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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."
Must ... have ... BRAINS!
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Do kids who get transplants this young need to be on anti rejection drugs for the rest of their lives? I know they're exceptional at healing & recovering from major surgery at extreme young ages, but don't know if there's an extra ability to 'adapt' to foreign tissue.
The same question could be asked about this baby :)
Of course we can't yet do brain transplants, so I guess one can say its the same person as long as its the same brain.
--
Wanna play some word games?
It must be a little odd to know that a growing plurality of your tissue used to be someone else's." I doubt the sixth month old really knows that though...
The one-year-old baby is not doing so well.
This is going to be really wierd/difficult when she grows up telling her that half of her organs come from someone else, a dead somone else. I wouldn't know how I'd react to hearing somthing like that. Wow
He said at least one previous transplant patient has lived ten years and others are doing well.
Did that patient only last 10 years, or are they currently alive after 10 years? Would be very sad if 10 years is all this baby Alessia has to hope for.
Hopefully she'll live a long and happy life.
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!
Also if new parts were brought in, old parts must have been removed. What happened to them? America needs to stay competitive in this free market world, and there is a huge cannibalism market opening up in Germany.
Doctor: I'm sorry to say, but your baby was born with no arms...
Mother: Oh, doctor, I don't care, I'll still love him...
D: I'm afraid he doesn't have any legs either...
M: Never mind, he's still my son...
D: He doesn't have a trunk...
M: Ah...
D: And no head, either...
M: But, what does he has...
D: An ear...
(doctor brings the ear)
M: OH MY SON, MY BEAUTIFUL SON...
D: It's no use screaming, cause he's deaf...
how long until
> It must be a little odd to know that a growing plurality of your tissue used to be someone else's.
In rare cases, the cells of non-identical twins in the very early stages of development can merge into a single embryo, and develop into a normal "patchwork" adult, called a chimera.
IIRC this phenomenon was only discovered recently, when modern DNA testing revealed that these people have different DNA in different parts of their body.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I'm a med student working on the multi-organ transplant service in Toronto. I wonder what the real goal of these kinds of commmando surgeries are. The more organs transplanted, the greater are the hemodynamic derangements, the more compensation that has to be made for natural fluid balances and what not. The more organs, the more likely it is for her immune system to react and reject the foreign organs. I wonder what their plan is for the child's immune system. A 6 month old immune system is fairly weak, and in a normal infant it would gradually develop and become capable of defending the infant from your regular run of the mill pathogens. I'm not sure what would happen in this case; Alessia will certainly need lifelong suppression of her immune system with drugs like Tacrolimus (or steroids for bouts of acute rejection) which have their own side effects. The flip side is that a weak immune system predisposes you to develop systemic infections, sepsis and other nasty things. I know that in infants with HIV and other immunocompromising illnesses, they still get most of their vaccinations (except the live vaccines), so she may still be protected against those. It comes down to a dilemma not unknown to those who work in Neonatal Intensive Care Units. How far should we go to save these unfortunate children? I've seen in my time the so-called "Sick Kids Specials", children at our Hospital for Sick Children who were born incredibly premature (24 weeks versus 36-40 weeks for normal gestation) and sustained in increasingly advancing NICU's. These children rarely turn out normal, and in some cases, have up to 12 different major medical problems (kidney failure, cerebral palsy) etc. etc. What kind of future is in store for Alessia? I don't think a particularly long one; she will most certainly require re-transplantation of many of her organs (things like kidneys can last 10 years or so, small bowel transplants are so rare that I don't think there's that many studies of them). When you consider the cost, the mental anguish to both parents and to this increasingly developing child, and the cost to the public health system, I wonder if the right decision was made.
However, the cost of doing things like this is astonishing, even in countries outside the US where medical treatment is priced more sanely. How many infants and other folks people could be saved by spending this money elsewhere? For example, from today's NY Times:
Terror of Childbirth
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?
how deep in the thread do I have to go so that I wouldn't be "offtopic" anymore?
is an identical twin transplant. i've read several references over that years that if one twin donates a kidney to the other that anti-rejection drugs are not needed.
eric
So if is she was version 2.0 is she now 2.8 or would that be 2.0 release 8
"It must be a little odd to know that a growing plurality of your tissue used to be someone else's."
