ANDRZEJ KRAUZE
It’s the wee hours of the morning, and Joe Thome, a graduate student studying immunology at Columbia University, gets a text message notifying him that someone has just died. It’s not someone he knows. In fact, he’ll never know who it is. The deceased was an organ donor who, in addition to opting to donate life-giving organs for transplantation, donated tissues for research.
Each year in the New York City metropolitan area, about 60 organ donors bequeath to scientists organs and tissues that can’t be transplanted into patients. Several times a month, at all hours of the night, Thome and the rest of immunologist Donna Farber’s lab at Columbia University receive messages advising them that some of those tissues will soon be arriving in the ...
