Word: pig
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...chiseled her story from a megalithic 16th century Chinese novel, Hsi Yu Chi. It tells of a spiritual quest, drawing on the legend of a 7th century monk who journeyed to India to bring Buddhist scriptures back to China. A trio of supernatural familiars attend him: a monkey, a pig and a river spirit. They are archetypal figures, as timeless as the Nereids who rescued Jason and the Argonauts, or the three sidekicks who accompanied Judy Garland into...
...call to consciousness." In this Molotov cocktail of fact and fancy, the party's founders, Huey Newton (Marcus Chong) and Bobby Seale (Courtney B. Vance), are two streetwise dreamers from Oakland, California, who live their slogan: "Power to the People." They arm themselves and talk instructive trash to the pig cops-but within the letter of the law. They also serve food to kids and educate them in Afro awareness...
Transplanting a pig's heart into a human being sounds like an experiment only a mad scientist would dream up. But researchers at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina believe they are quite sane -- and getting closer to making such a bizarre operation possible. In the journal Nature Medicine last week, they reported overcoming some of the obstacles that Mother Nature has put in the way of transplanting organs between species. By altering the genetic makeup of a strain of pigs, Duke's team, led by Dr. Jeffrey Platt, was able to fool the immune systems of three baboons...
...around that problem, scientists at Nextran, a biotech firm in Princeton, New Jersey, re-engineered the genes of several litters of pigs so that their tissue would have some of the immunological markings that are found in humans. After these so-called transgenic animals had grown to full size, Platt and colleagues at Duke transplanted the pigs' hearts into baboons. Ordinarily, such hearts would have stopped beating within 90 minutes. Instead, all three transgenic hearts survived for at least several hours -- one lasted more than a day. Because people and baboons are so closely related genetically, the human markings...
There are several more complications to clear away before surgeons can start stitching pig hearts into people. For one thing, viruses that normally attack only swine might literally piggyback a ride into people during transplant surgery, leading to new diseases in humans. Yet transplant doctors are optimistic that such technical obstacles can be surmounted. Then it will be up to the patients to decide how they feel about having a pig's heart beating in their breast. --Reported by Alice Park/ New York