Word: transplanter
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...both B cells and T cells are lacking. The most famous SCID victim, a Texas boy named David, lived for twelve years in a germ-free bubble while doctors searched in vain for a cure for his disease. He died in 1984, four months after receiving a bone-marrow transplant that doctors hoped would supply his missing immune cells...
Ever since the pioneering transplant operations of the 1960s, the chief obstacle to the full recovery of transplant patients has been the immune system's xenophobic zeal to destroy anything that is foreign to the body. Once the alien threat has been identified, agents known as helper T cells unleash the powerful immune response that attacks grafted tissue. During the 1970s, physicians found that they could minimize this reaction by more closely matching the MHC proteins, or immunological "dog tags," of a donor with those of the recipient. Even so, they could not completely eliminate the rejection response. To make...
...university's professional schools and research institutions have produced a dazzling string of scientific and technological breakthroughs. Stanford developed the world's first X-ray microscope. The Stanford Medical Center was the site of the nation's first adult heart transplant. Stanford research produced the basic patent on gene splicing and scores of other inventions that will net the university some $6 million in royalties this year...
...develop implantable pumps that temporarily take over part of the heart's job. Some half a dozen such devices are now available, most of them experimental, bulky and requiring risky open-heart surgery. But at a medical conference last week in Reno, O. Howard Frazier, director of the transplant program at the Texas Heart Institute in Houston, described the first successful use of a radically different newcomer. It is a tiny, disposable pump that can handle most of the heart's workload and that can be inserted in 20 minutes without major surgery...
Frazier first tried the device last month on a patient who was near death after a heart transplant. Working from an incision in the patient's groin, the surgeon threaded a 7-in. assembly made of a tube connected to a miniature, propeller-like pump through the patient's arteries and into his left ventricle, the main pumping chamber of the heart. The stainless-steel pump, driven by a slender cable linked to a motor outside the body, took on the work of the ailing ventricle. Spinning 25,000 times a minute -- about four times as fast as a sports...