Happy new year! As I thought of the fact that the year 2009 has now begun, I thought of the Earth traveling around the sun and how arbitrarily we have decided that one certain point in the Earth’s orbit is when the new year begins. Now, I’ll continue to my actual post. # Have you ever received those emails that have some kind of sweet story with a moral message? I occasionally receive these from my family members and friends. Despite the semi-annoying and too-sugary-sweet nature of these kind of emails, I can still think they’re nice. A while back, a friend of my sent me this type of email. The story went something like this. There was a boy who felt embarrassed by his mother, because she only had one eye. This was his attitude during both childhood and adulthood. He didn’t find out until after she died that she had donated one of her eyes to him after he was in an accident. (He was a baby at the time, so he did not remember this.) The morals of the story seem to be that we should appreciate the selfless things our parents do for us and that we should not judge people based on their appearance. My second reaction to this email was that, while the story was semi-predictable and overly sweet, it was still nice. My first reaction was, This story can’t be true. (I had not been expecting it to be a true story, of course. I’m not saying that a parent would not be willing to sacrifice for a child, but most of these kind of emails that I get are made-up stories with a message, though still semi-realistic. In this case, the fact that it was not true was blatantly obvious.) If the boy had gotten a transplant, he would be on immunosuppressive medication for the rest of his life. A person who receives a transplant from another person must take this type of medication. The recipient’s body will recognize that the organ is a foreign object, and the immune system will attempt to destroy it. These medications suppress the immune system (hence the term "immunosuppressive") so that the organ can function and extend the person’s life. Eventually, the body can "figures out" what’s going on and can start attacking the transplant organ anyway. The transplant can’t last forever. Therefore, there’s almost no way our fictional son could be completely oblivious about the fact that he received a transplant, even if he was a baby at the time. Unless someone was slipping the medication into his food from childhood into adulthood and even after his mother died (which I guess is technically possible, although would be a rather big point to leave out of the story) he almost certainly had to have known about the transplant. As I wrote above, most of these kinds of emails do not contain a true story, but this scientific mistake was easy for me to realize. At the time (during the fall 2008 semester) I was enrolled in a pathophysiology class and we were learning about the immune system. I told the friend (also a pharmacy school student) who sent me the email about my reaction. I was glad that I had actually remembered something from class and was (kind of) applying it to a situation outside of an exam. Maybe being in pharmacy school and taking all these science classes has made me more logical and encouraged me to use some critical thinking. If this is so, I am glad. At the very least, it has given me more knowledge about science than I had before, for which I am also glad. So, in conclusion, it’s good to know that I can appreciate the morals of a story but still logically judge it (based on my admittedly still-limited scientific knowledge) for accuracy. # Bibliography All information about transplants and immunosurppressive medications is from my pathophysiology lectures. I am still a student, so if any of my information (or logic) is incomplete or incorrect, please feel free to tell me. # To all those who value both logical reactions and morals... May the Force be with you. – Jedi Master 713 | 