Maybe you can classify it as partial reincarnation or perhaps scattered possession?
If you would have RTFA you'd have noticed that the baby was one year old. Last time I checked 12 month old babies don't sleep in their mother's womb.
I know a guy who started the whole "lets use computers to map the human geome" thing. I know about 20 bio people that have the brains to do good real science.
Not one of them are in the field anymore. it turns out that real science doesn't pay. We could pull of great things but we keep running off the people who can help. How many great biochemsists are working filling perscriptions at the local drug store? Too many and we will all pay at some point.
I might not have saved that child. It's clear she has very low chance of having a normal or happy life, much less a productive one. Some cultures don't even give a child a name unless she/he can survive for some time. Or, that's just what I've heard. Anyway, if this was done on public money, it's a waste of it. How many people could be saved with that money? If the operation and subsequent care is privately funded, then I have no problem with it, though I feel pity for the little one.
Did you have to re-activate XP?
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
I have hemophilia, and I am not reproducing. Still, people around me seem to feel that I'm contributing substantially through my career and in my community.
When I was young, I'm sure everyone thought I'd die young from such a terrible disease. Now I have a normal lifespan and a relatively normal lifespan.
I have to say that issues around what the "right" thing to do are very complex, and distorted by health care financing, organ shortages, religious values, etc.
I recognize that I survive based on the generosity and altruism of blood donors. On the other hand, the medicine that makes my blood clot normally comes from paid plasma donors, some of whom donate in spite of having HIV, and the manufacturer accepting these donations accepts this.
You also have to consider that the picture is always different when looked at from an individual standpoint, in contrast to looking at it from public policy. It's been said that the cure for hemophilia is to let the bleeders die before they breed more bleeders. I have to say that this logic would have been an injustice to me, since I'm not reproducing (yes, I'm sure about that).
Seriously ethically challenged: With no real prospect for long term survival, this little girl sounds like some ego driven maniac's insurance fueled biology experiment drawing scarce medical resources from the system. Kinder and better for everyone but the doctors to let this one go... Biologically a dead end, if the mother is still able she would be better off trying again. Societies that can't accept hard facts and choices, whither.
Keep in mind that heart, intestines and movement muscles are made of separate types of muscle tissue. This baby had only defective smooth muscles, or it's intestines, therefore if it recovers from the surgery it should not have any problems besides the side-effects of the immunosuppresant drugs.
What about the vast numbers of children that die each day due to starvation? Could they not do the same?
The concern I raised in my original post was purely for the quality of life for the child, as in "perhaps they've saved her for now, but if this only serves to prolong her suffering, was it the right thing to do, for her?"
But what of the hundreds of thousands of people dying worldwide because of starvation? No medical science needed, just some food and water so that they don't starve to death. How many of them could potentially be brilliant scientists, leaders, who knows...? They're dead, just because they had no food.
Do you think it's right that medical science can save those who can afford it, but those who are otherwise healthy, but just happen to live in poverty deserve to die?
Good luck to this girl - I really hope she makes it and has a great life ahead of her. Just don't forget that while we're spending millions saving the life of one baby, thousands of people are dying for the cost of just some bread and water.
Organic free-range music... yum!
or incilin or any human advancements that have allowed people to live who would have otherwise died.
.
.
Everyone who draws the line of what is too far, like you just did, conveniently places that line to exclude any kind of technological help their survival has depended on.
There are plenty of people living in dirt, eating trash to survive for what will probably be a pretty short life. Maybe until such people decide that THEIR quality of life is so low that they start drowning themselves and their children in muddy puddles, we can implement a "quality of life" policy and put those poor souls out of their misery if they fall below the definition of "liveable". Until then . . . I say you are playing God with out any of the usual minimal requisites to play the part.
