Scripting News: Love and technology

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

Love and technology

Here's a great story...

Dave Jacobs is PKD survivor, a hereditary disease that destroys the kidneys. Both Dave and his sister Cher received kidney transplants in 2004. His younger brother, Brant, died from the disease. Dave has three sons and is raising his nephew -- each of these boys have a 50 percent chance of having inherited the disease. So the Jacobs family is very well motivated to solve this problem.

Dave is healthy again, really -- you should see the guy, it's a real miracle. We go out to eat, go to baseball games, take long walks, and kid each other about stuff that doesn't matter, and cheer each other on as we go forward. And Dave is doing some amazing stuff, which I want to tell you about today.

His new company, Silverstone Solutions, has developed software that automates something that used to be done informally, manually and inefficiently, and the result is new kidneys for people who, without them, would likely die. Here's how the system works.

Suppose you have a friend or relative who wants to donate a kidney to you, but for some reason that kidney isn't transplantable in your body (wrong blood type, for example). So you register with your hospital, and they enter your data into the Silverstone software. Another person has a friend with a kidney that's incompatible for them, but works for you. And suppose your friend's kidney works for them. Bingo. Two people survive where before none would. The software of course can handle three-way combinations, and so on.

They've spent a couple of years getting it to work, and have signed their first customer, California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. And today, Valentine's Day, they performed their first transplant.

There's no doubt that Big Dave survived his disease to find his purpose in life, to combine technology and knowledge with medicine and love, to save lives. I'm proud to know Dave, and honored to be among the first to tell this story.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:00:30 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

Jan Mar