Kidney transplants seem so routine now. But the first one was like Lindbergh's flight across the ocean.
Joseph MurrayRead
The slow rejection of the foreign skin grafts fascinated me. How could the host distinguish another person's skin from his own?
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the body's ability to identify foreign tissues, particularly in the context of skin grafts.
In this quote, Joseph Murray expresses his intrigue at the biological processes involved when a body rejects foreign skin grafts. It raises profound questions about identity, the nature of self, and how our immune system perceives what is 'us' versus 'not us', highlighting the complex interplay between the body and the concept of ownership over one's own biological matter.
Themes
IdentitySkinRejectionBiologicalGraft
In practice
Example use cases
In a medical seminar discussing organ transplants, this quote emphasizes the importance of understanding immune response.
More from Joseph Murray
All quotes βOne 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.
Joseph MurrayRead
Similar quotes
True science teaches us to doubt and, in ignorance, to refrain.
Claude BernardRead
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism... We cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
Richard LewontinRead
Medical science has proven time and again that when the resources are provided, great progress in the treatment, cure, and prevention of disease can occur.
Michael J. FoxRead
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work-that is, correctly to describe phenomena from a reasonably wide area.
John Von NeumannRead
It's hard to imagine anything more interesting than learning how we're woven into the enormous tapestry of existence. Where did our universe come from? How special is our world, and how special are we? We allocate tens of billions of dollars annually to NASA, NSF and academia in search of the answers.
Seth ShostakRead
More than two decades after the birth of Louise Brown, and all the hysteria that surrounded her 'test tube' conception, we should know that institutions, not technologies, create dystopias. Artificially conceived children are everywhere, beloved by their parents, and they haven't radically altered our world.
Virginia PostrelRead