RMWF Writers Series: Dr. Joshua Mezrich • Every Living Creature: How Xenotransplantation Will Change Our Lives

This is a Premier Program. All residents of Rancho Mirage and donors who contribute $100 or more annually to the Rancho Mirage Library and Observatory Foundation can take advantage of priority seating for Premier programs by arriving early.

Dr. Joshua Mezrich is Professor at the University of Wisconsin and holds the Mark A. Fischer Chair in Transplantation. He is the surgical director of the kidney transplant program. He runs a translational science lab investigating the role of the microbiome and serum biomarkers on organ quality in brain dead donors.

His new book, Every Living Creature: How Xenotransplantation Will Change Our Lives, is the incredible history and promise of inter-species organ transplantation. With more than 100,000 patients in the United States waiting for life-saving organ transplants, the shortage of organs will never be solved if someone must die for someone else to be saved. And yet a solution is well within reach—xenotransplantation, or the transplanting of organs between different species—the once unimaginable scientific achievement that Dr. Mezrich explores in Every Living Creature.

The protagonists of this story are as incredible as the science it details: a transgender visionary, the highest-paid female CEO in the world, who simply wants her daughter to live; the surgeon saved by a high-risk heart transplant, who swears by the promise of pigs’ organs; the brilliant and brash surgeon-scientist-entrepreneur who is risking everything to make xenotransplantation a reality. Each plays a part in what is, in the end, the story of a miracle—a miracle we can breed.

The first 200 people at this event will receive a FREE copy of Every Living Creature.