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- <text id=90TT2918>
- <title>
- Nov. 05, 1990: Breath Of Life
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1990
- Nov. 05, 1990 Reagan Memoirs
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- MEDICINE, Page 77
- Breath of Life
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>A mother donates a lung
- </p>
- <p> Mothers routinely make sacrifices for their children, but
- what happened last week was unprecedented. In an extraordinary
- seven-hour operation, doctors at Stanford University Medical
- Center transferred part of a mother's lung to her dying
- 12-year-old daughter. The girl, born prematurely, had long
- suffered from severe scarring of the lung. She had perhaps a
- year to live. Dr. Vaughn Starnes, who performed the operation,
- says the mother, 46, should not notice the loss of one lobe of
- a lung. The lobe is expected to expand to fill the space in the
- daughter's chest created by the removal of the child's right
- lung.
- </p>
- <p> Transplants from living donors have been performed with
- kidneys and parts of the pancreas and liver, but never before
- with a lung. Lungs taken from cadavers are regularly
- transplanted into adults, but for reasons not well understood,
- children's bodies are more likely to reject them. If the new
- procedure proves successful, it may eventually be offered to
- thousands of premature infants with badly damaged lungs.
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-
-