"Zara Whiteley lost her leg in a traffic accident" "But her artificial leg allows her to run very fast zara is almost a science fiction vision of what a Superhuman could be" "But a true Superhuman is rebuilt using flesh and blood, not just plastic and carbon fibre." "In this programme, we'll see a little boy called Kyle being given his hearing for the first time." "Look at attempts to treat blindness with bionics" "And meet the man with the very latest in robotic limbs" "But we'll also see surgeons replace missing limbs with new ones made of real flesh and blood" "Discover what it's like to live with the transplanted hand of a dead man" "No, no, no." "And strangest of all, see how brain cells from a pig enabled this man to walk again." "The human body is often described as a well-oiled machine" "Machines, though have one obvious advantage when their parts fail they can easily be replaced" "In a scrapyard like this you can even get them off the shelf." "In principle, it's possible to replace all the parts that make up a car" "The idea of doing the same thing with the human body as our parts wear out or are damaged by disease is seductive" "But in reality our technology is finding it hard to match the incredible complexity of the human body." "Kyle Duxbury is like any two-year old:" "He loves drawing and messing about but unlike most children of his age there's one thing he can't do." "I started to realise" "I think about- when he was about nine months because I'd, you know, look at other people's children and they'd be yabbering on;" "all Kyle did really was high-pitched screams" "Took him to the health office to do the hearing tests" "They put him to sleep put the electrodes on his head and the brain signals that were coming off to the computer were dead" "They just turned round after they did the test and said - 'there is a big problem and he has got a really severe hearing loss.'" "You think 'no, no, he's not responding he doesn't want to hear when you want him to he you know, try and give an excuse for every probl that arised and 'course at the end of the day" "you know, he was profoundly deaf" "It still upsets me now because told him that I loved him and he never heard me for all that ti" "It was quite upsetting." "'Postman Pat," "Postman Pat, Postman Pat and his black and white cat' what normally happens when sound enters the ear is that it's transmitted to a small spiral-shaped organ called the cochlea" "The electron-microscope reveals things so sma they can't be seen with the unaided eye" "Hair-like projections arranged like organ-pipes stick out of what are known as 'hair-cells'" "It's possible to isolate one and see how it reacts to Postman Pat" "The vibrations are relayed by way of the auditory nerve to the brain where they're perceived as so" "But this isn't happening in Kyle's ears" "In his world he sees the pictures but there's no sound." "The auditory nerve to his brain is OK but there's damage somewhere in his cochlea" "To overcome the problem" "Kyle's parents have been offered a bionic replacement called a cochlea implant" "He's gonna be able to hear dogs and birds and aeroplanes, so I mean I'm hopeful very very hopeful, that it's gonna give him you know, the life that we want him to have" "This is a human cochlea." "This spiral bit which looks a bit like a snail's shell converts sound into electrical signals" "By comparison, this is the best man-made device available:" "It's an electronic cochlea, and what the surgeon's going to do is to insert this little tail here into this canal, and by doing so it's hoped that Kyle will be able to hear ordinary sound for the very first time." "Cochlea implants have been available for some time but putting them in can be tricky." "Underneath the skin here we're gonna be drilling a bed in the bone to accommodate the er- the microchip in here and we have to put that in the right place - we have to be clear of the ear so that" "it doesn't interfere with the microphone for the cochlea implant when it's eventually put into place." "There are risks with this type of operation:" "The facial nerve passes dangerously close to the area where they're cutting" "If it's accidentally damaged, Kyle's face could be paralysed for the rest of his life." "If he goes in and it does happen you know, he's gonna be able to hear but he's not gonna be able to smile." "That's the facial nerve in the distance there and it runs through the ear from the brain to the face and it's a risk with a lot of the operations that we do in the ear" "It runs very close to the surgical approach of this particular operation" "Damage to the facial nerve would give you facial nerve paralysis!" "V that's a very undesirable thing, horrible deformity." "To reduce the chance of this happening they've got a warning system:" "If the surgeon gets too close to the nerve" "Kyle's face will twitch;" "electrodes near the muscles should detect the twitch and warn the surgeon" "Once the hole has been drilled, and the facial nerve carefully avoided the implant is ready to be inserted." "So here's the active electrode array and it almost sort of drops in under its own weight not that there's very much weight - but it goes in usually pretty easily and you just keep putting it in until" "it won't go in any further, really." "Hi." "Hello there." "It's good." "Yup." "No problem." "Oh, my God!" "The thing went in beautifully." "Thank you, thank you very much." "It was actually very easy." "The whole thing went in first time without any difficulty whatsoever so he'll be out in a couple of minutes!" "V he has