Word: organisms
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...cattle also toddling out of the labs. Last week cloning technology took another step forward when an international biotechnology company announced that it had created a litter of five genetically identical piglets, and that it had a pretty good idea of how they could one day be used: as organ donors for ailing humans...
...idea of turning pigs into tissue factories has been around for at least 30 years. Pigs breed easily and mature quickly, and their organs are roughly the same size as those of humans, meaning operations can be performed with a relative snap-out, snap-in simplicity. The problem is, once the donor organ is stitched in place, the body rebels, rejecting it even more violently than it would a human graft. "A pig heart transplanted in a person would turn black within minutes," says David Ayares, a research director with PPL Therapeutics, the biotech firm based in Scotland, New Zealand...
What causes porcine organs to be rejected so quickly is a sugar molecule on the surface of pig cells that identifies the tissue as unmistakably nonhuman. When the immune system spots this marker, it musters its defenses. PPL scientists recently succeeded in finding the gene responsible for the sugar and knocking it out of the nucleus of a pig cell. Their next step would be to extract that nucleus, insert it into a hollowed-out pig ovum and insert the ovum into the womb of a host sow. The sugar-free piglet that was eventually born could then be cloned...
...Dolly begat Millie, Christa, Alexis, Carrel and Dotcom... The British company that shocked the world by producing the first cloned sheep announced Tuesday that it had produced five cloned piglets - and not only that, certain genes had been "knocked out" of some organ cells of the above-named piglets, signaling a breakthrough in the medical application of cloning technology: Knocking out the genes prevents a human recipient from rejecting a pig organ transplant. "This opens the door to making modified pigs whose organs and cells can be successfully transplanted into humans - the only near-term solution to solving the worldwide...
Never let anyone, not even a close relative, pressure you into giving up an organ--no matter if you're healthy. "There's often the feeling that you're not a good friend, father, mother if you don't do this," says Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics. Some transplant centers will invent a "medical problem" on behalf of those who are reluctant to donate but feel they...