Word: ernest
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...DIED. ERNEST J. PARHAM, 93, witness to events leading up to the 1923 massacre of at least six African Americans in Rosewood, Fla. His 1994 testimony led the state legislature to compensate survivors. Parham remained silent for 71 years because "no one ever asked...
...cells in solution and injecting them into the eye--because cells handled in this fashion did not grow particularly well. The team found that it obtained much better results when it attached the cells to a sticky substrate like fibrinogen, a protein involved in blood clotting. "And then," says Ernest, "we made a serendipitous discovery." Dr. Karine Gabrielian, a physician on the team, had been struggling to fashion the thinnest possible slivers of fibrinogen. Checking on her samples one morning, she found that some of the slivers had curled up into spheres, each the size of a coarsely ground speck...
...team made progress on one front, Ernest grew increasingly worried about the immune system's response to the transplants. Contrary to what many had supposed, fetal RPE cells did not behave as if they were immunologically neutral. In experiments in Sweden, for example, transplanted cells were rejected. And Ernest's team found that adding fetal RPE cells to laboratory cultures sent white blood cells, which attack transplanted tissue, into overdrive. Curiously, however, adding even greater numbers of RPE cells to the culture appeared to force the white blood cells into a quiescent state, thus lowering the chances of rejection. Pearl...
...knows yet whether this hunch is right. Gouras and his Swedish colleagues have found that rejection of fetal RPE cells can occur months down the road. Moreover, slight differences in approach between Gouras' team and Ernest's may or may not prove to be significant. "It's an experiment," says surgeon Patel. "That's all it is. What we're trying to find out is whether there's a rationale for going to a larger study...
From the beginning, Ernest and his colleagues were also worried about the explosive ethical questions raised by the use of fetal tissue. Very early on, Ernest approached Dr. Mark Siegler, director of the University of Chicago's MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, for advice. As Siegler and many others saw it, there were no insurmountable barriers to the use of fetal tissue for medical purposes. After all, organs and tissue from brain-dead children and adults are donated for transplantation all the time. And while such deaths are tragic, they are caused not in order to obtain the organs...