After Brad Crenshaw's daughter, Lani, dies while awaiting a heart transplant, he closes his practice as a pediatric cardiologist and turns to the laboratory, in an attempt to honor Lani's memory by creating an unlimited source of transplantable hearts, thus ensuring that other parents and patients do not have to face the same agony his family has endured. His plan is to substitute human DNA in the genomes of cloned swine to make their hearts more compatible with human hosts. After thirteen such substitutions, he is near to complete success. But the cloned swine resulting from the fourteenth substitution demonstrate unexpected changes that threaten his research, his family, his Hawaiian community, and ultimately, the future of humanity.