The Excerpt Podcast: Man receives world's first eye transplant

On today's episode of The Excerpt podcast: USA TODAY Health Reporter Karen Weintraub explains how a man received a major face and eye transplant. Israel agrees to daily four-hour pauses to combat operations in Gaza. Sen. Joe Manchin will not run for reelection. USA TODAY Personal Finance Reporter Daniel de Visé breaks down the new IRS campaign to increase audits of high-income Americans. Watch Dua Lipa's new single.

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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Taylor Wilson:

Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson. And today is Friday, November 10th, 2023. This is The Excerpt, formerly 5 Things. Today, how a face and eye transplant changed a man's life. Plus, Israel agrees to daily pauses in the Gaza assault. And Senator Joe Manchin has made a major announcement about his future.

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Happy Friday. We're going to start today's show with some good news for a change, the story of a man who got a new face and a new lease on life. I spoke with USA Today health reporter Karen Weintraub for more. Karen, always a pleasure to have you on.

Karen Weintraub:

Great to be here.

Taylor Wilson:

So Karen, would you just tell us a little about Aaron James and this terrible accident he had?

Karen Weintraub:

He was a high voltage worker, high voltage lineman. He was up on a line. I think he was actually in a basket and they were moving the basket up, and with his left side of his face touched a live wire. 7,200 volts of electricity shot through him. Would've killed most people, frankly. He was in a coma for a while, but managed to survive, had to learn how to walk again. A terrible, terrible accident. But pretty quickly, they started talking about doing a face transplant on him. He had burned off most of the skin on particularly the left side of his face, the left eye. He lost most of his left arm, which was his dominant arm.

And they started talking about the possibility of doing a face transplant. And he was committed pretty much from the beginning. There is a high risk here. It was not a guarantee that it would work.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about the science behind this type of transplant? He gets a new eye as well as a part of it. How exactly did this work?

Karen Weintraub:

To some degree, face transplants are the same as other transplants. It's a lot of immunosuppressive drugs, which can be risky. There's also always a chance of rejection. At NYU, they said they've not had anybody who's had a face transplant. They get a rejection, which means they need to take the face off. They have not had that at NYU. But overall, these are dangerous procedures. The drugs also cause organ damage in the long term, so the doctors really aren't sure how much additional life they're giving to people. They warn them that it might be five years, it might be 10 years. They really don't know.

Taylor Wilson:

And the involvement of the eye transplant here seemed pretty complicated. Does this rethink how we view the nervous system? Just how big of a game changer is this?

Karen Weintraub:

Yeah. So the researchers are pretty excited, the doctors here. This was the first time anybody, they think, had successfully tried to transplant an eye. The difference is your hand, your arms, your face are all part of the peripheral nervous system, which means there are nerves that come from the spinal cord to those parts of the body. The eye is actually connected directly to the brain through the optic nerve as is the spinal cord. And those have never been nerves that have been repairable before.

But in this case, they think that his optic nerve is growing together with the donor nerve. So he still can't see, but there's the possibility that he'll be able to. And in any case it has taken, it opens the possibility now, potentially someday, of doing more extensive transplants like this and maybe getting nerves to regrow.

Taylor Wilson:

It's been a few months since Aaron had the transplant surgery back in May. How is he holding up at this point?

Karen Weintraub:

He sounds like an amazing person. Really tough. Former army veteran that has a strong support from his family, particularly his wife and his daughter. He says he is taking it day by day, that he wouldn't have made it, but for his family. But he really seems to have a really tough spirit and is doing amazingly well. The quote that I love that he said was, he was pretty low in terms of confidence beforehand. "You've got to be pretty self-conscious when your face is essentially not there anymore." And so he said he was feeling pretty down. But since the transplant, he said, "I tell people I can't walk past a mirror without looking at it. It's made me stand up taller." So he's just proud to have a face again, to feel good about himself again.

Taylor Wilson:

Karen Weintraub with an absolutely inspiring story. Thank you, Karen.

Karen Weintraub:

Thanks.

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Taylor Wilson:

Israel has agreed to daily four hour pauses to combat operations in northern Gaza. US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Israel has committed to announcing the window at least three hours in advance each day. By last night though, there was still no sign fighting had stopped according to a Reuters report. Pauses in the fighting have been taking place on and off for days while tens of thousands of civilians flee northern Gaza for the territory South, though the US and several other nations have been urging Israel to allow more time for safe passage and for the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza.

