全球首例
——猪心脏移植到人体

西藏 旦真郎加

美国马里兰大学实施了全球首例将猪心脏移植到人体内的手术。 该大学医学系的一个团队将一颗经过10次基因改造后的猪心脏移植到了一位心力衰竭的男子身上。

主题语境：人与社会 篇幅：353词 建议用时：7分钟

Doctors have transplanted the heart from a genetically modified pig into the chest of a man from Maryland in an effort to save his life. The first-of-its-kind surgery is being hailed as a major step forward in the decades-long effort to successfully transplant animal organs into humans.

Although it's been tried before—one of the earliest subjects, known as Baby Fae,survived 21 days with a baboon's heart in 1984, according to Time—the practice has fallen into disuse because animal organs are usually quickly rejected by their human host.

But doctors say this new transplant is a breakthrough because the donor pig had undergone gene-editing to remove a specific type of sugar from its cells that's thought to be responsible for previous organ rejections in patients.

The man, 57-year-old David Bennett from Maryland, had a terminal (致命的) heart disease, but several medical centers had determined that he was ineligible for a human transplant, the statement said. “It was either to die or do this transplant. I want to live. I know it's a shot in the dark but it's my last choice,” Bennett said the day before his surgery. “I look forward to getting out of bed after I recover.”

“This was a breakthrough surgery and it brings us one step closer to solving the organ shortage crisis,” Dr Bartley Griffith, director of the Cardiac Transplant Program at the University of Maryland Medical Center and the surgeon who performed the transplant,said in the statement. “There are simply not enough donor human hearts available to meet the long list of potential recipients.”

According to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which oversees a network for organ transplants in the United States, there were more than 3,800 heart transplants in the country last year—a record number. More than 100,000 people in the US are currently waiting for an organ transplant, and over 6,000 people die each year before getting one.

If the method of genetically modifying donor animals to make their organs less likely to be rejected by human hosts proves successful in the long term, such procedures might be an option for many other patients awaiting transplants.

Reading Check

1. What can we know about the surgery mentioned?

A. It is the first ever animal-to-human organ transplant.

B. It is a successful animal-to-human organ transplant.

C. It involves gene-editing technology in organ transplants.

D. It's intended to test a theory about organ transplantation.

2. What does the underlined word “ineligible” mean in Para. 4?

A. Knowledgeable.

B. Unsuitable.

C. Unlikely.

D. Impatient.

3. What's Dr Bartley Griffith's attitude to the surgery?

A. Nervous.

B. Hopeless.

C. Confident.

D. Worried.

4. What can we conclude from the last but one paragraph?

A. Organ transplants are badly needed in the US.

B. Few people in the US suffer from heart diseases.

C. Heart transplants have been very successful in America.

D. The number of heart trouble has been in decline in America.

Language Study

Ⅰ. Difficult sentence in the text

But doctors say this new transplant is a breakthrough because the donor pig had undergone gene-editing to remove a specific type of sugar from its cells that's thought to be responsible for previous organ rejections in patients. 但医生们认为，这次新的器官移植是一次突破，因为供体猪经历了基因编辑，从其细胞中去除了一种特定类型的糖，这种糖被认为是之前在病人体内引起器官排异反应的主要因素。

【点石成金】本句是一个复合句。 because 引导一个原因状语从句，该从句又包含一个that 引导的定语从句，先行词是sugar，在定语从句中作主语。

Ⅱ. Text-centered chunks

modify v. 修改；更改

hail v. 赞扬；称颂

fall into disuse 荒废；淘汰

undergo v. 经历；遭受

recipient n. 接受者；受方