The countdown started around midnight at Baltimore's University of Maryland Hospital. At that hour doctors began the delicate task of removing the heart and lungs from a 32-year-old victim of a car accident declared brain dead several hours earlier. Working swiftly, they excised the organs, chilled them to 45 degrees F and transported them across town to Johns Hopkins Hospital. Clinton House, 28, a refrigeration mechanic whose lungs were ravaged by cystic fibrosis, had been summoned from his home and was being wheeled into the operating room. He had waited a year for this moment. In a room ten yards away,...
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