Word: livers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...have the national recognition of a Genentech or Cetus, but Chiron Corp., a small genetic-engineering firm (1987 sales: $20 million) in Emeryville, Calif., has had more than its share of biotech success. Two years ago, a preparation it developed with New Jersey-based Merck to ward off the liver-damaging effects of hepatitis B became the first genetically engineered vaccine to win Food and Drug Administration approval for use in humans...
...last major hepatitis virus to elude detection: a blood-borne infectious agent that is known as hepatitis non-A, non-B. The virus strikes about 5% of the 4 million Americans who undergo blood transfusions each year, and it causes a range of symptoms from fatigue to chronic liver disease...
Physicians began testing the drug on humans in 1978. The results were dramatic. Both rejection and infection continued to be problems, but survival rates one year after transplantation rose from 32% to 70% for liver patients and from 54% to 77% for kidney patients. "By early 1980," recalls Thomas Starzl of the University of Pittsburgh, a leading transplant surgeon, "we had a sense that there was a tremendous change in outlook in both kidneys and livers, and that enthusiasm quickly spread to the heart." Cyclosporine is highly toxic, however, and researchers have begun to look for alternatives. Ideally, they foresee...
...balancing act is especially tricky in the most difficult of operations: multiple abdominal transplants. Doctors in the U.S. have tried such surgery only four times in the past four years. Just one patient, now seriously ill, survives. Ten-month-old Michael Steward of Chicago received a new liver, pancreas, small intestine and part of the stomach in February to correct a congenital defect. Last week, a record 6 1/2 months after a similar operation, three-year-old Tabatha Foster of Madisonville, Ky., succumbed to cancer. The lesson: physicians have a great deal more to learn before they can manipulate...
...Drinking and Drinking & Driving, as if there were no other way. Every young fighter jock knew the feeling of getting two or three hours' sleep and then waking up at 5:30 a.m. and having a few cups of coffee, a few cigarettes, and then carting his poor quivering liver out to the field for another day of flying. There were those who arrived not merely hungover but still drunk, slapping oxygen tank cones over their faces and trying to burn the alcohol out of their systems, and then going up, remarking later: `I don't advise it, you understand...