My professional experience with transplant teams is that among the medical profession, they are probably the most intensely devoted members.

I cannot imagine the surgeons at either end being less than meticulous in their representations, matching, selection, harvesting, and/or ultimately the transplantations of those organs.

For the donors, the team, and primarily the recipient, hopefully, it all means a longer life in large part spent maintaining those often long-awaited, precious, organ gifts.

It’s tragic, on at least three fronts, when something like this happens.

Jill

According to Quammen’s article, on Earth the “ancien regime” was a world of single cell organisms multiplying wildly and without check. Kind of like cancer in fact.

The modern era in the planet’s history of life began with the rise of the multicellular organisms, where unchecked cell growth could not continue without disrupting the organism. Cellular apoptosis mechanisms developed, and cells would die “for the greater good” of the organism.

The rise of strains of cancer in recent times that can infect organisms by contact, represents the ancien regime making an attempt at a comeback at the cost of us multicellular creatures!

Since all of us salon habitues are card-carrying multicellular organisms this is almost as troubling as the current administration’s attempt at making a comeback of pre-New Deal political economic and legal arrangements.

In both cases, brutal, primitive creatures (bacteria, prokaryotes, Bush, Cheney, etc.) attempt to subvert higher organizations on the evolutionary ladder.