Living Cell's Paul Tan (left) and Bob Elliot.

Living Cell's Paul Tan (left) and Bob Elliot.

Nice pig. She's a descendant of those left on the Auckland Islands 200 years ago and she's special. Not because she's destined to make lovely bacon, sausages, ham, or pig skin leather, but because she's free of infections associated with many pig herds.

In particular, she doesn't secrete infectious porcine endogenous retroviruses (Pervs), making her ideal as a source of cells for medical use.

Her owners, Living Cell Technologies (formerly Diatranz), are at the frontier of an extraordinary, some say miraculous, development in medical science: transplanting living animal cells into humans.

From these pigs, Living Cell is taking hormone-producing brain choroid plexus cells for experimental treatment of animals with brain injury, such as strokes, and brain disease, such as Huntington's.

Even more promising are the pigs' insulin-producing, pancreatic islet cells, which are now being used for treating humans with diabetes.

For many of the 15,000 type 1 diabetics, including 1500 children, in New Zealand, it's an exciting prospect. But it's a prospect that has stopped dead here because our Government has banned all animal-to-human transplants (xenotransplantation) until the end of next year and looks likely to extend the ban further.

Critics say the Government is being, as it were, pig-headed and pig-ignorant - not only denying hope for thousands of New Zealanders, but also turning its back on a share of a brand new multi-billion-dollar industry.

"Hard." That's how 12-year-old Samantha Darby views her diabetes. "It's sort of hard to live with, but you can live with it. It's hard to be a little bit different from everyone else."

That difference involves giving herself blood tests about eight times a day, injecting herself with insulin four, and up to eight, times a day. And always watching what she eats.

Harder still is the constant worry about her blood glucose level being too high or low, which has scary effects. "Sometimes I feel tired, but I can't go to sleep. You get cold. You get blurry vision and maths is the first thing you lose. If it takes a long time to answer a maths question it's a sign you're going hypo."

That's hypoglycaemic, which can lead to insulin coma and potentially death. Samantha's brother Cameron, 15, also a type 1 diabetic, knows the hypo worry well.

"You get them during the night when you're not aware you're going low. They are probably the most dangerous ones because you can't really stop it if you're in a deep sleep."

To meet Cameron and Samantha is to meet remarkably well-adjusted, happy kids. Both like music, play the saxophone and enjoy surfing the net. Samantha is keen on badminton and her favourite subjects are maths and drama. Cameron has done fencing for three years, likes PlayStation 2 games and his favourite subjects are science and graphics.