Slashdot Mirror
Six Months Old, Eight New Organs
AEton writes "According to the BBC, Dr. Andreas Tzakis has just successfully replaced six-month-old Alessia Di Matteo's liver, stomach, pancreas, small and large intestine, spleen, left kidney, and right kidney in a record-setting operation. The child is so far doing fine with a one-year-old baby's organs. Tzakis is no stranger to multiple-organ transplants; in 1997 he set the previous record of seven organs by replacing seven of a two-and-a-half-year-old's organs. It must be a little odd to know that a growing plurality of your tissue used to be someone else's."
I know this will sound harsh, but if your child is born with so many problems that they would die without eight organ replacements, one has to wonder what their long-term chances of survival realistically are.
I know we can work wonders with organ transplants these days, but how much is too much? What are this child's chances of having a reasonable quality of life after being born with so many potentially fatal problems?
It's sad to see your loved ones die, but I can't help wondering if the parents did the right thing under these circumstances.
No doubt my feelings on this would be much stronger if it was my own child in question, but it would seem we as a species very often let our emotions get in the way of rational thought, and I'm just not sure these parents made the right decision for their child.
This is most definitely a difficult issue - I could well be wrong, but I'm throwing my initial thoughts into the pot to see what others think.
Organic free-range music... yum!
however as much as I wish to see this girl survive and live a healthy, happy life you have to wonder if those organs might have been better used saving multiple children with one major organ failing instead of someone who seems to have a body that seems to be almost completely non-functional. Think about what this girl's long term prospects are - considering her body's frail state. Hardly anything inside of her works. Will she live a year and die, taking the truckload of transplanted organs with her, while others with one or two problematic organs and much better chances to survive long-term post-transplant are forced to wait and quite possibly die?
You raise some good points. However, the same arguments could have been made years ago about any transplants, or severe burn victims, or any of a number of problems that were once considered incurable or prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to treat. It is primarily through such pioneering work that that advances can be made routine, safe, and affordable.
I'm seeing some people here saying that this baby should have merely been allowed to die, and the parents encouraged to just "have another one". Obviously I can't say for sure, but I'd hazard a guess that most of these people aren't parents. If they were, they'd realize that most parents become deeply emotionally attached to their children very quickly, usually at an early stage in pregnancy, in fact, so it's not as though a six-month-old girl can simply be scrapped and replaced as though she were a defective car.
Here's a more pertinent point: once you start saying that some people are too "physically defective" to live, where would you draw the line? I, for example, am among the most physically health people around -- my mother always said I was "disgustingly healthy". Even so, had I lived in Nazi Germany, I would have been exterminated due to my "physical imperfections" (and no, I'm not Jewish).
Then, on a more personal level, there's my wonderful girlfriend, who's beautiful, incredibly intelligent (IQ in the mid 170s), who graduated from Berkeley with honors, and who spends her time rescuing homeless cats and advocating for social services for autistics (not to mention the ways she's brought joy into my life, in more ways than I can count). She was also born with severe birth defects that required eight or nine major operations over a number of years at a total cost of several million dollars. Was it worth it? I don't even have to wonder about that.
The simple fact of the matter is, you can't tell which human lives are going to be valuable and which ones aren't when the baby is so young. As to the argument of "quantity" -- that you could have saved more babies with those eight organs -- well, let's use your own calculus. Why is it so important to save the maximum number of lives possible, especially considering, as you point out, that making babies isn't exactly a huge challenge? It's not as though human beings are in short supply these days -- far from it. And it's also not as though most people even want babies, considering (for example) that one-third of all pregnancies in the United States end in abortion.
I realize this post is a bit meandering, but you'll have to excuse my lack of coherence. There are people responding to this article who are essentially saying that my girlfriend (a slashdotter whom I love with all my heart and plan to marry someday) should be dead because she's "too defective" and repairing those defects wasn't worth the cost or effort. It's hard to write clearly when your emotional response to such comments is interfering so much.