New York researchers transplanted pig hearts into two brain-dead people over the last month, the latest in a string of developments in the long quest to one day save human lives with animal organs.

The experiment was intended to assess the safety of such transplants, prior to them being tested in clinical trials. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

As a kid of the 1970s, Mary Roach sat in front of the TV watching “The Six Million Dollar Man” promise a techno-rebirth. “We can rebuild him,” the narrator intoned. “Better than he was before. Better.

Many medical science advances underlie a unique surgery done at the University of Alabama at Birmingham last fall and just published in the American Journal of Transplantation — the first ...