Word: transplanters
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...system of the patient can no longer recognize the donor's skin as foreign. The skin can then be grafted onto any patient without being rejected. Summerlin's work, which is still experimental, could eventually eliminate both the rejection problem and the need to match donor and recipient, enabling transplant surgeons to make wider use of organs taken from cadavers...
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...