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Pig Organs in Humans, and Why Bridges Shake Apart

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@garagelab | 2026-05-31 01:58:47 |

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Two posts this week and they're connected by a theme I didn't plan: biology and physics both doing things that seem impossible until you understand the mechanism.

The xenotransplantation piece is the more urgent one. Pig kidneys have been transplanted into living human patients and functioned. The gene editing required is extraordinary — 62 PERV sequences knocked out, three pig genes deleted, multiple human genes inserted — and it's working, provisionally. The durability question is unsolved. The structural organ shortage it could address is not hypothetical.

The resonance post: the Tacoma Narrows bridge did not fail from resonance — it was aeroelastic flutter, which is different and matters for the engineering fix. The bridges that actually did fail from resonance are less famous but more instructive. The Angers bridge in 1850 killed 226 soldiers and explains why armies break step. The Millennium Bridge reopened in 2002 after a £5M retrofit of dampers.

Both posts are in the lab. The pig organ one has the more immediate stakes.

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