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...surgery, performed in Saudi Arabia, involved the transfer of a uterus from a 46-year-old donor who had undergone a hysterectomy into a 26-year-old woman whose uterus had been removed because of hemorrhaging. The organ survived for 99 days but failed after kinking or other blood-vessel problems choked off circulation. Many members of the medical community were nonetheless encouraged. Says New York University's Giuseppe Del Priore, who has performed the procedure on animals: "Now that we have the first, the second and third transplant should come soon...
...problems remain. Transplant surgery is a punishing procedure, and the battery of antirejection drugs a patient must take can cause grueling side effects. If a transplant recipient did become pregnant, the body, already fighting to reject the alien organ, might reject the fetus too. And if the fetus survived, the circulatory problems that caused the Saudi transplant to fail could only get worse during pregnancy, when blood volume increases dramatically...
...sent packing. While it's true that hospitals expect to be reimbursed for services provided to even the neediest and most grievously ill patients, it's not true that they handle things in so mercenary a manner. "That's Hollywood," says Anne Paschke, spokeswoman for the United Network for Organ Sharing. "The fact is, there are a lot of things that would prevent that from happening in the real world...
...even know? These people are called heroes, not victims, and no one debates the ethics of what they do. A larger question, however, is why this dilemma exists in the first place. If enough of us would sign our donor cards and tell our families we want to be organ donors, living donors wouldn't be necessary. PHYLLIS M. GEORGE Clinton, Tenn...
...living-donor transplant works particularly well when an adult donates a modest portion of the liver to a child. Usually only the left lobe of the organ is required, leading to a mortality rate for living donors in the neighborhood of 1 in 500 to 1 in 1,000. But when the recipient is another adult, as much as 60% of the donor's liver has to be removed. "There really is very little margin for error," says Dr. Fung. By way of analogy, he suggests, think of a tree. "An adult-to-child living-donor transplant is like cutting...