a wee bandage on his head at the moment" "He's a fighter." "Let's take this away." "I'll just give you to him." "Is he fine?" "Is he fine?" "Baby, mummy's here, mummy's here, baby, and daddy." "I'll take the tag off his hand" "OK." "I can't help it." "One month later, Kyle visits the hospital again to have his cochlea implant switched on" "Lyndsey and Mark will know if their prayers have been answered and if the operation has been a success." "You know it goes in there." "Kyle is given toys to play with while a technician in a nearby room sets the level on his implant so he'll be able to hear as many sound frequencies as possible." "As Kyle plays, his actions are monitored by the technician through a video link when the levels have been set it's time to turn on the implant." "Kyle, for the first time in his life is about to hear ordinary sounds and the moment will be registered on his face" "And I'm clicking now, and you are on." "Now." "OK, oh, lots of blinking." "Stop, stop!" "Look happy, try and look happy." "He'll be all right." "Is it good?" "Yeah?" "Although his cochlea is turned on and working" "Kyle isn't actually hearing words what he's hearing is a jumble, a confusing and rather upsetting mixture of sounds." "Over the next few months his brain has to learn what all those sounds he's hearing actually mean." "Like a baby does when it first emerges into the world" "Kyle's brain starts to make new connections" "It responds and adapts to the cochlea" "Six months later, having heard speech for the first time in his life" "Kyle is beginning to learn to speak himself." "He's got about twenty words now that he can you know, use and understand and, you know, relate, you know, to one another" "He's doing really well, I'm really chuffed with h" "It's great, got a, you know, new little boy as concerned it's with his hearing and his responses and, you know, the way he reacts to sound and the way he listens when he walks down the street I mean, it's amazing." "Kyle's implant will stay in place for the rest of his life." "Say bye, bye." "Bye bye." "Bye bye." "So we can treat certain types of deafness and it had been assumed that by now we would have plenty of other bionic ways to repair our bodies, but it's been more complicated than we ever imagined." "Take, for example, the struggle to cure blindness with bionics." "Scientists have been trying to do for the eye what they've done for the ear using an electronic chip" "They're going to put this into the eyeball." "We see thanks to an array of about a hundred million light-sensitive cells which lie at the back of the eye in the retina." "The whitish disc seen on the left is the end of the optic nerve which relays signals from the retina to the brain" "In some types of blindness the retinal cells are damaged" "The idea is to replace the damaged cells with an electronic chip." "Chips have already been implanted into the eyes of a number of volunteers and patients who previously could see nothing at all report seeing faint shades of light" "Compared to the human retina, these chips are very crude" "Some contain only about twenty cells with an array that size, what you'd see is something like this." "It's early days, but if the experiments are successful they may be able to increase the number of cells to one hundred, two hundred, four, five, six, seven, maybe even a thousand cells" "But the most optimistic experts agree that it'll be decades before treatment like this will routinely available and even then for only certain types of blindness." "Where the dreams of science fiction come closest to what we can actually do with electronics is in the creation of the bionic arm." "Bionic arms have really come on a long way in the last few years" "Even here, there's something of a mismatch between expectations and reality." "A hotel owner in Scotland has one of the most advanced artificial arms in the world" "It's made of carbon fibre and is much lighter than the normal arm" "Driven through gears by an electric motor its brain, so to speak, is in the upper arm." "The shoulder holds the battery." "On the inside are sensors which pick up a musc tensing in the shoulder and move the arm." "The hand and arm are covered with a latex skin to give it grip, and it's attached to the body with straps." "To operate the arm, you have to think in a different way." "It may be that the muscles that once controlled your elbow movement you're now using an old thumb movement." "The opening and closing of the hand could be the small finger movement." "This wrist rotation might be the movement of a thumb that you once used before." "You have to discipline yourself for about six weeks to make sure you get the clear thinking processes in your head otherwise it just goes bananas:" "It has a mind of its own." "Particular problem with this hand is you have two movements." "The hand opening and closing, and the wrist rotation." "If you don't get it right first time" "It does give you movements that an ordinary prosthesis wouldn't give you:" "It takes you a stage further." "It will get better but it'll take a long time to get better." "Perhaps in fifteen to twenty years something very realistic will be developed." "But the hand can't give Campbell any feedback" "It's very difficult to apply pressure to certain things - you have no sensory feedback whatsoever." "You just don't know how hard or soft you're pressing, and the results can be." "Crushing!" "The other problem experienced with the arm is when you try to have a drink!" "V not that I drink out of bottles very often" " is this pivotal