Word: transplanter
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...ABORTION ISSUE has focused on a definition for the beginning of life. When transplants are performed on the same scale, an adequate definition of death will become just as controversial. The traditional termination of spontaneous heartbeat and breathing simply is not satisfactory. Emergency techniques have brought back many such clinically "dead." At the other extreme is the guideline of a cautious Dr. Maze, who wrote in 1890 that the first signs of decay should precede burial. For transplant purposes, this caution is a little restrictive...
...Martin S. Hirsch, a specialist in infectious diseases, said that lymphomas--tumors of the lymph glands--occur "several thousand times" more often among transplant patients than among healthy people of the same age groups. The studies revealing this fact were conducted at the University of Colorado Medical School and the Veterans Administration Hospital in Denver, he said...
Hirsch, who based his conclusions on recent research he has done on laboratory animals, said that the tumors are probably caused primarily by the drugs administered to transplant patients to prevent the grafted organs from being rejected by the body...
Immune-suppressing drugs are not the only causes of cancer in transplant patients. "The graft-rejection response itself can activate from a latent state a virus capable of causing tumors," Hirsch said...
There are other major mysteries to be solved in immunology. No one, for example, has figured out how to overcome completely the phenomenon of tissue rejection that plagues transplant surgery. Serum that inhibits the production and action of lymphocytes, the cells responsible for rejection, may cause severe reactions; immunosuppression, which is now the mainstay of transplant surgery, reduces the body's ability to resist both infection and some cancer...