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?
Creating a new theory is not like destroying an old barn and erecting a skyscraper in its place. It is rather like climbing a mountain, gaining new and wider views, discovering unexpected connections between our starting points and its rich environment. But the point from which we started out still exists and can be seen, although it appears smaller and forms a tiny part of our broad view gained by the mastery of the obstacles on our adventurous way up.
Science has helped us to understand and master ourselves, creating an elevated new form of human life, the wealth and beauty of which cannot be pictured today by the keenest imagination.
In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.
There has been so much underestimating of animal cognition that to perhaps overestimate it, as I probably do, is probably a healthy reaction.
It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.
Wherever there is a design that is highly successful in a broad range of similar environments, it is apt to emerge again and again, independently - the phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution. I call these designs 'good tricks.'
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