"Jiigsaw Woman" re-assembled (with apologies to Larry Nive..

This old news, from March this year, got me thinking of Larry Niven's
story, "Patchwork Girl". (Was that the name?)

Gist of procedure:
o Remove a bunch of abdominal organs.
o Remove tumor.
o Repair damage to blood vessels.
o Replace organs.

Found the article [1] via google [2] after seeing a mention in Ripley's
"believe it or don't" comic [3].

Was this reported in the "real" news, and I just missed it? The battle
between the Tweedles seeking their parties' presidential nominations
might have crowded it out. Or might have missed it because I was
listening to books on tape instead of radio news, basically my sole
source of MSM news these days. -Eric

[1] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23782222/
[2]
http://search.netscape.com/search/search?query=brooke%20zepp%20organs%20tumor
[3] http://www.comics.com/comics/ripleys/archive/ripleys-20080705.html

--
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In article ,
Eric S. Harris wrote:
>This old news, from March this year, got me thinking of Larry Niven's
>story, "Patchwork Girl". (Was that the name?)
>
>Gist of procedure:
>o Remove a bunch of abdominal organs.
>o Remove tumor.
>o Repair damage to blood vessels.
>o Replace organs.
>
>Found the article [1] via google [2] after seeing a mention in Ripley's
>"believe it or don't" comic [3].
>
>Was this reported in the "real" news, and I just missed it? The battle
>between the Tweedles seeking their parties' presidential nominations
>might have crowded it out. Or might have missed it because I was
>listening to books on tape instead of radio news, basically my sole
>source of MSM news these days. -Eric

Well, it's news to me. OTOH it reminds me of what I always
thought the people in _Bug Jack Barron_ *should* have done.
Remove glands from patient, irradiate glands, return to patient;
patient gains longevity.

Instead, because Spinrad wanted to make the evildoers as evil as
humanly possible and put his protagonist in as untenable a state
as he could manage,


.... note merely spoiler, but squick alert ....























.... the evildoers would buy poor black children from their
impoverished parents; irradiate them with something that would
upgrade their glands* but cause terminal cancer in the rest of
their bodies; remove the glands, leaving the kids to die at their
own convenience; transplant the glands into rich old white men
who would thereby gain near-immortality. When the evildoers
found the protagonist was on their tail, they kidnapped him and
fitted him out with a new set of glands of his own, thus making
him an accessory after the fact, sort of.

*Which glands, AFAIR, was never specified. The protagonist
imagines them as evil vile things dripping green secretions, but
in fact most glands are pale pinkish or white blobs (the name is
from Latin _glans_, "almond") that don't drip anything
noticeable. Another example of what happens to SF writers who
try to base stories off a realm of science about which they know
little or noting: in this case, biology.

Dorothy J. Heydt
Vallejo, California
djheydt.DeleteThis@kithrup.com