If you are going to argue against this, please, oh please, say that the same money could have been better spent to save many more lives in some developing country.
But making judgement on someone's quality of life is all fun and games until someone looks at YOUR marginal existence and says, "man, we should really put YOU out of your misery."
Is this why the U.S. can bomb people and say it is saving those same people at the same time? Under a dictatorship their quality of life is so low that it is well worth risking their death in an attempt to raise their quality of life to a level worth living? How noble . .
I sympathize that you were merely trying to discuss the issue, but your assumptions reveal a value that has been the root of all types of exploitations of other people. The quality of life argument has been used to inslave, to kill, and to exterminate entire civilizations. And now, I fear it has been used to turn the U.S. into a tool to allows poorly educated politicians play God.
I fear God's retribution for such blasphemy . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
She may only live another 6 months, 6 years, 30 years, whatever .. who knows ? Maybe she will fully recover in a few years time, and then get run over by a truck - who knows ? The world is an odd place indeed.
I met a girl not too long ago who by all rights should never have survived, and who's whole life could be seen as a drain of resources to the people around her.
But then again, she managed to write a way controversial film script, and convinced enough people to produce the film.
The film went into production, and made it to the Cannes film festival, where she was hauled up the steps and taken along the red carpet.
After the screening of the film, the stunned audience wiped away their tears and gave a standing ovation.
Her name was Heather Rose Slattery. ACPA Site Here
Or you can read my small contribution Here
RIP Heather .. Im sure you can read this where you are now.
So ever since meeting Heather, Ive learned that there is no relationship between someone's physical condition, and their productive value to the rest of society. Its all pretty random really.
If a baby who is 6 months old needs 8 simulatneous organ transplants, then shouldn't the baby just be allowed to die naturally? I consider a single transplant or a tweak of an organ to justifiable, but isn't transplanting 8 organs in a 6 month old baby breaking some type of natural law?
I know it would be difficult for the parents to bear the sadness of watching their child die, but what if the organs are rejected in the future and they have to watch their child slowly wither away, while be connected to all sorts of tubes and wires? Could those 8 organs have been used to save 8 babies or young children? Could the money that was used to pay for this multiple transplant be used to save others' lives?
My wife is 8 month pregnant and I hope we never are in a situation similar to this. It would be difficult, but being faced with 8 organ transplants, I would think that some higher power might be telling me something about this baby.
Why did I lurk so long before registering for a Slashdot account? I could have had a Slashdot ID of less than 100000.
Most likely those organs would have gone to waste anyway had Alessia not needed them.
That is a good argument.
Still, however ethically challenged the whole operation may of been, it probably cost no more than the money required to design, build, ship overseas, and launch a single cruise missile.
Certainly a lot cheaper than, say, launching a pointless lawsuit against Lawrence Livermore and NERSC for alleged IP violation.
Maybe in their next life, all lawyers need to come back as doctors or something. Maybe this particular doctor was a lawyer in the last life.
I would think that while old folks might be weak their immune systems would be strong (more "memories") than a middle-aged person.
You assume there are multiple children, all of a compatible tissue type, each waiting for one of each organ, that didn't get an organ. This is unlikely.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Good point, had there been 8 other people they wouldve most likely gotten them.
A lot of people are saying "organs should have gone to different kids." While this may be true, this is also a test bed for future technologies.
Think about stem cell research. If in the future (as it looks like it will be), it woudl be possible to grow those organs from a slightly modified version of the child's stem cells (with the smooth muscle disorder corrected), then those would all have to be transplanted into the body. The same applies for adults who say may have stomach cancer. A new stomach and gastrointestinal tract, just to be safe, would be grown and then transplanted in.
I am not so jaded as to thing that this is a publicity stunt, especially considering they did not release the fact that it was taking place until well after the surgery.
To the "natural selection" people: why even bother with any sort of medicine then? Any influence that we have is not "natural." The same arguments can be made for such simple things as pacemakers, dialysis, and insulin therapy.
