In a milestone for the newly resurgent field of xenotransplantation , a 39-year-old brain-dead person in China has become the first human to receive a lung from a pig. With consent from the person’s family, researchers took the organ from a CRISPR’d pig, trimmed it, and stitched it into their chest, where it remained for nine days.

The procedure was intended to test whether pigs that have been gene-edited to make their organs less recognizable to the human immune system — and thus less prone to rejection — could one day be used to supply hospitals for transplants. In the past few years, surgeons in the U.S. have transplanted pig hearts and kidneys into both living patients and people who had been declared clinically dead because they lacked brain function. Last year, doctors in Chin

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