Word: implants
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Without extensive tests on animals, many of medicine's most spectacular advances, from antibiotics to heart transplants, would never have occurred. But increasingly, the tables have been turned: the guinea pigs have become the patients. Today veterinarians treat cancer, implant artificial joints, even perform open-heart surgery. Animal medicine in the U.S. has been transformed into a $5 billion industry that rivals human health care in sophistication. Says Franklin Loew, dean of the Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine in North Grafton, Mass.: "There are no technical boundaries to the application of human medicine to animals...
...consent, doctors routinely remove bones from patients who die suddenly, check them for infections such as hepatitis and AIDS, encase them in plastic and store them at -112 degreesF in freezers. Though the living tissue is killed by the extreme cold, the bone's structure survives. Thus, once surgeons implant the new graft, tissue rejection -- the unforgiving nemesis of most transplant attempts -- occurs in only 3% to 5% of cases...
Schlesinger contended that the U.S. should never have permitted the Soviets to cast concrete parts for the American building away from the site -- a procedure that allowed the Soviets to implant the electronic listening devices. He suggested that future construction be done by American workers using materials prefabricated in the U.S. He blamed the State Department and other Government agencies for recognizing the problem so late. Schlesinger admitted that U.S. experts still did not fully understand how the eavesdropping system worked, but he credited unnamed U.S. technicians with inventing a new detection device that enabled them to assess the damage...
Striking results from a controversial cancer therapy give cause for guarded optimism. -- First U. S. brain implant for parkinsonism...
Past attempts to implant fetal islet cells failed because a small percentage of these cells have antigenic markers that trigger an immune response. "The classic view was that since these antigens were genetically controlled, there was no way to remove them from the cell," says Kevin Lafferty, an Australian-born immunologist who is director of research at the Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes in Denver. In 1980, however, Lafferty discovered that culturing islet cells in an oxygen-rich environment for a couple of weeks kills those that bear trigger antigens. Says Calvin Stiller, an immunologist at the University...