Short answers, pulled from the story.
The liver is a major metabolic organ found exclusively in vertebrates. It performs detoxification, protein synthesis, carbohydrate and lipid metabolism, hormone production, and bile production, with estimates of its functions cited at around 500. For this reason it has sometimes been called the body's chemical factory.
The liver sits in the right upper quadrant of the abdomen, below the diaphragm and mostly shielded by the lower right rib cage, to the right of the stomach and overlying the gallbladder. A normal human liver weighs approximately 1.5 kilograms and measures about 15 centimeters wide, making it the heaviest internal organ and the largest gland in the human body.
The liver is the only human internal organ capable of natural regeneration of lost tissue, and as little as 25 percent of a liver can grow into a whole liver. In mammals this is compensatory growth rather than true regeneration, restoring function but not the original form, while species such as zebrafish restore both shape and size.
Human liver transplants were first performed by Thomas Starzl in the United States in 1963 and by Roy Calne in Cambridge, England, in 1967. Liver transplantation is the only option for those with irreversible liver failure, and living donor transplantation was first performed in 1989 for pediatric cases.
Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease is the most common chronic liver disease, affecting an estimated one-third of the world population, and hepatitis B or C is the main cause of liver cancer. Classic symptoms of liver damage include jaundice, intense itching, pale stools, dark urine, fluid buildup in the abdomen, swelling of the ankles, and easy bruising and bleeding.
Umm nyolokh is a non-alcoholic drink made from the liver and bone marrow of the giraffe by the Humr, a tribe of the Baggara people in southwestern Kordofan, Sudan. They claim it is intoxicating and causes dreams and waking hallucinations, and one speculation is that the compound N,N-Dimethyltryptamine in giraffe liver might account for these effects, though it remains unproven.
In Plato and later physiology the liver was thought to be the seat of the darkest emotions, specifically wrath, jealousy, and greed, and the Talmud names it the seat of anger. The Zulu word for liver, isibindi, is the same as the word for courage, and ancient peoples of the Near East and Mediterranean practiced haruspicy, reading the future in animal livers.