I thought that species with a DIVERSE genetic base had the best probability of survival.If, through technology, we are able to maintain an even MORE diverse code base, then is that not better?
.well, keeping in mind the progress of the last 100 years, can you call me crazy if I were to say that technology could cure all illness within the next thousand years? With that in mind, maybe your genetics gives you a disadvantage physically, but the mental advantages to your genetics is a far greater advantage to the human race. Or maybe just having your gene set to study will allow the human race to understand our code that much quicker. Technology is just so much faster than evolution that even if your contribution is very, very small (like teaching your kid to program OSS), it is enough to make up for any genetic deficiencies.
Good genes, bad genes . . . in the current environment it is easy for you to pass judgement, However, when the environment changes, so must your definitions of good and bad. Since change is uncertain, there is no way you can really know which genes are good or bad. Would it not be better to hold on to as many different genes as possible, just in case we need them later?
Besides, if your genes are really detrimental to your daily function, you will already have a disadvantage that will limit the spread of your genes compared to other "good" gened people. There's additional medical costs, social prejudice, and simply a higher risk of death for people with inferior genetic material. You may live a quite normal and happy life, but individuals with similar genetic material as you will automatically be limitted, relative to other "healthier" genes. Plus, you have to take in account how large and diverse our population is now. Evolution will continue whether you decide to help it or not. It is simply the way the world works, not a policy one should live their life by.
Finally, it really can be argued that evolution is no longer relevant to human survival. Evolution takes thousands and thousands of years to mold species. Technology, on the other hand . .
And maybe the environment will change and your son will be the only one left to impregnate an entire generation of women . . . nomatter how slight the possibilty, how could you rob such a possibility like THAT from ANYONE!
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
What always annoys me in such articles is that the journalists concentrate on the kid and ignore the medical science. Come on, who cares about Alissia? She is only 6 months old - a less than complete human being, and a defective one at that. Why isn't the public told about what medical achievements made it possible, what infrastructure was created in the hospitals in the past decade to make this possible, about the doctors, nurses, their training, education, about computers, about tools, etc., etc.? Why? Certainly all that is much more important than whether yet another human baby will live or die...
Call me heartless, but crap like that BBC article breeds stupidity among general public and teaches them it's ok to ignore how things happen in our world. And hence some of the readers will say the obligatory "wow" (if at all) and go back to opposing stem-cell research, genetics, budget extension for medical schools, and after that will send their kid to some quack or a faith-healing program after consulting with a professionally made horoscope, of course...
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
This line of reasoning is absurd. In order to redirect that money, you'd have to (among other things) fire the doctor, close the operating room, and lay off the nurses. The "cost" is usually calculated by taking the fractional load on the system this one patient incurs, then dividing the entire system budget by that fraction. The money isn't convertable in any reasonable way.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Dib: You'll never... get away with this...
ZIM: You speak craziness, Earth boy. More organs means more human. It WILL work.
-- Invader ZIM, episode 7
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I don't see how you can make that joke, and how people can think its funny. Someone obviously lost their child, which is a horrible thing to have happen. Just hope that you never lose anything with significant meaning, because only then will you even begin to comprehend the cruelty of your statement.
Are you joking or do you just have no idea what you're talking about? There are ENORMOUS waiting lists for organ transplants. It is VERY, VERY likely that there are other children waiting to get transplants.
...for the poor guy who is going to end up with Darl McBrides brain (after he dies in a car crash due to brake failure, shouldnt have gotten his parts at Autozone).
Evolution is a descriptive science. Evolution is what happens. It is not some infallible dictum about what really happens. If we alter our genes, the alterations will influence our survival and reproduction, and evolution will continue.
1. The number of organs transplanted is NOT an indication of the pre-op condition/prognosis of the baby or an indicator of post-op "quality of life".
Her disorder is a single disease process that happens to affect most of her vital organs. All other things being equal, a baby born with several disorders, requiring fewer organs transplanted (even as little as 1 or 2), actually could be considered "sicker", have a much lesser chance of survival and be a greater "burden on society".
