Word: medawar
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When the transplant experts tackled the rejection problem, they quickly agreed that all early drugs designed to suppress the body's immune reaction to foreign protein were bad. Since they blocked off the production of disease-fighting antibodies indiscriminately, said London's Sir Peter Medawar, they left the transplant patient easy prey to infectious crises caused by the commonest microbes that healthy people carry around all the time...
...trouble with ALG, as it is abbreviated, is that transplant patients apparently can never be weaned of it, and some cannot tolerate it for more than a few weeks or months. They develop severe allergic reactions to it. Besides, said Medawar, "ALG is conceptually an archaic substance. Injecting horse-serum derivatives into human beings violates our sense of the fitness of things." It was Medawar's work in the early 1950s, which explained why some skin grafts in mice are rejected and others not, that laid the foundation for all today's transplant surgery. And now the transplant...
...full explanation of one man's rejection of another's flesh had to wait until 1953, when Britain's Sir Peter Brian Medawar revealed details of the immune mechanism involving the white blood cells. These are the body's main line of defense against viruses, which have protein coatings, and against many other germs. They react just as strongly against any "foreign" (meaning another person's) protein. They make antibody to destroy such invaders...
Then, in 1953, Britain's Peter Brian Medawar pinpointed the "rejection phenomenon." It is, he proved, a display of the same immune mechanism that enables a healthy body to beat down a virus infection by developing antibody against the foreign protein. Against a second invasion, the body reacts faster. It is the same with grafts: the first may be rejected slowly, but a second one from the same donor is turned down more quickly...
...Burnet-Medawar discovery, hailed in the Nobel citation as "a new chapter in experimental biology," has no direct medical use. But it represents a long step closer to the day dreamed of by many doctors when surgeons will be able to shift hearts, lungs, kidneys and even limbs from one body to another...