Word: transplantation
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Saudi thieves take note: A 48-year-old New Zealander who three weeks ago underwent the first hand-transplant in decades held a press conference Thursday to confirm that the new limb felt just like his old one. Hallam lost his hand in 1984, in what he told French doctors was a logging accident. The accident was later revealed to have occurred in a New Zealand prison, where Hallam had been serving a two-year sentence for fraud. "Embarrassed as they might have been, the surgeons had no grounds for canceling the operation," says TIME correspondent Michael D. Lemonick...
There was a very slim chance that if enough of the baby's intestines were viable, the doctors could keep him alive long enough to perform a bowel transplant that might save his life. Here, however, the doctor's dilemma is ethical as much as medical. Is it fair to set out on a course of treatment that would involve enormous risk and pain, a year in the hospital at least and a very difficult life thereafter? "Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should," explains Dr. Goldberg. "We have to keep a level head and treat...
Christina Crosby is twice blessed. She just may get to save one life in the course of giving birth to another. Her cousin Bobby Cooper, 33, learned last spring that he has a rare form of leukemia and might be a candidate for a stem-cell transplant. Duke is one of about a dozen hospitals and blood centers in the country that is collecting blood from umbilical cords and using the cells to treat cancer patients. So Christina has agreed to donate her cord blood, in hopes of raising the odds that her cousin will find a match when...
...concentrate the stem cells. Theoretically, stem cells can rebuild the body's bloodmaking machinery so that it produces the full array of effective blood cells the body needs to defend itself against germs, close wounds and transport oxygen. Scientists speculate that cord stem cells are more adaptable and will transplant more successfully, even in patients with imperfect biological matches, than stem cells harvested from adult bone-marrow donors...
...prelude to transplant is brutal, however. The children receive near lethal doses of radiation and chemotherapy that kill the rapidly dividing sick cells. This leaves the patients without any immune system, so the most minor infection could kill them. It also kills the cells lining the gut, making digestion difficult, and those lining the mouth, producing painful sores...