A personal perspective on the science, ethics, and commercialization of xenotransplantation.

A parent of a child with a fatal lung disease decides to try to save her first with improved pharmaceuticals to hold the disease at bay, and then with an unlimited supply of transplantable lungs to cure the disease and manage the consequences of eventual organ rejection. The parent needs to surmount science, ethics, and commercialization issues for organ transplantation to be a practical cure, and several of those issues are particularly difficult for xenotransplanation. After half-a-decade of effort, the parent's personal journey has resulted in a 100-fold increase in the number of hours that pulmonary xenografts are viable, but still remains significantly shy of commercial viability and still leaves some ethical issues open.