Good example of journalistic storytelling, delaying the ending of the story a bit to keep you reading, without appearing to be deliberately coy. (We know from the headline that the story ends happily.)
This is a medical container. Inside is a trachea, a carefully constructed human windpipe, seeded with 60 million stem cells from a very sick woman in Barcelona. We have just 16 hours to get it into her body. We pre-arranged this.
We have no record of your request, said the airline.
You do have a record, said the professor. There’s a woman in Barcelona right now who needs this, and we are running out of time. It took us five months to create this organ. It is the first of its kind. We must board this plane.
Sometimes, leaps in medical science require an agreeable security guard, and on this day in 2008, he wasn’t playing.
