Word: bone
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When a Tibetan dies, his body is carried to the top of a mortuary hill, hacked into pieces by body breakers and left to be picked clean to the bone by scavenger birds and beasts. Tibetan sons keep their fathers' skulls and use them as drinking cups out of filial piety. On stormy days, when blizzards smother the high mountain passes, lamas cut out paper horses and scatter them to the winds to carry help to any poor traveler foundering in the deep snow. Meeting a stranger, a Tibetan sticks out his tongue in friendly greeting...
Radiation in doses exceeding about 400 r. (for roentgen) is usually fatal because it destroys the bone marrow's blood-forming mechanism, and it incidentally suppresses the antibody reaction. Theoretically, it should be possible to cure many cases of radiation injury by injecting bone-marrow cells from donors while the patient's antibody production is knocked out. And in acute leukemia, when the bone marrow is secreting abnormal cells, it might be possible to destroy the marrow deliberately with massive radiation, then replace it with healthy marrow. It has worked in mice and dogs, but the human system...
From volunteers under total anesthesia his colleagues extracted 200 to 300 cc. of bone marrow each, through as many as 20 punctures into the breastbone and hip bones. Dr. Jammet promptly injected this fluid into the veins of the five Yugoslavs. One, who had soaked up 1,000 r., died. In the other four, the donors' marrow cells made blood for them until their own marrow began working again. They are now convalescing at home...
...because his patients had been healthy before the accident, then had suddenly received such a whopping jolt of radiation that it could not fail to knock out their marrow function-including antibody formation. Frozen marrow keeps for at least six months; if it can be kept longer, general bone-marrow banks may become practical. In any case, Dr. Jammet suggested, people working around reactors might have some of their own marrow removed and stored as a precaution...
Relying on the fact that drugs can usually restore even children with severe leukemia to a normal-appearing blood pattern for a while, a Harvard University research team at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital tried yet another approach. They took bone marrow from the patients during such remissions, deep-froze it until all drugs had ceased to work, then gave the children 600 r. of X rays and a prompt reinjection of their own marrow. In the New England Journal of Medicine the doctors report that one case was a clear failure; the second child died, but with...