‘I was saying I’m tormented constantly by my situation.’ She addressed her co-patients imploringly, her temper receding. ‘You all know what I go through. I have Miss Dudzinski’s anxieties. What should I do? What is right? If I stop, Mr. Zane will be fired. I know that. He’ll be shattered. If I go on-well, I feel sinful. I lie awake nights, night after night, and ask myself all the questions. Am I being disloyal to Mr. Zane? Or am I truly helping him at great sacrifice? I pray to the Lord, and pray someday He will answer me. Heavens knows, I don’t enjoy the act that much. I can see Mr. Ring smirking-but I don’t, you all believe me. I’m exhausted. I have five children and a husband, too-and his boss, every night. I’ll give you an example. Let me tell you what happened last night-’

John Garrett knew that Mrs. Zane had done what he had intended to do-interrupt so that she might have the floor. His admiration was mingled with annoyance. He was impatient with Mrs. Zane’s prolific and perspiring acrobatics, and her secret pleasures and atoning guilts, and he wanted to voice the exigency of his own immediate problem. He glanced at his watch once more. There were thirty-four minutes remaining to the session. He hoped that Mrs. Zane’s indulgence of the night before had been brief, silent, hedonistic, but he doubted it.

Waiting his turn, he thought back to how he had got into this damn group thing. It had begun with the increasing periods of depression and the persistent headaches, of course, the pressures against his forehead and the back of his skull coming daily with regularity, intruding on his achievement, and work, and home life. He had seen his physician, and subsequently an ear man, and then a neurologist, and suffered all the tests, but nothing pathological had been indicated. At last, upon the suggestion of his physician, he had reluctantly called upon a psychoanalyst in Pasadena.

There had been three months on the couch, ridiculous and wasted. Then, one morning, the psychoanalyst had recommended analytic group psychotherapy. The reasons given for this suggested change, which Garrett found senseless, were that persons like him, who hated and retreated from social contacts, who performed poorly in social situations, could most benefit by group therapy. Moreover, Garrett learned, his hostility towards the psychoanalyst (an extension of his ancient resentment of his father, whom his mother had worshipped and to whom she had given all her time), made person-to-person therapy difficult. Garrett learned that, attached to a group whose members suffered similar hostilities and anxieties, his anger might be modified, and that more progress might be made. The Pasadena psychoanalyst had then suggested that a Dr. Keller, of Los Angeles, was one of the best men in the field. And so, after an undecided week, Garrett had joined the group.

True, with the months of group psychotherapy, despite his shame at the public exposure, and the frustrations of competing with others for time and Dr. Keller’s attention and approval, the head pressures had become more irregular, sometimes disappearing for several days in succession. But the source of the headaches still remained a partial mystery to him. Despite Dr. Keller’s occasional remarks to the contrary, Garrett chose to believe that his discomfort had started with the entrance of Dr. Carlo Farelli into his life.

Certainly, in the period before the advent of Farelli, John Garrett had reached a peak of personal happiness, a summit of satisfaction, that he had never dreamed of attaining. Now, daydreaming in Dr. Keller’s office, he had no trouble slipping backward into the recent past, to the events that led to his triumph and the event that led to its decline and fall. You pushed a button in memory, and lo, you slid back…

He was, he knew (for now he could afford a certain candour with himself), a drab, colourless and withdrawn research workhorse in the Rosenthal Medical Centre in Pasadena. He possessed the degrees, and the knowledge and techniques that had earned him the degrees, but he was neither imaginative nor creative. Nothing about him soared. A thousand colleagues would have agreed that his epitaph would one day be one word: competent.

Yet, for some inexplicable emotional reason, he became interested in a dramatic phase of medicine-that which dealt with tissue transplantation, the technique of replacing the missing or damaged parts of a human being’s body with new parts. Mulling over old medical journals, Garrett learned that the field was not a new one. Almost two thousand years before, a Hindu surgeon, Suśruta, had used cheek skin to help create new noses for his patients. In more recent times, in 1870 to be exact, Dr. J. L. Reverdin, of Paris had introduced modern free skin grafting. Early in the twentieth century, Dr. Charles Guthrie, of St. Louis, had successfully grafted the head of a donor dog to join the head of a host dog, thereby fashioning a two-headed canine.

To Garrett, in his earliest enthusiasm, it appeared that anything was possible in this field. But not until he left his reading, and participated in actual experiments, did he fully realize the nature of the obstacle that hindered progress. The obstacle was not in surgery, where advance in techniques had been sufficient to make possible the replacement of an old, dying organ in the human body with a new, living organ. The obstacle was biochemical. As a self-defence against germs, the human body threw up an immunological barrier that not only warded off invading diseases but also destroyed foreign tissues that might be helpful.

Once he perceived the problem, Garrett devoted more and more of his energies and time to studying it. Figuratively, Saralee became a widow, and the children orphans, due to his work. Where colleagues were satisfied with eight hours given to research, Garrett was not satisfied with twelve or fourteen or sixteen hours. The medical laboratory became his Santa Maria, Pinta, Niña rolled into one, and he was as single-minded in his exploration as had been their admiral.

Soon, he was sated with knowledge of the human body’s rejection or immunity mechanism. This was the reticulo-endothelial system. It consisted of antibodies and powerful white cells known as lymphocytes in the blood that protected man by killing off bacteria, viruses, or any strange or foreign cells that entered the body. This rejection mechanism was everyman’s friend, but Garrett came to regard it as his personal enemy. For if the rejection mechanism warded off diseased cells, it also murdered healthy new cells, since it could not tell the difference. This, then, was the difficulty. If a man were dying for want of new kidneys, or small intestines, or lungs, or heart, you could not transplant a fresh vital organ for the old, because the rejection mechanism, antagonistic to foreign tissue, would murder it-and its host.

The rejection mechanism became Garrett’s target. And what confirmed his aim were the exceptions to the rule. Toiling side by side with his colleagues in the Medical Centre, he found that transplants of pieces of artery, sections of bone, the cornea of the eye were long-practised grafts that had nothing to do with the rejection mechanism. A new cornea in place of an old one survived because antibodies and assaulting white cells could not get at it. As to transplanted blood vessels and bones, they did not need to survive for they were merely scaffolding across which normal host tissue could grow.

What interested Garrett even more was another exception to the rejection mechanism. There had been case after case of successful organ transplantation in identical twins. Chemically, identical twins were the same person. They emerged from the same fertilized egg. Their tissues were not foreign to each other. A kidney from one identical twin could be grafted into his ailing brother, and it would endure, because the rejection mechanism would not recognize it and would leave it alone. But the moment that the same transplantation was tried on non-identical human beings, the kidney, or any other organ, would die.