Miraculously Unmiraculous

From MSNBC.com:

'Miracle' Girls Heart Heals Itself

British doctors designed a radical solution to save a girl with major heart problems in 1995: They implanted a donor heart directly onto her own failing heart.

After 10 years with two blood-pumping organs, Hannah Clark's faulty one did what many experts had thought impossible: It healed itself enough so that doctors could remove the donated heart.

But she also had a price to pay. The drugs Clark took to prevent her body from rejecting the donated heart led to malignant cancer that required chemotherapy.

From the Oxford American Dictionary:

mir-a-cle
noun
a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency : the miracle of rising from the grave

Yes, there are two additional definitions which take into account that the word is now applied to less profound circumstances than bodily resurrection, but I'm not sure we've evolved enough as a people to reliably distinguish between the two. Many people see that headline and think "See...Jesus does perform miracles!" 

Given this ambiguity, I wish news outlets would stop applying that word to situations in which highly skilled professionals bring all of their experience and talents to bear in extraordinary ways, inevitably aided by deep scientific learning. If a homeless man had performed this procedure, it could rightly be dubbed a miracle. If the "miracle girl's" heart had actually healed itself without major intervention by medical personnel, she might indeed be a miracle girl.

What actually happened here was that some very smart doctors tried something radical and new on a patient who would otherwise be experiencing the miracle of bodily disintegration beneath six feet of earth. And then she got cancer and almost died when her body rejected the donor heart, except that the new procedure seems to have unlocked the secret to the heart's regenerative powers - powers that we've apparently long known the zebra fish to possess, according to this 2006 article from Scientific American. I suspect - and this comes from a man with no medical training whatsoever - that the miracle girl's doctors had been searching for a way to "get mammalian progenitor cells to behave more like zebra fish cells," by "introducing growth factors and activating the receptors on epicardial cells." 

Or maybe it was a miracle.