(from the New York Times) BALTIMORE, Aug. 1 — Jeremy Weiser-Warschoff, 13, met Paul Boissiere, a soft-spoken 30-year-old electrical engineer from Trinidad, for the first time today, even though they had been linked for the last five days by Jeremy's newly implanted kidney, which Paul had donated. The web of connections had actually been a lot more complicated than that. In return for Mr. Boissiere's kidney, a friend of Jeremy's family donated a kidney to Tracey Stahl, a very ill mother of two from Johnston, Pa. And Mrs. Stahl's sister, Connie Dick of Latrobe, Pa., gave her kidney to Mr. Boissiere's seriously ailing fiancée, Germaine Allum, who is from Trinidad. The triple-swap kidney transplant operation was announced in a news conference today at the Johns Hopkins Comprehensive Transplant Center, which said it believed that this was the first time three simultaneous kidney transplants have been performed. Other transplant experts said they had not heard of another three-way exchange in the nation. Months in the making, the exchange was the only way all three recipients could have received a kidney, the lead surgeon, Dr. Robert A. Montgomery, said, because of tissue, blood or antibody incompatibilities among the donors and their originally designated recipients. Many patients arrive at the Baltimore center only to discover that a person who is willing to donate a kidney is not suitable, Johns Hopkins has found. With 55,000 people on the national waiting list for a kidney, the United Network for Organ Sharing said, and only about 25 percent a year likely to get a transplant, Johns Hopkins said it was trying to explore novel ways of matching organ donors and recipients. Dr. Montgomery, who directs the Johns Hopkins incompatible-transplant program, said the center has created a "matchmaker system that attempts to pair all of our incompatible donors and recipients."