movement here brings something to your mouth." "This doesn't have that pivot movement, so the result is." "I just let it go then!" "Campbell's robotic arm is trying to compete" "with something that took millions of years to evolve." "Like our fellow primates, we have hands that are remarkably versatile." "They let us grasp and hold objects." "This versatility also allowed us to start making simple tools the earliest form of technology." "As our brains got larger and more sophisticated, so did our hands." "After all, skilled hands need a big brain." "It's likely that the development of manual dexterity and the growth of intelligence went hand in hand with each other." "The result is that humans have not only the largest brains but also the most complex hands of any animal" "Our hands contain three main nerves, two major arteries and twenty seven different bones." "Even quite simple motions involve coordinating up to sixty different muscles." "It's this complexity that a robotic hand has to try to match." "The sense of touch is also something no artificial hand can give you." "There are two thousand five hundred nerve receptors in each square centimetre of your fingertips." "More of your brain is devoted to controlling your hands than any other part of your body." "The advantages of having the real thing are so great that it's hardly surprising that some people have opted to have one of these rather than one of these." "Matthew Scott has chosen to have a dead man's hand in preference to a robotic one." "He lives in the outskirts of Atlantic City in the United States." "His operation took place in January 1999 but the story really starts back in the mid-eighties." "I was having a celebration with two of my friends and we returned to the home of one of them and he had a firecracker, and I touched the fuse to the tip of my cigarette never expecting it to light." "This lit very quickly and the fuse started burning very fast so all I could do was- is pull my hand away from my face and I was standing next to a friend of mine and I just take a couple of steps away from him before it exploded." "The explosion was so powerful, it took off his left hand." "To compensate, he had a prosthesis, or artificial hand, fitted." "He could type with it but many ordinary things he simply couldn't do." "Things such as tying my shoes or opening a door." "More times than not I've dropped things and spilled things" "I was never able to pick up both my sons at the same time." "For years, Matt was coping with his life and getting by with his artificial hand." "How're you doing there, sport?" "Things changed radically when they decided to take a holiday in Britain." "Whilst there, his wife bought a newspaper." "She said you're never gonna believe the article that's in the paper, and she showed it to me and it was about the team in Louisville preparing to do their transplant and that they were actively looking for candidates" "So immediately in my mind I said:" "Well I'm a candidate and I'm going to try for this" "So I read the article and read it several more times on the aeroplane back home, and the next morning after we got in, I made the call down to Kentucky." "As soon as I read the article I just knew our lives were about to change for ever, right there and then" "I just knew that he was gonna be the one getting that transplant I just knew it." "He was chosen by the Jewish Hospital in Louisville to be America's first hand transplant patient." "Doctors have been transplanting hearts and other internal organs for years, so why not a hand?" "Well, a limb transplant supposedly was done in this church hundreds of years ago." "A fifteenth-century painting by Francesco Pessol shows what is reported to have happened." "The two men standing by the bed are St. Cosmos and St. Damian." "They were in their time famous doctors and are now the patron saints of surgeons" "Accounts of their work refer to their great skill" "Let's take a closer look at what's going on." "Their patient in this case is the gentleman on the bed" "He had a diseased leg that no one could cure" "One night he dreamed that Cosmos and Damian amputated his leg and replaced it with the leg of a black man who'd recently died" "but I wonder if there isn't another explanation for a black leg on a white man." "Doctors in those days would not have been familiar with something that surgeons nowadays are all too well aware of:" "Hyper-acute rejection." "Within a very short time, the patient's immune system would have delivered a massive and devastating attack on what to it was a foreign bo" "As a result of that attack, the leg would certainly turned black cease to function and be rejected." "Legend has it that this man made a miraculous recovery but for those of us that are not blessed with the help of Cosmos or Damian the problem of rejection is a very serious one." "These days we have powerful drugs to suppress the immune system but they can have serious side-effects." "The lead-surgeon, warren Beiderbak, one of the very first things he said is:" "I want you to understand that if you go through with this procedure!" "V he was addressing the entire room!" "V that this can kill you, that these drugs can potentially lead to your death." "Nevertheless, Matthew Scott decided to go ahead and in January 1999 a surgical team prepared to carry out America's first hand transplant." "Doing a lot of thinking." "Waves going round my brain" "Let's not think too much, everyone, remember this is just like a... this is like on-call, right?" "This is like being on-call I'm on fire-power