Word: bloodstream
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...personal computers, a couple of feet high, wired together and left running in a corner. But stored on disks in these machines is an extraordinary medical cornucopia: the details of thousands of heart attacks painstakingly etched into silicon over nearly 30 years. Each spasm, each chemical released into the bloodstream by a dying heart muscle, each patient's treatment, is registered in this giant multivariate database by doctors, nurses and researchers at Duke University. The heart of the Medical Center's Databank for Cardiovascular Disease, these computers tell doctors, with greater certainty and accuracy every day, the best ways...
...attack antigens that the immune system does not ordinarily recognize as dangerous, such as those displayed by tumor cells. Moreover, these antibodies (dubbed monoclonal because they are identical) can be made even more deadly by loading them with radioactive iodine and other toxins. Infused into a patient's bloodstream by the millions, they become biological torpedoes that home in on clusters of malignant cells, blasting them with killer rays. Almost overnight, it seemed, cancer could become as curable as strep throat...
...even the devil could have designed a virus as fiendish as HIV. Clear it out of the bloodstream and it hides in the lymph nodes. Banish it from the lymph nodes and it lurks in the brain. And even if it could be eradicated from the brain, it could still be found cradled among the chromosomes of a few quiescent immune cells, ready to pounce again after the hunters have gone away...
...convenient and safer way to deliver relief. Taking their cue from the birth-control implant Norplant, which is inserted under the skin and provides long-term contraceptive protection, researchers have packed a button-size insert with a powerful narcotic. Implanted under the skin, the device releases analgesic into the bloodstream continuously for three months. Tests on cancer patients will begin within a year...
...hands that meet in a high five, offer fingers for counting and clasp their adored parents in an embrace belong to a single body. Abby controls the right limbs, Britty the left. Although they have separate necks and heads, separate hearts, stomachs and spinal cords, they share a bloodstream and all organs below the waist. In medical terms, they are known as "conjoined twins." In human terms, though, they are two very different people, with separate opinions, tastes and dreams...