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Six Months Old, Eight New Organs

Posted by michael on from the organlegging dept.

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."

2 of 319 comments (clear)

  1. And on the computer front... by vudufixit · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    My PC is running better than ever with the transplantation of a new hard drive, CPU, RAM chips and graphics card. Anti-rejection drugs were not necessary. Donor was newegg.com.

  2. Re:10 years? (Another moderation abuse) by jdbarillari · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    I'd be pretty pissed if she died after 10 years. Think of how amazingly expensive this procedure probably was for their insurance company! That's money that you and I have to foot the bill for. At 6 months old, wouldn't it make a hell of a lot more sense to let her die and start over? If your computer is SO fucked up that you need a new motherboard, CPU, memory, hard drive, DVD-ROM, floppy drive, and there's a huge ass dent and scratch in your case and the plastic front is all cracked, wouldn't you just say fuck it and start from scratch? It may sound cruel and heartless, but this kind of surgery is just ludicrous for a baby. She's going to be fucked up for the rest of her life now whereas if they would've just let her die peacefully they could've started fresh.

    As usual, the Slashdot moderation is used to mod down people who have unusual but nevertheless legitimate points of view. (See my last comment.) This fellow expressed a view not unlike Peter Singer, a well-known (if highly controversial) Australian philosopher. (details)

    In a college or university setting (or even at a bar somewhere), we'd have a debate over this point, but on Slashdot, it becomes "-1, Flamebait".