tonight, so" "The donor hand arrived and was carefully unpacked" "Altogether, eighteen surgeons were involved in the operation." "One team prepared the donor hand while another team worked on Matt Scott's arm." "A hand transplant is tricky because you have to connect arteries, veins, tendons and nerves and unlike say a kidney there are three different tissues involved:" "Skin, bone and muscle." "The first step was to attach the new arm to Matthew Scott's stump using metal brackets." "With the bone secured, the next step was to work on the blood vessels." "The arteries and veins were carefully connected." "After the arteries and veins were joined," "Matthew Scott's blood started to circulate around his new hand." "Once the nerves and tendons had been connected again using microscopes for the fine stitching involved, the flaps of skin were sewn together." "The whole operation had taken fourteen and a half hours" "Matthew Scott was going to wake up to a new left hand." "When I looked to the left I saw fingers." "It was cast and it was dressed and it was very- but there were fingertips!" "V" "I hadn't seen those for thirteen years, but now to look to this way and" "See something there where for thirteen years there was nothing was a wonderful feeling - it was terrific." "I remember the nurse Carrie, pulled back the sheet and said:" "Look, and it was amazing, I remember crying" "I remember just feeling completely overwhelmed it was nothing that I could have prepared myself for." "Now all it was was:" "It it gonna work?" "Is it gonna take?" "When I get to move it, are they gonna move?" "The answer is yes, but to a limited degree." "He can open doors and tie his shoe-laces ie his shoe-laces, ed degree." "But not quite as easily as he could do with his original hand." "The new hand doesn't sweat much either so he has to wear rubber fingertips to give him a better grip." "But all in all, he's happier now." "I could tell by looking in his eyes his anger and his frustrations were gone." "He's started to do things that he wanted to do:" "He can play the drums now, he loves to practise." "He's much happier, he's much more at peace with himself he's more balanced." "What're you doing?" "The ability to do little things with such ease has just made all of our lives so much happier" "There's a harmony here that- that I never knew was missing." "When it first came out of the cast and it came out of the dressings," "I could do nothing with it, Except for a few small movements." "Now I have great wrist motion, finger grip strength," "I can pick things up, I can do a lot of things that I was not able to do before with the prosthesis:" "Opening the door, tying the shoes and a lot of those little things that made life so frustrating for me before." "So I feel better." "Grab hold of the bars" "Grab the bars." "Matthew Scott is obviously content with his transplant." "But it doesn't always work out quite so well." "The world's very first hand transplant was carried out in France in September 1998." "The patient was a man from New zealand, Clint Hallam." "In March 2000, he was living in Perth, western Australia, with his wife and two children" "My first thoughts when I- when I saw my hand was that it was a miracle, and there hasn't been a day go by in the eighteen months since the transplant that I don't still see it as a miracle." "The total join actually goes around in quite a jagged join." "It's probably only been in the past six or seven months that I've actually started to feel uncomfortable some time with the actualdifferences in the skins." "The difficulty that I find psychologically is that I want to be able to use my hand to do things but it's not always possible to control it." "Now brushing my teeth is a- is a safe exercise for using my hand but when it comes to shaving" "I make sure that I've got the razor in my good hand and fully under control." "No, no, no?" "Human hands are prehensile" "In other words, we can oppose the thumb against the fingers with quite some strength but Clint can't" "Playing cricket with his children, he stops the ball with his new hand but picks it up with his left hand." "One of the hard things to accept for me is that" "I'm almost more handicapped with my new hand than when I just had one and a half hands." "This is not exactly as the dream was for eight nine, ten years, this is not happening like itdoes in the movies." "Reality really set in that progress was not as I wanted it to be, not as I had told everybody it was going to be." "He also discovered that many people found being near a dead man's hand objectionable." "I've had people in aeroplanes- I had one lady ask to be moved to another seat because um she didn't like the fact of sitting next to me with- with this hand that belonged to a dead person." "A very dear friend who lives in London." "I never understood why he used to grab my hand like this and in fact grab my wrist," "And I thought it was because he didn't want to maybe injure the hand while I was- it was recovering." "But he used to grab my wrist simply because he didn't want to touch my hand." "To him it was quite horrific." "He has to accept that his new hand may never function any better than it does now, and that this time he was facing the possibility that he might lose it." "His body was starting to reject his hand." "My mid-December, the fingers ha- the fingertips had started to get red, and I lost all sensation in the end of the fingertips." "Fortunately, sensation has started to recover but unfortunately there are other indicators that" " that show that all is