In a seventh-floor room in New York City's Mount Sinai Hospital, a 49-year-old man with incurable brain disease lay in a coma one day last week. Alerted that death was hours away, a team of 16 doctors who had been standing by for 48 hours quickly readied two other patients for kidney transplants. First they removed the diseased kidneys of a 16-year-old Manhattan boy and kept him anesthetized on the operating table, the incision in his groin covered with a plastic drape. At the same time, they gave presurgery sedatives to a 48-year-old New Jersey housewife who had lost both...
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