A very thin but familiarly-dressed Steve Jobs took the stage this afternoon at Apple’s “It’s Only Rock and Roll” product launch event. Jobs, making his first major appearance in over a year, was met with an enthusiastic round of applause that lasted over a minute. “I’m very happy to be here today with you all,” he said, before explaining that he’d had a liver transplant and encouraging the audience to “elect to become organ donors.” Jobs announced in January that he was taking a medical leave of absence, saying then that his “health-related issues are more complex than [he] originally thought.” He had been diagnosed in 2004 with pancreatic cancer, but the exact details of his recent illness have not been disclosed. A transcript of his opening remarks is after the jump.
“As some of you might now, about five months ago, I had a liver transplant. I now have the liver of a mid-20s person, who died in a car crash and was generous enough to donate their organs. And I wouldn’t be here without such generosity. So, I hope all of us can be as generous and elect to become organ donors.
“I’d like to take a moment and thank everybody in the Apple community for the heartfelt support i got, too. It really meant a lot. I’d aslo like to especially thank Tim Cook and the entire executive team at Apple. They really rose to the occasion and ran the company very ably in that difficult period. So thank you guys, and let’s give them a round of applause.
“So. I’m vertical, I’m back at Apple, loving every day of it, and I’m getting to work with our incredibly talented teams to come up with some great new products for you all in the future. So it’s wonderful. Thank you.”
– additional reporting by Elizabeth Livengood
Photo credit: Robert Galbraith/Landov
I am glad that an innovator of the caliber of Steve Jobs has a chance at extending his life. We are witnessing advanced medicine at its best with the ability to transplant a liver. The availability of organs is considered a “very scarce medical interventions such as organs” as defined by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel (see summary below). Under Dr. Emanuel’s recommended model the “complete lives system” of allocation of scarce medical resources I doubt that Steve Jobs would have had the opportunity to get a liver. From the Lancet, “When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.”
The Lancet, Pages 423 – 431, 31 January 2009;
Principles for allocation of scarce medical interventions
Govind Persad BS a, Alan Wertheimer PhD a, Ezekiel J Emanuel MD
“Allocation of very scarce medical interventions such as organs and vaccines is a persistent ethical challenge. We evaluate eight simple allocation principles that can be classified into four categories: treating people equally, favouring the worst-off, maximising total benefits, and promoting and rewarding social usefulness. No single principle is sufficient to incorporate all morally relevant considerations and therefore individual principles must be combined into multiprinciple allocation systems. We evaluate three systems: the United Network for Organ Sharing points systems, quality-adjusted life-years, and disability-adjusted life-years. We recommend an alternative system—the complete lives system—which prioritises younger people who have not yet lived a complete life, and also incorporates prognosis, save the most lives, lottery, and instrumental value principles.”
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