Word: serum
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...most noted transplant teams have now turned to antilymphocyte serum or globulin (TIME July 26). It is made by injecting human white blood cells into animals (usually horses), which make antibody against them. When this antibody, extracted from the animal's serum, is injected into a transplant patient, it interferes with the ability of his own white cells to make antibody against his graft...
...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...
Starzl stopped operating while he and his colleagues worked on a less hazardous method of immunosuppression, using antilymphocyte serum or globulin extracted from horses into which human white blood cells had been injected (TIME, July 26). Only when the technique was developed satisfactorily did he begin transplanting again. In his second series, Starzl operated last year on Julie Rodriguez, now 21, who suffered from cancer of the liver. Julie has had to be readmitted for additional treatment, but has now survived for a record twelve months. Starzl has no hope of curing her cancer, which has spread. What is certain...
...months at 86°-90° F. Many physicians also believe that plasma substitutes are in short supply. Neither assumption is true, say the American Red Cross and the Greater New York Community Blood Council. Salt solutions and synthetics such as dextran are plentifully available. So is serum albumin; although extracted from plasma, this can be filtered and heated sufficiently to make it noninfectious...
...elimination of plasma comes from the scores of blood banks that make a profit out of plasma. They can extract it economically from outdated whole blood, which cannot be used after storage for 21 days, keep it indefinitely and ship it easily. Most of them lack facilities for extracting serum albumin, and would have to buy that. But if they do not ship across state lines, federal regulations cannot touch them. Meanwhile, the number of federally reported cases of serum hepatitis-a miserably lingering and debilitating liver disease, sometimes fatal-is running at double the 1967 rate, with...