57-year-old David Bennett (R) poses Bartley P. Griffith, MD who surgically transplanted the pig heart into the patient Bennett. In a first-of-its-kind surgery, a 57-year-old patient David Bennett with terminal heart disease received a successful transplant of a genetically-modified pig heart at the University of Maryland Medical Center and is still doing well three days later on Monday Jan 10, 2022. It is too early to know if the operation will work but marks a step in the decades-long search by scientists to use animal organs for life-saving transplants. Doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Centre said the transplant showed that a genetically-modified heart from a pig can be used in the human body without immediately being rejected.