Tough Decisions Regarding...Organ Donation and Transplantation
||Bert Thompson, Ph.D. Brad Harrub, Ph.D. Fifty years ago, there
was no controversy. If someone’s organs were failing, either
from disease or poor genetic endowment, the only hope was
medicinal therapy. Prior to modern-day transplant procedures,
surgical interventions focused primarily on replacing limbs or
teeth—although success rates were dismal at best. During the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of
animal organs were transplanted into humans—but without success.
But the seed took root. The first reliable report of transplant
surgery is from 1823, when German surgeon Carl Bunger performed
plastic surgery on a woman’s nose by grafting skin from her
thigh. In 1906, Austrian ophthalmologist Edward Zim performed
the first corneal transplant, paving the way for surgeons to use
dead or donated material. But the major breakthrough occurred in
1954 when two medical doctors, Joseph Murray and David Hume,
performed the first succes