I have never personally seen a hand transplant that is more useful than a prosthesis.
I had worked on dogs for a couple of years developing a renal transplant operation. We had dogs running around with kidneys we had transplanted back into themselves.
Within one year of starting work, I had found that the nucleus of an endoderm cell from an advanced tadpole was able to yield some normal development up to the nuclear transplant tadpole stage.
My first attempts to transplant nuclei in Xenopus were completely unsuccessful, because the Xenopus egg, unlike those of other amphibians, is surrounded by an extremely elastic membrane and jelly layer that make penetration by a micropipette impossible.
I was on dialysis for 18 months before the transplant, so it was important I tried to look ahead to days like my comeback this Saturday. You need those big goals to drive you on.
It was in 2003 that I realised there was no choice but to have dialysis treatment - by the time of the World Cup that year, I could barely walk. A year later, I finally had a kidney transplant.
When I got really sick and needed a stem cell transplant, I was fortunate to have a twin sister as the donor.
I am overjoyed that I do not need a heart transplant at this time.
More than 100 people are involved in a transplant operation... and we can't waste time and resources if there is a chance the caretakers aren't up for an awesome responsibility.
The idea of a spiritual heart transplant is a vivid image to me; once you have the heart of somebody else inside you, then that heart is there. Jesus' heart is inside me, and my heart is gone. So if God were to place a stethoscope against my chest, he would hear the heart of Jesus Christ beating.
