blood Ties & Pig Genes
In 1980, a young man dies of renal failure when his family hesitates to donate a kidney.
In Kagitha Sangaligal, Sujatha Rangarajan, a modernist writer and pioneer of science fiction in Tamil, imagined a tragedy. This simple plot, written in spare, unsentimental prose, asked whether blood ties are infallible in times of medical crisis. The very title Paper Chains was a dead giveaway.
At her husband’s bedside in the ward of the General Hospital in Madras, the young wife pens lines with the cadence of a Beatles song.
People come, People go
Some sell prayers, some sell soap
Human albumin—and hope.Days after I listened to the story, I mourned for the young widow, an English literature graduate. I asked myself: what if this renal affliction had happened to me, or to a loved one, at age twenty‑five?
Blood relatives were once the only lifeline for those who needed a kidney. Then, in the early 1980s, cyclosporine arrived. Thanks to this powerful immunosuppressant, altruistic strangers — even the newly dead — could donate their kidneys. For the patient, it became a matter of waiting for the right match. But the wait can stretch into years, binding patients to dialysis machines, until life itself slips away.
Meanwhile, science was already looking for alternatives. In 1964, a young American schoolteacher named Edyth Parker lived almost nine months with a chimpanzee kidney. Later, pigs became the chosen species to replace human organs—heart, liver, and kidneys. In the 21st century, with genome‑editing technology CRISPR, researchers began editing pig DNA with precision, silencing rejection signals and erasing hidden viruses. In 2024, one patient survived six months with a pig kidney carrying ten edits—a milestone.
This January, Tim Andrews, a 66‑year‑old, received a pig kidney with sixty‑nine edits at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. By summer, he was strong enough to throw the first pitch at Fenway Park, Boston’s famous baseball stadium. Andrews christened his kidney Wilma, after the pig. By late October, his body rejected Wilma. Back on dialysis, he waits again—but his trial gave others a glimpse of what might be possible. “It’s like going to the Moon,” he told Science magazine. “I am just one of the people on this journey who suffered pain, health issues, and grief to move the program forward.”
Sujatha’s readers had pleaded with him to reconsider the heart‑rending ending of Kagitha Sangaligal. They said they would donate, but their generosity would have been of no avail. “The story was set in a time when immunosuppressants like cyclosporin were not in vogue,” the author wrote later. “If you go meet a broker in Royapuram Tsunami Nagar, fifteen people will come forward to donate their kidneys.” In the rehabilitation slum where fisherfolk had lost everything to the waves in 2004, kidneys were sold, not given. Poverty turned bodies into commodities. Sujatha, astute observer of human nature, was well aware of this reality.
Xenotransplantation offers a glimpse of a future where survival does not depend on a sibling’s hesitation, a stranger’s desperation, or anyone’s altruism. In this vision, science becomes the more reliable bond—an unflinching partner when human kindness falters or completely fails.
People come, people go.
Some sell prayers, some sell soap.
Xenotransplants—and hope.