John Kirby said pauses could also help the effort to win freedom for at least some of the approximately 240 hostages held by Hamas, including several Americans. President Joe Biden told reporters that he asked Israel for a pause longer than three days in talks about freeing the hostages. More than 1400 people have been killed in Israel in the war, mostly in last month's Hamas attack. And more than 10,800 Palestinians have been killed according to Gaza's Health Ministry. At least 45% of all housing in Gaza has been damaged or destroyed by Israeli bombardment according to the UN.

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Senator Joe Manchin, the centrist Democrat from West Virginia announced yesterday that he will not run for reelection next year. But the retirement announcement may have really been the launch of a new campaign. Manchin said he is not done with public service and expressed his frustration with both major political parties. He had previously said that he would consider running for president with no labels, a potential third party effort to put forward centrist candidates to challenge President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump.

Manchin has served in the senate since 2010 when he left his position as governor of West Virginia. He's often been a thorn in his party side breaking with Democrats on issues from spending to energy. He was facing a tough reelection campaign in West Virginia, which has become increasingly Republican in the last two decades. It has chosen the Republican candidate for president every year since 2000.

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The IRS has announced a campaign to increase audits of high income Americans. I spoke with USA Today personal finance reporter Daniel de Visé about why this is happening now and what it means for most people around the country. Daniel, always good to have you on.

Daniel de Visé:

Likewise. Great to be here.

Taylor Wilson:

What exactly does this plan entail?

Daniel de Visé:

Well, the IRS has an infusion of up to $80 billion in new funding. And this is an agency that's been really rung out in the last several years. Their budget has been pushed and pushed and pushed, and their staffing is way down. So this is a huge infusion of cash. And they're supposed to use it to go after wealthy tax sheets, basically.

Taylor Wilson:

So what does this mean for middle income and lower income Americans?

Daniel de Visé:

We are assured from many quarters that it doesn't mean anything for us, you and me, people out there who earn less than $400,000 a year, which is, that's the vast majority of us, are not supposed to be affected by this. What we are told is, IRS is going to go after people in roughly the top 2% of the income spectrum, people earning hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, large corporations and very large personal returns. So it is not supposed to affect everyone in the middle income spectrum, even upper income up to a pretty high point.

Taylor Wilson:

And Daniel, why is the IRS going more aggressively after the rich with audits now?

Daniel de Visé:

Well, this is where you could talk to some economists and what they would tell you is, okay, you know how the wealthiest people contribute a greater share of taxes. I mean, they earn that credit. They also contribute a much larger share of the tax gap, which is taxes that aren't paid at the end of the year. So every year, the IRS has a big gap, billions and billions of dollars of taxes they haven't collected. I think right now, it's close to $700 billion. Because only about 85% of all taxes are paid on time. The other 15% are not. And the auditors come in to try to collect some of that remaining $688 billion each year. And a huge share of that represents very high income earners.

Taylor Wilson:

What issues do critics have with more of these types of audits?

Daniel de Visé:

I think people who are anti-tax in the first place, or believe that taxes have gotten out of control say this is another example of that. In a senate hearing that I monitored on Wednesday, some Republican lawmakers were making the point that the IRS could use these almost $80 billion, which I think has now been brought down to more like 60 billion, they could use it for customer service, answering the telephones, working on technical issues. The IRS once had an enviable electronic profile, and now their computer system is very old. So they could be using money on customer service and not on "harassing" taxpayers. So that's where the political divide stands.

Democrats generally think, "Hey, let's audit the rich." Every dollar you spend auditing rich people, according to some Harvard researchers I interviewed, yields $12 in recovered funds. And this is not just from the audit, but this is from the years after the audit when the rich person you audited, they pay more taxes after you audit them. And so there's a big return on investment in auditing wealthy people, and that's the argument for it.

Taylor Wilson:

All right. Daniel de Visé covers personal finance for USA Today. Thank you, Daniel.

Daniel de Visé:

Anytime. Thank you.

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Taylor Wilson:

Dua Lipa dropped a new single yesterday called Houdini. The song is the first from her anticipated third album due out next year. She noted that Houdini "Embodies that 4:00 AM feeling when the night is coming to a close and you're a bit sweaty, but you don't want the party to end." The three-time Grammy winner has been busy since the 2020 release of her hit album Future Nostalgia and the tour that followed. That includes a number one hit with Elton John in 2021 and another chart topper this summer from the Barbie: The Album soundtrack. But enough of me talking about her. You can find a link to the new single and video in today's show notes.

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Thanks for listening to The Excerpt. We're produced by Shannon Rae Green, and our executive producer is Laura Beatty. You can find us every morning wherever you get your podcasts. If you use a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. I'm Taylor Wilson, and I'm back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from USA Today.