Word: transplanter
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...point. Though Murphy is just a first-time felon serving a mandatory four-year sentence for drug possession, the ailing 33-year-old inmate finds himself on a kind of de facto death row; his weakened heart has one-sixth its normal pumping power. He needs a transplant...
...sound like a somewhat heavy-handed lampoon of the American health- care system -- bad Joseph Heller, say. It gets worse. If Murphy is furloughed for the prolonged pre-transplant regimen, afterward he would return to prison. Would he be furloughed promptly again if a heart became available unexpectedly, as donor hearts are wont to do? The Bureau of Prisons says he would be. Murphy has his doubts. Doctors see a logistical snarl that could hopelessly compromise the success of the transplant. The authorities shrug. "The Bureau of Prisons doesn't have a hang-up," explains Robert McFadden, executive assistant...
...hearts are difficult for anyone to come by; for inmates, it's even harder. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons doesn't pay for transplants. Medicare will pay -- if Murphy is released. The bureau will release Murphy -- if a doctor accepts him for the necessary pre-transplant work-up. But no doctor will take him -- unless he's released...
...when he was fired from his job as a warehouse foreman in Kansas City, Missouri, for being sick too much. Suffering from what he thought was pneumonia, he got a chest X ray, which showed that his heart was greatly enlarged. He was told he would need a transplant and placed in intensive care...
...most direct approach is to find a healthy copy of the missing gene and transplant it into the affected cells. That's the strategy Anderson, teaming up with Drs. Michael Blaese and Kenneth Culver at the National Institutes of Health, used in a landmark experiment three years ago. The disease the team targeted was severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), often called the bubble- boy disease because its most famous victim was encased in a plastic bubble during his short life to protect him from infection. One form of SCID called ADA deficiency is caused by a defect that blocks production...