Every Living Creature

The incredible history and promise of inter-species organ transplantation, from an award-winning transplant surgeon.

With more than 100,000 patients in the United States waiting for life-saving organ transplants, the shortage of organs will never be solved if someone must die for someone else to be saved. And yet a solution is well within reach: xenotransplantation, or the transplanting of organs between different species—the once unimaginable scientific achievement that Joshua Mezrich explores in Every Living Creature.

The story begins with efforts using chimpanzees and baboons from the 1960s through the 1990s, rife with ethical and practical complications and disappointments. The successful cloning of Dolly the sheep revived xeno-optimism, followed by the discovery of CRISPR-Cas9, which finally opened the door to xenotransplantation in humans, using genetically modified pigs as organ donors.

The protagonists of this story are as incredible as the science it details: a transgender visionary, the highest-paid female CEO in the world, who simply wants her daughter to live; the surgeon saved by a high-risk heart transplant, who swears by the promise of pigs’ organs; the brilliant and brash surgeon-scientist-entrepreneur, who is risking everything to make xenotransplantation a reality. Each plays a part in what is, in the end, the story of a miracle—not the answer to a prayer, as Every Living Creature makes clear, but a miracle we can breed.