2. Of the eight organs transplanted, some might not have actually been "diseased" (more on this later).
3. The greater the number of organs transplanted is not proportional to the surgical difficulty.
Not to take away from Dr. Tzakis' great achievement, but technically the surgery might have been easier than transplanting a few non-contiguous organs. Here is why:
If you ask any transplant surgeon, the most difficult aspect of the surgery is doing the anastamoses (or "rejoinings"). Essentially taking the entire foregut and midgut en bloc significantly decreases the number of "rejoinings" one has to perform.
Tzakis likely only had to join this single unit of organs (the liver+stomach+pancreas+spleen+small bowel+large bowel) at two points (those being #1 the original esophagus-to-new stomach and #2 the new large bowel-to-original rectum) for complete continuity of the gastrointestinal tract and then probably about another 4 anastamoses for blood supply.
The entire blood supply for all the aforementioned organs (minus the kidneys) originate from only 2-3 arteries arising from the aorta. To leave the original pancreas and spleen (which are not significantly affected by her disorder) would have been several times more difficult than taking the "whole package" because the vascular supply for each organ would have to be dissected and reanastomed individually. This is more difficult because it's more vessels to join and the vessels are smaller i.e. more difficult to work with.
Transplanting even only 3 of these organs in non-continuity would have required 1-2 GI tract and 2+ vascular anastamoses for EACH organ. If you do the math you can quickly realize why it was probably easier to take all the organs, even if some were not diseased.
4. Transplanting both kidneys is NOT the transplant surgery standard of care. The baby would have done fine with one kidney and there has yet to be any studies proving that transplanting two kidneys vs. one improves a patient's post-op outcome. But if Tzakis did not take both kidneys he would be stuck at 7 and we wouldn't be talking about this whole topic right now (take it however you want).
So to make a long story short:
1. The baby was not as sick or doomed as one might think.
2. It's a great accomplishment but it wasn't "pushing the envelope".
3. The ethical issues raised are no different than those for any other medical procedure or treatment: should society help the inherently weak at the expense of the strong or should we fall into the Darwinian model of society were it's survival of the fittest? Or is there a middle-ground as to how much help we give the weak and who/what determines how much and what is too much help to give?
This is a perfect example of why people should become organ donors. Have it noted on your driver's license. Tell your family that you want all or some of your organs to be used if needed to save someone else. Ok, I can understand if you don't want your face to be altered for open-casket reasons (ie cornea donor). That does make sense. Remember though that morticians can replace your eyes with very life-like and nearly identical fake eyes and no one would be the wiser. The important thing is that you choose to be a donor. I'm sure this little girl will be very grateful in decades of her life yet to come.
Why didn't they just make a new baby? It's fun, and cheao.
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
In evolution, the rules are always changing. One man's deleterious trait is another man's survival trait. There is no higher arbitrator of evolution. It is a simple matter of who survives and reproduces. If humans create a world in which people who formerly would have died younger and reproduced less do not, we have not prevented evolution. We have created a different world in which the favorability of different traits has been altered. Will the world we create ultimately become unsustainable? I think so.
It is bad that evolution is so misunderstood, even by people who think they know it. Evolution is descriptive. It describes what happens. Evolution does not depend on our decisions about what the good genes are except in the ways that our decisions lead to outcomes in survival and reproduction.
I think there are some important exceptions to your ideas. There are cheetahs. All of them are nearly identical genetically, not that they are thriving tremendously. There are species that no longer have males. They have only females who produce only more females. That survival strategy is not conducive to diversity, but the species have made it this far.
The risk for death for each and every one of us is 100%.
I doubt that we can help or hurt evolution. Evolution is just what happens. It does not get better or worse. It's just a bunch of stuff that happens.
If a child can grow up and reproduce, its genetic material really is not flawed from an evolutionary standpoint.
Evolution is about which individuals, which traits and which genes live and reproduce. It is not about subjective impressions of fitness by human observers. What survives is fit; what does not was not. The arbiter consists of survival and reproduction.
