Johns Hopkins surgeons perform world's first male genital transplant

I'm not saying this to make light of the situation; my point is that I would expect the risk of suicide caused by this kind of injury to make such a surgery of medical importance. Compare, for example, that several governing bodies consider gender reassignment surgery to be of medical necessity for transgender individuals who want to transition because of the dramatic reduction in suicide.

There are serious shortcomings in veterans' care when returning from combat, and we shouldn't regard any of it as "elective". Spending significantly more resources on veteran care might also help some countries reconsider the costs of war before engaging in it.

For a good book on the subject, read "What It Is Like To Go To War", by Karl Marlantes.

This is what "support the troops" should mean.

I got the chance to film alongside ESPN using experimental cameras and technology that I've pioneered, and didn't request payment (just all expenses covered). Gaining networking contacts at ESPN and on-air mentions of the tech are worth far more than I could reasonably bill, and in the case of billing them, you lose out on extracting favors for doing it for "free."

Being a good business operator requires not relying on platitudes you hear from the freelancing community.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17979010

Not only do we have philosophical, logical, and biological contributors affecting this, but "society" and "culture" can have logical and biological components as well. From a purely philosophical standpoint, what if I had come to the conclusion that a part of myself would live on through my children, and I am in despair at the lost opportunity to do do so? From a biological standpoint, I have lost access to one of life's greatest pleasures, but am also subject to the same physical drives without any release.

Now to expand that to "society," what fault is it of a partner who similarly has a philosophical drive towards procreation, or a biological desire for certain pleasure?

Some things just are blamelessly tragic, I'm sorry to let you know.

'medicine' will decide what it wants.

The other thing: they may actually plan to do those transplants down the line, but there's no sense in doing them if the scrotum fails to take.

https://www.parsemus.org/projects/calcium-chloride/

Two intratesticular or intraepididymal shots are far cheaper and so much less invasive than two surgeries.

I've personally been attacked a few times on HN as transphobic for trying to talk about women's issues and my personal problems as a woman in a man's world. My experience suggests the trans community frequently takes approaches that are openly and unnecessarily hostile.

I also spent 9 months being very supportive of a MTF trans youth met through HN whose life was in serious crisis at the time. Several other members of HN are well aware of the support I provided her. None of them ever stepped forward in my defense during the time when I was being repeatedly randomly attacked as supposedly transphobic.

The MTF individual in question was incredibly ugly to me during the months that I was supportive. Every single personal problem I had as a divorced single mom, problems very typical of divorced single moms, was dismissed as me being incompetent, not wanting success badly enough, etc.

I got badly burned for being sympathetic and supportive. I have reason to believe this individual still has the ear of powerful people and there is evidence they are still telling lies about me and dragging my name through the mud.

If my experience is at all representative, then your description of the problem space doesn't begin to capture the issue.

I can't source it and it is not a study/statistics, but I did see a piece once on a Black American with a brain injury in a coma who was declared dead and then their organs were promptly harvested. The article suggested the patient could have recovered from their brain injury with proper care and that a well off white person with the same injury would have gotten the care they needed to recover instead of being declared dead and then essentially parted out.

It's a pretty macabre scenario. It's a question most people don't want to ask. Organ transplants get hyped a lot as miraculous and entirely positive events.

I used to belong to a number of cystic fibrosis lists. CF accounts for about a third of adult lung transplants and about half of all pediatric lung transplants in the US. I have seen plenty of discussions by family members, recipients or other concerned parties about things like being listed and waiting for a donor, as well as stories of people dying slowly from rejection.

So I have thought long and hard about this and I have my misgivings about "heroic medicine," such as insanely expensive drugs (one new-ish CF drug costs about $250k-$300k annually) and organ transplants.

The patient who received a new penis may not have gone through this, but one of the things that horrifies me about transplants is that, once you are listed, you essentially sit around hoping that a young, healthy person who is a tissue match dies tragically in the prime of their life in an accident so that you get a second shot at life. If your condition is deadly, you have been listed because you are basically dying. So you sit there hoping someone dies fairly soon. I can't imagine what that does to someone psychologically.

However, my father and my ex were both career army. The military has a very long association with experimental medicine and this relationship is more responsible for medical advances than people realize. I'm extremely sympathetic to this story in part because he's a veteran.

Returning to the question of studies, I do recall a blurb about Puerto Rico being a major source of organs for transplant. The article went into some of the reasons for that, though I don't recall any of the details. You could try looking for info on that angle and see where it leads you.