"It was either die or do this transplant. I want to live. I know it’s a shot in the dark, but it’s my last choice."

Said the man with the pig's heart, quoted in "In a First, Man Receives a Heart From a Genetically Altered Pig/The breakthrough may lead one day to new supplies of animal organs for transplant into human patients" (NYT).

I wonder why they finally got around to doing this. I've heard about it for decades.

The doctor said: "It creates the pulse, it creates the pressure, it is his heart. It’s working and it looks normal. We are thrilled, but we don’t know what tomorrow will bring us. This has never been done before.... The anatomy was a little squirrelly, and we had a few moments of ‘uh-oh’ and had to do some clever plastic surgery to make everything fit."

The pig anatomy was squirrelly.