How is our species weakened if more of us survive? Looking at the data, our species has become stronger.
More research and funding should be put towards developing more artificial organs. The thought of extracting eight organs from a recently dead [but goulishly kept living] infant is disgusting and barbaric. Not to mention the poor quality of this potato baby's extremely short expected life. (Anti-rejection drugs, etc.)
The sappy article does nothing but manipulatively stir emotion. It is mindless drivel for the mongoloid masses. It is completely devoid of any mention of the technology behind this process.
While the technology is there for artificial organs, a lot of the research and engineering has not caught up. (Thanks to the fact that people would rather ban medical research, and instead fund sports programs.) Besides, a new baby could be made for a lot less effort and cost. A six-month-old is ultimately replaceable, and it not much more tragic than the loss of a family pet. Yes, it's tragic, but people, get on with your meaningless lives!
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
...you are a freshmen in Highschool, and the original owner, a senior, wants his organs back.
Table-ized A.I.
...but then again I could be wrong.
And come to think of it, I am.... because the organ would still have the donors DNA.
Oh well, it was a good point - for a few milliseconds. Damn! It didn't even last long enough for me to finish typing the subject line!
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
They almost harvested my Dad. They decided he was too far gone, from head injuries from a motorcycle accident (he was wearing a helmet). The doctors thought that he would make a great donor, he wasn't that old, and all of his vital organs were intact save for his lungs which were full of blood. They asked my mother to sign the waiver tht would allow them to harvest all of his organs. Outraged she refused to sign the paper work, and because of her refusal they actually took my father to surgery, and actually practiced proper medicine, rather than jumping the gun, and hacking off chunks of my dad to give to others.
So HELL NO I'm not going to put that crap on my drivers license. Lest I be part of the.. "Ooh this one looks hard, lets just harvest the organs" crowd.
Just so you know that was 5 years ago, and while my dad isn't 100% what he was before he's not really that bad off, he has some issues with some air trapped in his head (can't dive, or pilot, or drive) that gives him headaches. He also has some scarring but his facial hair covers most of that, and he also has some dental issues he's getting taken care of.
Just be careful what you wish for, its all fine and good to use organs belonging to those who are dead, but whats to say you won't be harvested while you're alive. If you have that endorsement on your license, they don't have to ask, they just DO IT. My Dad didn't have the endorsement on his license, and its a good thing he didn't.
I'm done. Have fun.
If you check her medical history, she received all new bones over a 16 month period!
That's 306 bones!
My father is a blogger.
That's exactly why I don't have children. I know my genetic code has some flaws in it. I will do what I can to make it through this life, and then die. The 'weird' and otherwise imperfect DNA will die with me instead of being perpetuated.
While your reproductive choice is, of course, your decision, no one is smart enough to second-guess evolution. "Survival of the fittest" is actually just shorthand for selection pressure, which favors different specific traits in different environments. As environments change, what was "fit" yesterday now fails. So over time, it is the range or diversity of traits within the species as a whole that determines its viability.
There are many examples: in humans, slow metabolic rates confer advantages in famine, sickle cell anemia combats malaria, etc. I speculate that severe depression and other mental illnesses are intimately tied to the processes required for creativity and cognition.
Evolution isn't your decision because you cannot know the future, or what selection pressures are in store for humanity.
"There is no beauty which hath not some strangeness in its proportion." - Shakespeare
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.
Dr Tzakis said: "To my knowledge this is the first attempt at eight organs."
Dr Tzakis should get his facts straight... as should the BBC.
German surgeons in Berlin did eight organs last year. The Dr can pat himself on the back--it is no small feat... but it has already been done. It is a non-story.
How many children will be saved later on from what we learn with this operation?
This operation is so amazing for its own sake and if they can save the baby as well, that's two birds with one stone! It doesn't get more excelent than that.
In this book, Heinlein chronicles the 2000+ year life of Lazarus Long. The character has had every organ replaced, his skin, bone structure(can't remember if the brain was swapped out).
