ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how xenotransplantation, or ‘heterotransplantation’ as it was originally known during the modern period, has developed. By definition, xenotransplantation is the transplantation of body tissue between ‘foreign’ or different species. In 1996 the United States Public Health Service published its ‘Draft Public Health Service Guidelines on Infectious Disease Issues in Xenotransplantation’. The more inclusive definition of xenotransplantation incorporates surgical procedures that are thought to pose only a small risk of transmitting animal diseases to humans, although in the future they would be regulated as rigorously as whole organ xenografting. In the modern period, xenotransplantation can be considered to have commenced in 1963 with Keith Reemtsma’s efforts to transplant chimpanzee and monkey kidneys into humans. In the spring of 1963 the surgical team led by James Hardy at the University of Mississippi Medical Center considered that their research ‘justified a planned approach directed toward eventual heart transplantation in man’.
