Borrowing Life by Shelley Fraser Mickle

Author:Shelley Fraser Mickle [Mickle, Shelley Fraser]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Charlesbridge
Published: 2020-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

16

“By the Way, This Patient Has an Identical Twin”

AS THE 1950S BEGAN, answers to the workings of the body’s immune system were imminent. So was the fascinating technology of television and how the transmission of beams could connect Americans and people across the globe. In 1948, the organizers of the Republican National Convention hired engineers to put an antenna in a B-29 and send it twenty-five thousand feet above Pittsburgh, from where it transmitted the political event to viewers in nine American cities.

In another three years, a grid of ground cable enabled President Truman’s 1951 speech at the Treaty of Peace with Japan to become the first coast-to-coast television broadcast. Carried by ninety-four stations to forty million viewers, the broadcast opened a new window in American culture. Soon, networks signed up local channels, and the shift from radio to television was on its way.

Charles Woods was buying up radio and television stations. Peter Medawar was publishing his groundbreaking research. Joe Murray was spending hours in the operating room and in his lab. Transplanting kidneys in dogs allowed him to perfect the surgical techniques he would need for a human transplant, while also answering crucial questions of how and where to place a borrowed organ. Franny Moore was digesting the basic science findings, especially Peter’s, toward the dream of transplanting a kidney, realizing that a successful surgery would make medical history at the Brigham. He was also carrying out his own research on wellness care of the surgical patient, pioneering a technique of using radioactive isotopes (a blend of chemical elements) to locate abscesses and tumors. All the while, he was writing chapters in his textbook Metabolic Care of the Surgical Patient, which would be published at the end of the decade.

Franny took note of a curious case in England in 1950, when three five-year-old boys were suspected of having been incorrectly identified in the newborn nursery. Two were thought to be identical twins. To determine their true identities, small patches of skin from each were traded among the three with the assumption that the skin between the identical twins would be accepted perfectly, while the third unrelated child would reject it. This was the first time that skin grafts had been used as a form of establishing identity. And the outcome allowed the boys to be restored to their rightful parents. This case would prove to be vital to the moment when, in only four years, Joe would walk into the operating room to make history by successfully transplanting a kidney. Knowing with little doubt that the donor and recipient were perfect biological matches could mean the difference between failure and a page in history.

Science was the bedrock that the Brigham transplant team was relying on. And that science was adding up.

In 1951, Peter and Billingham lost no time publishing their first findings, authored with colleagues Anderson and Lampkin, in a newly established journal of genetics, Heredity. The article was titled “The use of skin grafting to distinguish between monozygotic and dizygotic twins,” soon to become known as the phenomenon tolerance.

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