- Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW-Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Public Radio, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight it's my pleasure to introduce to you Josh Mezrich. He's with the Department of Surgery here at UW-Madison. He was born in Princeton, New Jersey. He went to Princeton Day School for high school, and then he went to Princeton University and studied Russian. Then he went and got his MD degree at Cornell University Medical College in New York City, then went to the University of Chicago for a residency, back to Boston at Mass General for a research fellowship, back to the University of Chicago to finish up his residency, and then he came here in 2005 for a transplant fellowship and then went on the staff at the hospital and the faculty here at the School of Medicine and Public Health in 2007. Tonight he gets to talk with us about the kidney, which is the second most important part of my body, the bladder being the first.  [laughing]  Thank you. If you can fix that, let me know.  - We can't transplant it but--  - Darn it. Pretty cool thing tonight. We get to talk about kidney transplants and kidney transplants from live donors. So the topic for Josh's talk is: Can Everybody be a Hero: The Beauty of the Paired Kidney Exchange. Please join me in welcoming Josh Mezrich to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.  [applauding]   - Great. Thank you so much. Can you guys hear me? Great. It's great to be here. And I was going to talk about the evolution of the chicken, but, luckily, I decided not to. And Tom has actually volunteered to donate his kidney on stage.  [laughing]  So those in the front row, you may want to--  [laughing]  No, I'm just kidding. So I know my talk was about paired exchange, but I'm actually going to use you guys to help me in a way and talk about a little bit more than that. And I think it's going to be a lot of fun and very interesting. And we will go over paired exchange, but we don't necessarily need a whole hour for that or 50 minutes for that. So I think transplant surgery is really incredibly amazing, and I think it's amazing for a number of reasons. But one of the reasons is that in the '40s nobody thought transplant could ever happen. In the '50s, just a few crazy people thought it was possible. By the '60s, those crazy people were actually having successes. And by '83, with the approval of Cyclosporine, transplant became a field with really good outcomes and has only gotten better. So when you think about it, it's a really short period of time. I've been fascinated by this for a long time, and somewhere in 2011 I read the book Emperor of All Maladies. Now, perhaps some of you read that wonderful book by Siddhartha Mukherjee, a book about the history of cancer, mostly the, well, cancer. He had recently graduated from an oncology fellowship, and he used his patients' stories to then jump back and tell the history of cancer. And he's a beautiful writer. He won a Pulitzer Prize and has gone on to write other books, The Gene. He writes for The New Yorker. But I was reading that book and it was a real epiphany for me. I said I'm going to do this for transplant because I think the story of transplant is so amazing and a lot of the pioneers are still alive or at least when I started thinking about it. Some of them have died in the last few years. And I started thinking about how I would do this. And I decided I would write a book that described both my coming of age as a surgeon and the stories of my patients, donors and recipients, and try and tell the story of transplant. And in that, I would travel around to all the pioneers and spend time with them to try and make the, understand how amazing it was what they did and to use me, a mere mortal, to show how hard it was what they did against all odds. And I spent three or four years working on this, was able to get an agent and sell it, and actually just had it, it's just accepted by HarperCollins. It's finished. Although I don't have a pub date yet. So I thought I would start talking about it now so that you'll all buy it.  [laughing]  That's not really true, but it's been sort of my passion, along with my surgery and my basic science, and I'm very excited to talk about it. One of the things that I think is amazing about transplant is our donors. Our donors are our heroes. Without donors there would be no transplant. Donors are living and deceased, and we're going to talk about both today. And I had my very first exposure to what I like to call taking from death, or seeing what death can provide to the living, in my second year of med school when I started working for the skin bank. It was called the New York Firefighters Skin Bank. And I was a medical student but I had this as a side job, and we would drive around to hospitals all around the tri-state area where patients were organ donors. And then after the procurement of the organs, we would then harvest the skin. And we would take the skin for burn victims to be used as temporary coverage until enough coverage from their own body could be used. And I was young at this point. I didn't