Word: thymuses
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...Mary (not her real name) also has something that casts a shadow over her otherwise happy life. She is figuratively carrying a time bomb in her neck, never knowing whether-or when-it will go off. As an infant in Milwaukee, she received X-ray treatments to shrink her thymus gland, which doctors suspected was causing breathing problems. As a result of that medical vogue, she must now live with the knowledge that she is at least 20 times more likely than the average person to develop cancer of the thyroid, which is normally among the rarest of malignancies...
Mary's predicament is not unique. From the 1930s into the early 1950s, doctors considered low doses of X ray a safe, effective way to shrink enlarged thymus glands or adenoids and destroy infected tonsils. They used the technique on thousands of small children. But in the early 1950s, after doctors began finding a high correlation between the X-ray treatment and the later development of growths (both benign and malignant) on thyroid glands, they hastily abandoned the procedure. In 1958, Dr. C. Lenore Simpson of the Roswell Park Memorial Institute in Buffalo confirmed their growing fears by reporting...
...combines painstaking laboratory work wiih gutsy speculations, or "probes," much in ihe manner of a medical Marshall McLuhan. On one occasion, while treating a patient whose inability to resist infection coincided with the growth of a massive thymic tumor, Good began to speculate about the link between the thymus and agammaglobulinemia, a disease caused by a deficiency or lack of the major antibodies. He?together with others in his laboratories?conducted a series of experiments in which he removed the thymus from newborn rabbits. The results of the test?all of the animals failed to develop normal immune systems?...
...fungus and viral infections; those with multiple myelomas, or cancers of the bone marrow, were vulnerable to such bacterial infections as streptococcus and pneumococcus. Subsequent observation and experiments at the University of Minnesota convinced Good that there were not one but two basic immune responses. One, controlled by the thymus, was responsible for delayed hypersensitivity, or certain types of allergic responses, and the rejection of foreign tissue. The other, involving blood-borne antibodies, helped the body to battle bacterial invaders...
...lymphocytes, which are produced by the so-called "stem cells" of the bone marrow, the mushy, reddish substance that manufactures blood components. Once formed, the lymphocytes develop into two distinct types of cells, each of which plays an important role in the immune response. Those that pass through the thymus-a small organ located just under the breastbone in children (it shrinks and virtually disappears by puberty)-become Tcells, the main agents of what immunologists call "cell-mediated immunity." They are responsible for maintaining the body's biological uniqueness by rejecting foreign matter, including transplanted tissue and organs...