Word: millers
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...Xeno Chronicles,” G. Wayne Miller recounts his two years spent in Sachs’ laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital, where Sachs is the director of the Transplantation Biology Research Center. The result is a revealing look at Sachs’ attempts to transplant organs from pigs into baboons, hoping that if a baboon won’t reject the organ, humans won’t either. And this is where Sachs’ research efforts lie: investigating new ways to prevent baboons’ immune systems from attacking the foreign organs, a task that comes with painstakingly...
...peek into Sachs’ research group is enlightening at times and disappointingly stiff at others. Miller profiles each of the major players in the field: Kazuhiko “Kaz” Yamada, the Japanese master surgeon; David K.C. Cooper, the old-school British surgeon; and Sachs himself, a New York native who was nearly crippled by polio in the 1940s. But, save a few revealing outbursts in group meetings, Miller has trouble getting any of the players to go off-message, quoting formal-sounding statements in multi-paragraph chunks. They escape from their interviews with their press armor...
...Miller casts a wide net of narrative, jumping somewhat discordantly between scenes of surgery, group meetings, and debilitated patients who, it’s no surprise, would probably stand to benefit from xenotransplantation technology. There are, however, areas where the narrative excels. He recounts an entertaining history of early attempts at xenotransplantation, most notably the exploits of traveling doctor John R. Brinkley, a snake-oil pusher of the 1920s. Brinkley’s scam was convincing hundreds of American men that they could cure impotence (and restore their all-around vitality) through implanting goat testicles alongside their own gonads...
...Xeno Chronicles” raises several interesting questions, but, in a slim 206 pages, Miller manages an honest stab at only a few of them. What issues of identity would a pig-organ recipient face? What are the ethics of growing and harvesting pigs solely for their organs—and should we transplant said organs into humans who, having brought themselves to their knees before the medical community, are sick in the first place because they’ve eaten too many pork chops...
...Wisely, Miller extensively ponders the arguments of the animal rights crowd in a careful analysis of the ethics of xenotransplantation. In the end, he appears to come down squarely in Sachs’ camp—that such experiments are not only ethical, but probably moral as well, given that they advance the human condition. Still, Miller is appropriately respectful of the opposite position...