Medical Muddle
Don’t blame the University of Chicago, responded Whitington, director of pediatric transplant services at the University of Chicago Medical Center. We intended to keep the lid on until we’d finished the operation, and then issue a press release. But the Smith family saw fit to stir up publicity back home in San Antonio and the wires picked up the story.
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We did give two journalists permission to be present at the operation, the doctor added. Two men with gleaming credentials: the Tribune’s Jeff Lyon and Channel Five’s Barry Kaufman. Lyon is a lay member of the medical center’s Pediatric Ethics Committee, which examines the ethical dimensions of new clinical procedures. The living-donor transplant was one of those procedures, and Lyon wanted to write a Tribune magazine article about the medical and philosophical steps leading up to the actual operation. Kaufman has maintained a close relationship with the university’s liver transplant team since it was established in 1984. A few years ago he helped two mourning parents establish the Johnny Genna Foundation, which helps underwrite the training of doctors in the treatment of liver disease. The foundation’s medical director is Dr. Peter Whitington.
“I’m not going to apologize for getting an exclusive,” Lyon told us. “That’s my job.” He’d known months before the actual operation that the medical center was preparing to do a living donor transplant.
Wolinsky said Easton had told him “a news embargo had been arranged so that only certain reporters and news organizations–selected by the physicians involved–would have access to the Smiths, donor-recipient family, and U. of C. physicians.
The day before the operation, Kaufman called Easton. In light of the AP story, Wolinsky’s piece a few days earlier, and the Arlington Heights Herald article, the embargo was meaningless, Kaufman reasoned. So he wanted to run his interview with the parents that night. Kaufman told us, “I indicated if I waited until Monday night [after the operation] it’d be pretty moot what I had.
