Word: organizers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There will never be enough cadaver organs to fill the growing needs of people dying from organ or tissue failure. This places higher and higher importance, and risk, on living relatives who might serve as donors. Organs that are either redundant (one of a pair of kidneys) or regenerative (bone marrow) become more and more attractive. Transplants become a matter of high- stakes risk-calculation for the donor as well as the recipient, and the intense emotions involved sometimes have people playing long shots...
CAPTION: Is it morally acceptable for parents to conceive a child in order to obtain an organ or tissue to save the life of another one of their children...
...morally acceptable to remove a kidney or other nonessential organ from a living person for use in another person's body...
...present golden age of transplants occurred only after researchers began tackling one of medicine's greatest puzzles: How do you sneak a foreign organ past the body's immune system, which is dedicated to the proposition that all alien tissue is dangerous and should be destroyed? On the one hand, doctors try to disable the body's defenses just enough so that they will not reject the transplant. Here the trick is not to go overboard and completely cripple the immune system, leaving the body open to attack by deadly viruses and bacteria. On the other hand, they...
...everybody had an identical twin from which to harvest organs, such drugs would be unnecessary. Failing that, doctors try, where possible, to find the closest approximation of a twin: a good genetic match. In a feat every bit as heroic as cracking the Enigma code during World War II, immunologists have determined just what makes for a good tissue match. Research dating from the 1960s shows that the immune system has developed its own set of molecular passwords, called human leukocyte antigens, that identify every nerve, every capillary, every organ as either friend or foe. If a cell displays...