Word: livers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...liver stops working, he soon lapses into a deep coma and usually dies within a few weeks. Drugs offer little help, and transplants are all but hopeless. Even if the rejection mechanism could be overcome, there would still be the crucial problem of supply, which can only be met by cadavers; unlike kidney donors, who have a second kidney to keep them going, no man can donate his liver and live. But the liver has a remarkable ability to regenerate damaged cells and rebuild lost tissue-an ability which suggested to University of Kentucky Surgeon Ben Eiseman that...
Sound Reasons. But there is no arti ficial liver comparable to the artificial kidney, and there is no hope of devising one soon, because the liver's multiple tasks are even more complex than the kidneys'. Surgeon Eiseman eventually decided to use a pig's liver, and for sound medical reasons: a pig's liver is about the same size as a man's, performs the same functions, is just about the cleanest liver in the animal kingdom...
...complex lab tests, Surgeon Eiseman ran human blood through excised pig livers, and found to his relief that they tolerated all blood types. This encouraged him to try hooking up pig livers to human patients. He and his colleagues chose eight patients in the last stages of liver coma and set up their operations as they would have for transplants. Each time, they removed the pig's liver and placed it in a steel perfusion chamber alongside the patient...
...downward through the diaphragm, making a wide split where there is normally a tight fit. Worse still, the splitting of the arterial walls extended into parts of four branch arteries-the two renals, supplying both kidneys; the mesenteric, supplying much of the intestines; and the celiac, supplying the stomach, liver and spleen. Using a graft with six connections, Dr. DeBakey replaced the entire assemblage of arterial piping...
...salt diet more palatable. Because alcohol is the only drug that is also a food, Dr. Chafetz suggests that it might be given to some patients instead of intravenous feedings. Even in some diseases for which alcohol is supposed to be deadly, such as cirrhosis of the liver, Dr. Chafetz says the belief rests more on folklore than scientific fact...