I'm a Transplant Surgeon Who Designed the Breakthrough That Saved My Own Life

I'm a Transplant Surgeon Who Designed the Breakthrough That Saved My Own Life

Dr. Robert Montgomery, the director of NYU Langone's Transplant Institute, is ironically the recipient of a heart transplant.



[Ed. Note: This is the fourth episode in our Moonshot series, which explores four cutting-edge scientific developments that stand to fundamentally transform our world.]

Kira Peikoff

Kira Peikoff was the editor-in-chief of Leaps.org from 2017 to 2021. As a journalist, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Nautilus, Popular Mechanics, The New York Academy of Sciences, and other outlets. She is also the author of four suspense novels that explore controversial issues arising from scientific innovation: Living Proof, No Time to Die, Die Again Tomorrow, and Mother Knows Best. Peikoff holds a B.A. in Journalism from New York University and an M.S. in Bioethics from Columbia University. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two young sons. Follow her on Twitter @KiraPeikoff.

Portrait of a teen giving thumbs up after getting vaccinated and showing bandage on her arm
Adobe Stock/Yashvi

Every weekend since January, pediatrician Cora Collette Breuner has volunteered to give the COVID-19 vaccine to individuals from age 12 to 96 in an underserved community in Washington state.

Even though the COVID-19 vaccines have been shown to be incredibly safe and effective, there's still quite a bit of hesitancy among parents to vaccinate their teenage children, says Breuner, an adolescent medicine specialist at Seattle Children's Hospital and a past chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics' Committee on Adolescence. "They have questions and they have questions," she says.

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Susan Kreimer
Susan Kreimer is a New York-based freelance journalist who has followed the landscape of health care since the late 1990s, initially as a staff reporter for major daily newspapers. She writes about breakthrough studies, personal health, and the business of clinical practice. Raised in the Chicago area, she holds a B.A. in Journalism/Mass Communication and French, with minors in German and Russian, from the University of Iowa and an M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Security workers with detection dogs walking in airport terminal

Security workers walk with detection dogs in an airport terminal.

Viacheslav Lakobchuk/Adobe Stock

Asher is eccentric and inquisitive. He loves an audience, likes keeping busy, and howls to be let through doors. He is a six-year-old working Cocker Spaniel, who, with five other furry colleagues, has now been trained to sniff body odor samples from humans to detect COVID-19 infections.

As the Delta variant and other new versions of the SARS-CoV-2 virus emerge, public health agencies are once again recommending masking while employers contemplate mandatory vaccination. While PCR tests remain the "gold standard" of COVID-19 tests, they can take hours to flag infections. To accelerate the process, scientists are turning to a new testing tool: sniffer dogs.

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Puja Changoiwala
Puja Changoiwala is an award-winning journalist and author based in Mumbai. She writes about the intersections of gender, crime, technology, social justice and human rights in India. She tweets @cpuja.