BLOODLINES . Making Precedent . Is your body your own?

Because your wife is a physician, you frequently debate the ethics and economics of modern medicine with her. You have taken the position in the past that the expense of developing xenotransplantation and other high-tech medical procedures will make them an option only for the rich and possibly siphon critical tax dollars away from the basic health-care needs of the less fortunate.

You've seen the inequalities of the current system in your wife's patient population, which includes a high percentage of patients who can barely cover the costs of their medications and sometimes do not comply with their treatment plans because they have trouble paying for the regular visits, tests and drugs.

Are you comfortable participating in the treatment even though it may mean that health care will be less available and/or more expensive for other people, including your wife's patients?


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Context

The federal government has provided tens of millions of dollars in funding for private research into transgenic animals. In one instance, the Commerce Department's National Institute for Science and Technology approved a grant of $1.7 million for a joint venture between Massachusetts' Immerge BioTherapeutics and Wisconsin's Infigen, two of the largest companies involved in xenotransplantation, to produce transgenic pigs, whose organs could be transplanted into humans.

Case

In the 1990s, Imutran experimented with pig hearts transplanted into non-human primates. The average survival time was 13 days. As of late 2000, the longest-measured survival of a pig heart in a non-human primate was 39 days.

Look Deeper

In 2001, the federal government spent approximately $7 billion on biotechnology research. To compare, federal spending in 2001 on child nutrition programs totaled just under $10 billion, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 3 million American children experienced hunger in 2001.





	Transplantation Costs and Facts It costs roughly $300,000 to perform a xenotransplantation, a figure that includes neither the costs of required lifelong immunosupression and health monitoring for the recipient, nor the costs of developing and breeding transgenic animals. It costs $25,000 to $100,000 to test one pig for known viruses. A 1996 Institute of Medicine report predicted that xenotransplantation would push annual transplant costs from $3 billion to $20.3 billion. By comparison, the national per capita expenditure (both private and public) on health care in 2001 was $5,035.


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