Word: brained
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Surgeons at Loma Linda University Medical Center in California only last October transplanted a heart into Newborn Paul Holc. What made the transplant different was that the donor, a Canadian infant known as Baby Gabriel, was born anencephalic, that is, without most of her brain. Like virtually all anencephalics, she could not have survived more than a few days outside the womb; unlike most, Gabriel died before her healthy organs deteriorated. Then, early in January, surgeons in Mexico City announced that for the first time, they had successfully grafted tissue from a miscarried fetus into the brains of two Parkinson...
Parents of anencephalics have been in the forefront of the campaign to make use of their infants' organs, as a way of making their brief, tragic lives meaningful. Such babies are often born with no skin or skull above their eyes. They have only an exposed bud of a brain and a brain stem that keeps their heart and lungs working erratically. Under current state laws, death occurs when all brain activity has ceased. Anencephalic infants are technically alive until their brain stem stops functioning. By then, however, the increasingly insufficient oxygen supply has ruined any potentially useful organs...
...problem with anencephalics is starkly different: doctors frequently do not know when death has legally occurred. Conventional measures of brain death are useless. Ethicist Caplan suggests that doctors rely on an older standard: that death occurs when the infant's pulse and breathing have stopped. Thus anencephalics would be taken off the respirator at set intervals to see whether spontaneous breathing had ceased. When it stopped, the infants would be pronounced dead and their organs taken. The few medical centers like Loma Linda that handle anencephalic transplants currently follow similar protocols...
...awful year Williams' wife died suddenly of a brain tumor just three months after giving birth to their daughter, he fled to the Oklahoma Outlaws of the United States Football League. When the U.S.F.L. folded after the 1985 season, only the Redskins indicated any interest in him, and then only as a backup. He attempted one pass in all of 1986. It was incomplete...
...This brain drain has left the parents and grandparents behind. Iowa is now the nation's third oldest state. The nonpartisan American Association of Retired Persons, boasting 300,000 members in the state, is spending $250,000 on TV ads and phone banks to prompt older Iowans to make their presence felt on caucus night. Senior-citizen centers are frequent campaign stops, as most candidates vie to affirm their commitment to the sanctity of ever rising Social Security benefits. Only Babbitt, who advocates full taxation of benefits for the affluent, and Dole, who is willing to freeze cost of living...