Word: medawar
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...even Jews, he fails also as a writer." Science Writer Martin Gardner, reviewing The Roots of Coincidence (1972), taxed the author with ignoring research that contradicts the claims of parapsychologists. Even Koestler's monumental and erudite The Act of Creation (1964) caused the eminent zoologist Sir Peter Medawar to grumble that Koestler had "no real grasp of how scientists go about their work." Malcolm Muggeridge dismissed the author as "all antennae and no head...
Although Summerlin's work was pushed by Good and approved by an independent scientific advisory committee, it soon came under criticism. Several scientists-including Britain's Sir Peter Medawar, winner of a 1960 Nobel Prize for his work on tissue grafting -tried but were unable to duplicate Summerlin's results. Apparently Sum-merlin himself could not repeat his earlier experiments; in a paper now awaiting publication in the scientific journal Transplantation, Good, Summerlin and Dr. John Ninnemann report that although they tried five different transplantation techniques on 500 mice, they were unable to get the new tissue...
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...