not well in Camelot." " The redness in the fingertips, the fingernails falling off with new nails coming underneath them, are all indicators of a serious rejection problem." "Clint's hand is being rejected by his immune system." "The immune system is a ferocious killing machin" "Normally, anything foreign which gets into our bodies is dealt with like this." "The immune system has been likened to a pack of piranhas in the ferocity with which it attacks:" "Relentless and merciless." "That's how the white cells of our immune system are programmed to behave." "We have over fifty billion of these fuzzy irregular-shaped cells constantly swarming around our bodies and every second we make 120,000 new ones." "Look how they hunt down and destroy microbes, and they respond this way to any foreign bodies they come across." "And that's great, except if you're having a transplant." "We can suppress it with drugs, but that carries risks" " the risks include cancer, diabetes and high blood pressure." "It's been estimated that for every ten people having a hand transplant, after ten years one of them will be dead as a result of taking the drugs." "The American, Matthew Scott, knows that to keep his hand he'll have to go on taking drugs which means keeping his immune system constantly suppressed." "The common cold can be long and drawn-out, things that would cause fever are of grave concern because I don't have an immune system per se to fight those things off." "So there's the, you know, trade-off of the cost of the immune suppression and the benefit of the physical outcomes." "In my opinion, I think the trade-off is well worth it." "Clint Hallam's experiences have clearly left him with mixed emotions." "So how would he advise anyone thinking of having a new hand?" "My immediate reaction would be that" "First they need to sit down and they need to look at their life as it is, right now." "If they have a good social life if they have a good work relationship if they have a good family environment - if all of those things are fine" "I would tell them that they really need to reconsider what they want, because maybe it's not what they need." "To make hand transplants safer, we'll have to find better ways to outwit our body's immune sytem." "Until we do, I think the risks outweight the benefits - after all, you can live without a hand." "But when the transplant is one you can't live without, such as a heart, then it's different." "If you need a new heart, your most pressing worry won't be the side-effects of drugs it'll be getting a heart because there simply aren't enough to go around." "Traffic accidents are still a major supplier of human organs." "But since we started wearing seat-belts, the supply has dwindled." "For every patient that gets one there's another waiting" " an endless queue." "While we wait, machines can keep us alive, but there's no real alternative to a heart except another heart." "When the heart starts to fail and death is inevitable there is no machine we've yet built that can really take over." "So the wait for a donor heart becomes a poignant and desperate race against time." "Overlooking Central Park in New York is an unusual hospital unit where the problems of shortage are starkly illustrated." "Everyone here is waiting and worrying." "Waiting for a transplant and worrying that they'll die before they get one." "We're called 'pole people'." "That's keeping me alive." "The pole's attached to us twenty four hours a day:" "Without that I'd be dead." "So when you see these poles coming down the hall these are the heart transplants." "Name is Freedman, born in Brooklyn;" "I need a new heart." "The reason?" "I was on a sea-food diet;" "every time I see food I ate it!" "They walk the endless corridors pushing their poles." "Seven times round the hospital adds up to a mile." "And they walk that mile" "And then try and walk faster and faster in the hope of keeping their muscle tone so that when they do get called for a transplant they'll be in good shape." "Peter Liuzzo waits for his transplant with quiet desperation." "He's had a series of heart attacks, and now it's almost too late." "Four or five months ago I went to see my doctor and when I got to his office I couldn't get out of the car" "Because I was so short of breath." "The prognosis was:" "Don't come back 'cause we can't do anything for you." "So at that point, my son was called in and told to have me put all my affairs in order" "Because I would probably go home and expire." "Each and every patient here has had to come to terms with a very harsh reality:" "Their lives depend on somebody else's death." "As you sit here and I think:" "Gee, in order for me to live, somebody has to die." "And I feel like I'm putting the gun in- I'm gonna shoot somebody just so I can live." "I was asked that question before they sent me here:" "How do you feel about the fact that someone has to die for you to live?" "I have no answer, except to say that" "I'll probably pray for that person for the rest of my life." "When Peter arrived at Mount Sinai, it was winter." "Since then eight months have gone by and he still hasn't received a heart." "I can feel myself deteriorating the last few months." "We would walk for exercise and pretty soon" "I was the last one in the group, and they would get faster and I would get slower." "In September, his heart stopped and he was rushed to intensive care where they saved his life." "By November, he was no longer able to walk and on the evening of the 9th, the doctors came down to see him." "It was around 12.15, 12.20, like