A medical team at Xijing Hospital of the Air Force Medical University in Xi’an, China, surgically connected a man with liver failure to an external, genetically modified pig liver. Credit: Xinhua via Alamy A 56-year-old man with liver failure has become the first living person to be surgically connected to a genetically modified pig liver, say the team that conducted the surgery. The pig organ filtered the man’s blood for a few days while he waited for a human liver transplant, they say. The man has since received a human liver and is recovering well, says Lin Wang, one of the surgeons who led the procedure in January at Xijing Hospital of the Air Force Medical University in Xi’an, China. Wang says his team plans to submit the results to a peer-reviewed journal. Proponents of transplanting genetically modified animal organs into people, a procedure called xenotransplantation, hope that the method could reduce the number of people who die while waiting for a human organ.…