New organ Donors  Every year thousands of people die while they are waiting to receive a new heart or liver. Even more patients with kidney failure have to go through painful dialysis for year just because they are waiting for a suitable healthy kidney. The main problem is a severe shortage of donor organs, and this situation is unlikely to improve very much (unless there’s laws making donation of all organs after death compulsory). The only way round the problem is either to find a source of artificial organs, or use animal organs. The main problem making a suitable match of organ so hard is rejection. The patient’s body recognizes that the new organ is “foreign”, and so the immune system produces antibodies which attack the foreign organ and destroy it. Unless the patient is given drugs (which are literally poisons) to suppress the immune system, then new organ will be rejected. The suppressing of the patient’s immune system will reduce their resistance to infection, so they catch diseases quite easily. They also have to take low doses of these drugs for the rest of their lives. With GE, there is a possibility to get organs from pigs. Pig is chosen because they have very close gene structures to humans and they are widely available. (Some scientist uses monkeys too) This is achieved by first altering the DNA of the pig making it a transgenic pig. The transgenic pig grows organs which are covered by human proteins. When these organs are used in transplants, known as xenotransplantation, the human body is tricked into accepting the new organ, even though there are pig cells inside it. The first of these genetically engineered pigs have already been produced into monkeys. There has yet been any successful surgery with organs from other spices. Quite a portion of the population are opposing doing this because of the step of inserting human genes into pigs and the possibility of virus transmission between species.