When reading the book, I got the impression that the character still had the sense that he was the same Lazarus who was born. Probably because he had the same spirit and consciousness. Myself I wasn't so sure because he had been almost entirely modified.
Great book for a weekend's reading.
BTW, that's a generic link to Amazon, not one of those 'sales' links that people around here post sometimes.
wbs.
Huh?
i live less than a mile from jackson memorial hospital, which happens to be our county's main ER. makes me glad 2b in good hands :)
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
Altering natural selection is why healthcare is skyrocketing.
It isn't a difficult issue at all. As long as the parents of the child in question can afford to pay for the treatment and the parents of the dead child have donated the organs there is no conflict.
The irony of this kind of treatment is that genetic defects will tend to accumulate in the moneyed classes while the poor who can't afford the treatment will tend to die, removing faulty genes from the gene pool and increasing it's quality.
I strongly suspect we're going to see this effect from the spread of HIV and AIDS in Africa. The current generation are going to be decimated, increasing the prevalence of any mutations in the population which help reduce the risk of infection. This won't happen in the western industrialised nations where drug therapies will be developed and can be afforded. The genetic fitness of the population will improve in the developing and 3rd world and will not improve in the west, this will gradually add a medical support burden to the western economies which the developing and 3rd worlds will not have.
So. Can we? Should we? Sure, if you can afford to pay for the treatment, go ahead. Just expect me to contribute.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Must... have... GRAINS!
but at a certain point, maybe it's best for some people to not have such extreme treatments. It can mean a lifetime of problems. If it was my kid, I'd probably be fighting like mad to have the treatments, I know...but if it resulted in a long term pain and suffering, I'd feel guilty about it for the rest of my life.
I have to say first of all that I fall right in line with the other posts from people who are parents. I'm very thankful that I was never called upon to make tough decisions regarding my own two, and my sincerest wish is that both of them will outlive me.
I was thinking, though, of a recent storm in my own community about a baby who was born with only the brain stem intact (anencephaly) and with a defect of the digestive system that made absorption of nutrients impossible. The doctors recommended providing fluids and painkillers only and allowing the child to die naturally rather than putting him through the suffering of an operation to repair the digestive tract. This caused a storm of protest in the larger community--the baby's life must be prolonged at all costs because, after all, "life is sacred." Never mind that the life would be no longer than a few weeks--the suffering that this small being would be put through was considered by many people to be worthwhile.
I've also witnessed the same thing at the other end of life. Frail, elderly people are put through the ordeal of being resucitated even though their lives are drawing to a natural close. It's rough; it's the equivalent of taking quite a beating. Why do it to a fragile body whose time to die has come? This was done to my grandmother some years ago. It bought her three additional days during which her dying process was marred by bruises and strains and other discomforts.
While I can't argue for "mercy killing" and am on the fence about suicide, I feel I can argue against needless human suffering. I truly hope that the child who has received these transplants has some expectation of a happy life. But I do have to wonder where and how we draw the line and who gets to draw it.
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In short, your post is an extremely good argument for America's system of private health care. When we start deciding how our public health dollars are spent, it doesn't take long for the healthy to realize that they outnumber the sick. When people realize, for instance, the very large portion of medical expenditures targeted at the elderly--well, hey. They're not productive members any more. And let's not forget about the special ed kids in school: some kid drooling in a wheel chair is never going to hold down a job or pay taxes either. If we just stopped giving them medical services, they'd die--and stop costing us money. Right?
Years ago I attended an economics lecture given by Milton Friedman, the Nobel prize-winning economist. He described a situation much like this, and went on at great length about the "tyranny of democracy." What happens, he asked, when 51% of Congress votes to shoot the other 49? In much the same way, the tyranny of democracy is expressed when the young, the healthy, the tax-paying, the well-educated discover that they could pay a lot less in taxes if they just killed off the lame, the halt, and the feeble.
