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?
The impression sometimes created among the public is that scientists are working away in their labs, and maybe they're not always thinking about the implications of their work. But we are.
The opinion prevailed among advanced minds that it was time that belief should be replaced increasingly by knowledge; belief that did not itself rest on knowledge was superstition, and as such had to be opposed.
I suppose I can live with missing decimals, missing floors to tall buildings, and floors that are named instead of numbered. A more serious problem is the limited capacity of the human mind to grasp the relative magnitudes of large numbers. Counting at the rate of one number per second...to count to a trillion takes 32,000 years, which is as much time as has elapsed since people first drew on cave walls.
If your child gets asthma, the fossil fuel industry doesn't pay. Or if there's a natural disaster, the bill is paid by the taxpayer, not the fossil fuel company.
My roots, in college, were in behavior in the context of evolution.
What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.