Word: bone-marrow
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...lost her father to cancer at an early age. During her freshman and sophomore years at Harvard, she volunteered her time in the bone-marrow transplant ward at Children’s Hospital, and near the end of that second year she found herself moved up to the inpatient cancer floor. She noticed a difference right away. This wasn’t bone-marrow transplantation, where her patients were already in the process of recovering and some day soon were going to be just fine...
...Woodlands, Texas, died in 1984 at age 12 from severe combined immune deficiency (SCID), the most serious form of the disease. Doctors tried to keep David germ-free by putting a plastic barrier between him and the world. It ultimately proved ineffective, and soon afterward, new treatments, including bone-marrow transplants, came along to make such experiments less urgent. Nonetheless, about half the 50 kids born each year with this type of immune deficiency still die before reaching adulthood...
...LaRues could have opted for bone-marrow transplants. But these are painful, require precise genetic matches that can take months to find and often fail. "The doctors basically told us [transplants] would either kill them or save them," says Theresa. So they chose an experimental alternative: transfusing the youngsters with a type of stem cell harvested from a newborn's umbilical cord and placenta. Unlike their more controversial cousins, embryonic stem cells, which are harvested from aborted fetuses and can develop into almost any cell, cord blood cells are used to rebuild blood and immune systems--exactly what the LaRue...
...hard not to get excited about an experimental cancer drug that shows real promise fighting chronic myeloid leukemia. The standard treatments for this rare disease--chemotherapy and interferon--are pretty tough on the body. Bone-marrow transplants can lead to a cure, but even patients with a perfectly matched donor face a 20% risk of dying in the first six months after the procedure...
...Imagine for a moment that your daughter needs a bone-marrow transplant and no one can provide a match; that your wife's early menopause has made her infertile; or that your five-year-old has drowned in a lake and your grief has made it impossible to get your mind around the fact that he is gone forever. Would the news then really be so easy to dismiss that around the world, there are scientists in labs pressing ahead with plans to duplicate a human being, deploying the same technology that allowed Scottish scientists to clone Dolly the sheep...