Kidney transplants seem so routine now. But the first one was like Lindbergh's flight across the ocean.
Interpretation
The first kidney transplant was a groundbreaking medical achievement, comparable to historic milestones in human exploration.
Joseph Murray's quote highlights the transformative nature of the first kidney transplant by comparing it to Charles Lindbergh's pioneering transatlantic flight. Both events represent significant advancements in their respective fields—medicine and aviation—demonstrating human ingenuity and the potential for overcoming tremendous challenges to achieve the seemingly impossible.
In practice
In a medical conference discussing advancements, one could say, 'As Joseph Murray noted, the first kidney transplant was like Lindbergh's flight across the ocean.’
One of my surgical giant friends had in his operating room a sign "If the operation is difficult, you aren't doing it right." What he meant was, you have to plan every operation You cannot ever be casual You have to realize that any operation is a potential fatality.
The slow rejection of the foreign skin grafts fascinated me. How could the host distinguish another person's skin from his own?
I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty—and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.
Q: What were you thinking when your colleagues were out there making cosmic history? A: I just kept reminding myself that every single component in this spacecraft was provided by the guy who submitted the cheapest tender.
The further a mathematical theory is developed, the more harmoniously and uniformly does its construction proceed, and unsuspected relations are disclosed between hitherto separated branches of the science.
The main reason why people should care about research in fundamental physics is the same reason they care about astronomy and cosmology. People, children, want to know what we're made out of, how it works, and why the universe is the way it is.
From a certain temperature on, the molecules 'condense' without attractive forces; that is, they accumulate at zero velocity. The theory is pretty, but is there some truth in it.
A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life.
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