that when the doctor and nurse came in and my first inclination was that something was wrong with my pressures on the monitor and so on; then the nurse came around and put her hands" "around my head and just started petting me." "At last, they'd found a heart And they started preparing for the transplant." "At six o'clock the following morning Peter was wheeled down to the operating theat" "I'm happy, I'm thrilled, scared, all kinds of things, all at once." "A twenty one year old man had died and his heart was already being flown to New York." "As the new heart arrives, the surgeons remove Peter's old one." "That's his heart - very enlarged and the walls are quite" "His heart has become enlarged in its struggle to keep him alive." "Just how enlarged is obvious when it's compared side by side with the new donated heart." "Finally, Peter's new heart is shocked into a regular rhythm." "So far, it looks very good." "The next couple of days is for any patient is the so-called critical period." "This is a very good start." "Peter recovered well, and two months later he's looking very different." "In the hospital, we're different shades of grey, and we sort of get acclimated to being grey." "The first day it's shocking." "The second day, I'm a little greyer or yeah I look like I don't have any blood circulating." "And then you wake up from a heart transplant and within a day you look in the mirror and say:" "Who is this?" "All the wrinkles are gone, the greyness starts to disappear your finger nails and your fingers are pink, and you're warm." "Peter is lucky." "He's got a new heart and it's transformed his life but he knows others back at the hospital are still waiting." "One controversial way people are trying to get round the organ shortage is by turning to animals such as pigs." "But what chance would pig tissue have against our immune system?" "Animal organs are so alien that if say, a pig's kidney were transplanted into a human you'd expect it to be destroyed within hours." "But despite this, doctors have recently started transplanting parts of the pig into humans with some remarkable results." "Jim Finn loves driving his Triumph sports car around his home town of Newport, Rhode Island." "But a few years ago, life was very different." "It's damn depressing." "I was contemplating suicide." "I could barely move;" "I had trouble walking trouble talking, trouble using my hands" "I had to crawl from room to room on my hands and knees" "I couldn't walk at all;" "I was certain to have to use a wheelchair;" "it was pretty demoralising." "Jim has Parkinson's disease." "The small group of cells in his brain which control the smooth movement of the muscles of the body are damaged." "This left Jim at the age of 32 barely able to walk or talk." "So Jim volunteered for an experiment:" "To have pig cells injected into his brain." "And the results are remarkable." "Within ninety days they could see improvement within six months I had got rid of the cane the walker and the wheelchair." "I'm walking pretty damn good." "Obviously I still have Parkinson's disease, I still have voice problems" "I still have tremor" " I still shake a bit;" "but this is nothing compared to what" "I was before the operation." "If I still had that condition I'd be dead by now." "The pig cells were injected into Jim's brain to replace his damaged cells." "The first thing they do is they drill a quarter-inch hole in your skull" "I can show it to you right here." "And you're awake when they put this hole in your head because they have to make sure they don't hit any optic nerves or anything else that they don't want to hit." "So you lie there and you joke with the doctors which I actually did" " and they drill the hole and they put the pig cells in and they send you home next day;" "all I got was a hand-shake and a band-aid!" "The cells used to treat Jim came from the brain of a pig foetus." "They're using foetal cells Because they're more likely to implant and grow" "Doctors have successfully treated patients like Jim using foetal cells before now but the source was human." "Using human foetus's to repair adult brains is controversial and it required a lot of them:" "Each patient they treated needed up to eight foetuses." "There are fewer objections to using pigs." "But why doesn't the immune system attack this alien implant?" "Well, firstly they're transplanting cells not whole organs, and that produces less reaction" "And they've disguised the pig cells." "Proteins on the cell surface trigger the immune response and they've coated these with a chemical." "If the immune system doesn't recognize the cells as foreign it won't attack." "With Jim it seems to have worked amazingly he doesn't have to take immuno-suppressive drugs." "It's early days yet" " some patients have not improved at all with this treatment but Jim is pleased with what's happened with him." "In my case, I'm getting better every day." "Who knows where I'll wind up?" "I may be able to go back to work some day" "God forbid!" "So will we farm animals for their hearts and kidneys?" "Well, scientists have genetically modified pigs to try to do this and like it or not, this may be the best hope for many heart-transplant patients." "We've made remarkable progress in replacing damaged parts of people." "But we've also found that something as complex as the human body easily copied by technology or fooled into accepting transplanted parts." "The race is now on, both to improve bionics and to crack the complex problems of rejection." "But in this race, whichever wins we all benefit"