Breath Of Life

Mothers routinely make sacrifices for their children, but what happened last week was unprecedented. In an extraordinary seven-hour operation, doctors at Stanford University Medical Center transferred part of a mother's lung to her dying 12-year-old daughter. The girl, born prematurely, had long suffered from severe scarring of the lung. She had perhaps a year to live. Dr. Vaughn Starnes, who performed the operation, says the mother, 46, should not notice the loss of one lobe of a lung. The lobe is expected to expand to fill the space in the daughter's chest created by the removal of the child's right lung.

Transplants from living donors have been performed with kidneys and parts of the pancreas and liver, but never before with a lung. Lungs taken from cadavers are regularly transplanted into adults, but for reasons not well understood, children's bodies are more likely to reject them. If the new procedure proves successful, it may eventually be offered to thousands of premature infants with badly damaged lungs.