Word: donor
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Dolly was once an awfully lonely sheep. When the famously cloned animal made headlines in 1997, she was the only mammal ever to be manufactured from the cell of an adult donor. Since then, the clone ranks have swelled, with mice and cattle also toddling out of the labs. Last week cloning technology took another step forward when an international biotechnology company announced that it had created a litter of five genetically identical piglets, and that it had a pretty good idea of how they could one day be used: as organ donors for ailing humans...
...turning pigs into tissue factories has been around for at least 30 years. Pigs breed easily and mature quickly, and their organs are roughly the same size as those of humans, meaning operations can be performed with a relative snap-out, snap-in simplicity. The problem is, once the donor organ is stitched in place, the body rebels, rejecting it even more violently than it would a human graft. "A pig heart transplanted in a person would turn black within minutes," says David Ayares, a research director with PPL Therapeutics, the biotech firm based in Scotland, New Zealand and Virginia...
DeVore, who was recovering from head surgery at the time, is holding a sign that reads, "Brain Donor of the Month...
...behind the experiments. Although moral critics of the practice will blanch, the purpose of PPL's cloning experiments - the latest being conducted by the company's U.S. division, in Blacksburg, Va., with a federal government research grant - has been directed not at creating photocopy humans, but at developing biotech donor organs. The company announced it would begin clinical trials of porcine organ transplants in about four years, and its stock price (listed in London) rose by a record 19 percent on the news...
...Barlett, Jim Steele and TIME for so graphically illustrating the insidious influence and devastating effects of campaign contributions on politics [Big Money & Politics, Feb. 7]. It is shameful that lawmakers and Administration officials are so desperate for cash that they will work tirelessly to bail out a single wealthy donor at the expense of small-business owners. What we need is genuine campaign-finance reform, so that lawmakers can no longer be encouraged to give their votes to the highest bidders. We need to ban soft money, allow for public financing of elections and provide free TV time. Until...