Med Student Rescues Body Part From Airport Security

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/06/19/155301289/med-student-rescues-body-part-from-airport-security

by colinprince • 14 years ago

108 39 14 years ago

andos• 14 years ago

I was reading this like any other ordinary story. Then I got to this part:

    Amazingly, he doesn't do transplants anymore. 
    Tracheas, he has decided, can be regenerated 
    from scratch, using stem cells.

It brought tears to my eyes. No amount of bad news can weaken the beauty contained in that little paragraph. This made my day, really.

timr4• 14 years ago

There are so many angles to this story that involve the tension between the forces of conservative thinking, and innovators who are trying to make the world a better place. Ignore the idiotic airport security problem, and you're still left with an amazing, improbable story about the world-changing consequences of an emerging technology that religious luddites keep trying to destroy.

Only a few short years ago, our society was getting its collective panties in a knot over the ethics of stem cell research. The US president made a strong movement to kill that research in the womb (pardon the pun). At the time, nobody could convincingly enumerate the medical benefits of the work...because it was research. Now we're synthesizing body parts. Amazing. How many years of human life will be saved? There's no upper limit. "Pro-life", indeed.

Save this story, and use it the next time you're in an argument with someone who wants to stop pure intellectual exploration in the name of vague, supernatural objections.

(Edit: Yes, these particular organs are being synthesized from adult stem cells, not embryonic stem cells. But it's a distinction without a difference -- we cannot predict what advancements or understanding will come from any given line of research. The argument is greater than the adjective.)

Turing_Machine4• 14 years ago

These aren't embryonic stem cells. No one has a problem with adult stem cells (well, I suppose the folks who refuse all forms of medical treatment might).

iwwr• 14 years ago

We are starting to see glimpses of the hidden costs of airport security. Consider just that by discouraging flight, more people end up dead on the (vastly more) insecure roads.

vacri2• 14 years ago

Strange that the article title refers to a bit of high drama rather than "we can make replacement tracheas from scratch now!"

marquis• 14 years ago

It is a sad day that speaks volumes about the world we live in now, that we encounter an article on such an important, ground-breaking topic, and it's titled 'Airport security refuses transport'.

tvon2• 14 years ago

When was the world not like this?

mikeash2• 14 years ago

It's possible to have multiple news articles concentrating on different aspects of the same event. I bet there are other articles out there that concentrate on the medical research. Not everything out there has to cover only the most important stuff.

jgamman• 14 years ago

i think there's a lesson here in risk management. the obviously brilliant doctor failed to put care and attention into the mundane delivery part of the process. there are no small details. Jet Star is a low price, zero premium service. for the cash/time invested, they should have being going business class with a premium airline, a signed piece of letterhead and if possible, hired an airline rep to walk them in one airport and out the other. someone's life hung on the balance of a student knowing a pilot...

beambot• 14 years ago

To quote, "That done, Birchall's team booked the only direct flight from Bristol to Barcelona, operated by an airline called easyJet." Thus, your "business class with a premium airline" doesn't (appear) to have been feasible.

teamonkey• 14 years ago

Bristol is only 2 hours drive from London.

tokenadult• 14 years ago

Previous submission, no comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4135224

(Neither this nor the previous submission submitted the canonical URL, which helps the HN duplicated detector do its job.)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4111691

catch23• 14 years ago

I hadn't seen it before. Reposts are not necessarily bad, if there are no comments, nobody saw the post, thus a repost is necessary. Perhaps the de-dup mechanism shouldn't incorporate comment-less posts as part of its data set.

adventureful• 14 years ago

The stem cell century accelerates.

kba• 14 years ago

Med student rescues body part? More like German pilot.

kristianp• 14 years ago

Or Med student who knows the right person.

sp3322• 14 years ago

This is what highly-connected networks of ridiculously rich and privileged people are actually good for!

ajb2• 14 years ago

The security professions need to learn a lesson which doctors have understood for some time now: treating everyone for a rare threat does more harm than good.

Suppose there is a drug which prevents heart attacks, but due to side effects, rare reactions, or just plain error, causes damage to a small proportion of people. If you have a 50% chance of a heart attack, taking it would be a good bet. But giving the same drug to everyone would be a medical disaster. Any treatment you give to a broad population had better be extraordinarily safe. The rarer the threat you are trying to address, the more easily you can do more harm than good.

Terrorism is rare.

sausagefeet• 14 years ago

I think there is a flip side of it too:

Fliers need to make it clear that they are OK with the fact that if they want to be treated better, security will not catch all security risks.

ajb2• 14 years ago

Yes and no. Think of it this way: if you have a graph of security against cost, there is a line which represents possible tradeoffs of best security for a given cost. You are saying, we need to think about where we want to be on the line. I don't think we are even on the line.

shod• 14 years ago

That's true when the risks outweigh the benefits, but it's not always true otherwise: we vaccinate everyone against smallpox to -keep- it rare!

Unfortunately, the cost of removing this sort of security theater as a deterrent is invisible and hypothetical, whereas the benefits are obvious.

nacker• 14 years ago

"The security professions need to learn a lesson which doctors have understood for some time now: treating everyone for a rare threat does more harm than good."

Nanny states need to learn this principle too: "First do no harm".

Med Student Rescues Body Part From Airport Security

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