This isn't an abstract argument: a population phenomenon in the United States called the Baby Boom means that an abnormally large population of people was born between 1948 and 1960. The oldest Boomers are nearing retirement age--and when 2025 rolls around (when the youngest Boomers turn 65) a disproportionately large portion of U.S. citizens will be expecting retirement benefits. As we get closer and closer to that point, I fully expect to hear more people claiming to be "courageous" and "willing to take a stand" by demanding that we kill old people.
For now at least, we (collectively) have no say in whether or not an Italian baby can have a lot of organs transplanted. And I think that's a good thing.
I wonder if this is a growing trend. Perhaps one day we will pull up to the hospital and roll out with new parts... I guess this is inline ith our "turn back the odometer" style lines of plastic surgeries...
:-)
Something like an autogarage for humans... Wouldnt want to consider myself used though...
--Ryan
Once you have the Chicken Pox virus, the Varicella Zoster virus, you have it for life. Your immune system will eventually beat it back and the Chicken Pox symptoms will disappear, but the virus will hide out in the nerve roots around your spine for the rest of your life. If your immune system is weakened by age, chemotherapy etc. the virus can break out again, burning is way up the nerves, usually on one side of your body, until it reaches the skin and causes rash and blistering. This is known as Shingles and is very painful. Not something you are usually told when you get Chicken Pox as a kid.
Yet countries with social healthcare cover more of the elderly and other "non productive citzens" better than we do. Sure, we have the best technology (for some treatments) for the privilaged few. The tyranny of democracy is checked because 51% of Congress can never vote anything into existance. Most votes require 2/3rds majority. Our system is a representative republic, so theoretically more politically savvy people are doing the voting on many issues. Our system is nowhere near perfect, and I could critique it for hours, but a social healthplan does not mean the death of elders and retards.
Oh, and Milton Friedman's Nobel Prize was awarded via a democratic vote.
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Other countries don't spend money on "heroic measures" because, in most cases, the only place such care is offered is the US. In this particular case, the child getting the multi-organ transplant is from Italy. Sounds to me like we're picking up everyone else's slack. Whatever the case, my issue with the original poster was that you cannot re-assign money spent on single cases, and unless you have an alternative to offer, your point is pointless. My pretend economic argument is nonsense? I seriously doubt you can back your claim that heroics are driving costs up in the US to any great degree. The biggest culprit is medicare and medicaid.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
$ If they have access to the monetary resources, then they are simply trading past contributions to society for this particular benefit. Or do you believe that we should be regulating our economy and forget about capitalism? Some would call extreme medical that antibiotic or vaccine that saved your life. Obviously you do not consider THAT extreme . . . bubble boy. Saving someone's life is not playing God, but a very basic value that societies are based on. If an individual that we save thinks we made the wrong decision, they are more than welcome to end their own lives. Otherwise, good luck debating with everyone on when to let people die and when to save people. I am sure it will be resolved unanimously in society just as quickly as that little abortion thingy.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
It's a strange thing that this is still the present tense.
There's a chicken pox vaccine... kids don't have to get chicken pox anymore. Hundreds of kids die of encephalitis due to chiken pox every year. There's also the school time lost, the scrring, and the eventual possibility of shingles.
Nonetheless, parents still "vaccinate" their kids by exposing them to other kids who have chicken pox at a convenient time, like summer vacation. Insanity.
I guess this is one of those "spay or neuter your pet" announcements. Get the issue out there.
As I clearly stated: "Tzakis likely only had to join this single unit of organs (the liver+stomach+pancreas+spleen+small bowel+large bowel) ... and then probably about another 4 anastamoses for blood supply." I made no mention of the kidneys.
I assume the entire celiac trunk was taken, it wouldn't make sense to take it more distal, it would just increase the complexity.
Also it is not necessary to take the IMA as enough collateral flow is available from the SMA to supply this young hindgut. Ligation of the IMA occurs in many colorectal cases without any ill effect.
There's already proof of cases where a complete person was replaced.
Hmm...
If you change too many body parts at one time, where do you apply for a re-activation key from??? god??