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?
Science is the topography of ignorance.
[Bacteria are the] dark matter of the biological world [with 4 million mostly unknown species in a ton of soil].
We know very little about the universe. I personally don't believe it's uniform and the same everywhere. That's like saying the earth is flat.
[M]y work, which I've done for a long time, was not pursued in order to gain the praise I now enjoy, but chiefly from a craving after knowledge, which I notice resides in me more than in most other men. And therewithal, whenever I found out anything remarkable, I have thought it my duty to put down my discovery on paper, so that all ingenious people might be informed thereof.
The art of doing science is doing the important things first.
[Concerning] the usual contempt with which an orthodox analytic group treats all outsiders and strangers ... I urge you to think of the young psychoanalysts as your colleagues, collaborators and partners and not as spies, traitors and wayward children. You can never develop a science that way, only an orthodox church.
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