Beyond Frankenstein: Transplant Science and Lifesaving Pig Organs

Surprising new research in xenotransplantation is leading to the use of pig organs for humans. Bob Montgomery and Peter Reese are transplant surgeons who are working with emerging technologies so that more lives can be saved. Brendon Parent is an associate professor of bioethics in the division of medical ethics with joint appointment in surgery. Together they will discuss how transplant decision making walks the fine line between what is morally valid for the extension of life, and the range of technologies that could test our definition of what it means to be human.

About the Speakers

Robert A. Montgomery is chairman and professor of surgery at NYU Langone Health and director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute. He received his doctor of medicine with honor from the University of Rochester School of Medicine. He received his doctor of philosophy from Balliol College, the University of Oxford, England, in molecular immunology as a Fulbright Scholar. Montgomery completed his general surgical training, multi-organ transplantation fellowship, and postdoctoral fellowship in human molecular genetics at Johns Hopkins University. For over a decade he served aschief of transplant surgery and director of the Comprehensive Transplant Center at Johns Hopkins. Montgomery was part of the team that developed the laparoscopic procedure for live kidney donation. He and the Hopkins team conceived the idea of the Domino Paired Donation (kidney swaps), the Hopkins protocol for desensitization of incompatible kidney transplant patients, performed the first chain of transplants started by an altruistic donor which has resulted in 10,000 transplants. In 2021, he led the team that performed the first gene edited pig-to-human xenotransplant and has performed eight pig heart and kidney xenotransplants into humans.

Montgomery is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. He has authored over 335 peer-reviewed articles, cited more than 38,000 times and has an h-index of 105. Newsweek featured him as one of America’s Greatest Disruptors in December 2021. He received the Liberty Science Center’s 2022 Genius Award. Modern Healthcare named him one of the Top 25 Innovators in Healthcare. In 2024, he received The Transplantation Society’s Starzl Innovation Award and the prestigious Jacobson Innovation Award of the American College of Surgeons. He was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World and Time’s 100 Most Influential People in Health for 2025. He is a Chevalier of Ukraine having received the Order of Merit awarded by Volodymyr Zelenskyy on September 21, 2023, for his surgical care of Ukrainian patients during the war. He is credited in the 2010 Guinness Book of World Records with the most kidney transplants performed in one day.

Brendan Parent is director of transplant ethics and policy research, and associate professor of bioethics in the division of medical ethics with joint appointment in surgery at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He is PI on nonprofit and government funded grants studying ethics and regulation of transplant research. Parent serves as an independent living donor advocate, an advisory board member for the National Kidney Foundation, and a member of the national donation leadership council for The Alliance. He provides ethics consultation for transplant programs across the United States. Parent’s current work also focuses on ethics of determination of death by neurologic criteria, crisis resource allocation, and big data and artificial intelligence in health research. He has published academic articles in peer reviewed journals spanning law, medicine, science, sports, and ethics, and his work has been featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Wired, Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, and on NPR. Previously, he was a legal fellow for the New York Task Force on Life and the Law, the first Rudin Post-Doc in the NYU Division of Medical Ethics, and received his JD from Georgetown University Law Center.

Peter Reese is a transplant nephrologist and epidemiologist. He cares for patients at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center. His research focuses on:

• developing effective strategies to increase access to kidney transplantation,
• improving the process of selecting and caring for live kidney donors,
• determining outcomes of health policies on vulnerable populations with renal disease, including the elderly, and
• testing strategies to improve important health behaviors such as medication adherence.

He directs Penn’s Center for Quality, Analytics and Research in Transplantation (PQART) and chairs the Ethics Committee for the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), which oversees organ allocation and transplant regulation in the United States. In recognition of his contributions to transplant research, he received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in July 2012. The PECASE "recognizes and supports scientists and engineers who show exceptional promise for leadership at the frontiers of scientific knowledge."

In the transplant field, Reese has written specifically about the ethical implications of accepting live kidney donors with risk factors for kidney disease, live donor outcomes, the effects of organ allocation policy on vulnerable subgroups including children and the elderly, and better strategies to promote the careful use of higher-risk organs (e.g., “medically complex donors”).

About the Series

The Joseph Priestley Society (JPS) promotes a deeper understanding of science, technology, and industry, with an emphasis on innovation and entrepreneurship. Speakers are leaders from a wide variety of large and small chemical companies and the financial, consulting, and academic communities.

For more information about this event, please contact jps@sciencehistory.org.

Image: Three-dimensional anatomical diagram of chest and abdomen, part of The Book of Health, 1884.