Opinion: Here are some questions about the pig heart transplant that people actually should be asking

Arthur Caplan, Laura Kimberly, Brendan Parent and Tamar Schiff are members of the transplant ethics and policy working group in the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.

Those who closely follow research in the field of transplantation have been expecting that someday a genetically edited pig organ would be transplanted into a living human. But when the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore announced that on Jan. 7 a genetically edited pig heart had been given to a human recipient, the news came as a surprise.

The operation, known as a xenotransplant, was widely described in the media as a “success,” but there are many questions that need answers to justify undertaking what is a hugely risky experiment.

Maybe the Maryland team already has good answers, and maybe the case will be reported in detail in peer-reviewed journals so that other medical teams can learn from their pioneering effort. But since this transplant was done as an emergency rescue, not a clinical trial, the data acquired are likely to be only anecdotal and perhaps...