Word: transplanters
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While Najarian may not have been greedy, he was certainly ambitious. He saw himself, says a former colleague, as a pacesetter who was moving the field of transplant surgery forward, someone who couldn't be bothered with the details of the rules because he was changing the rules. And while Najarian is a personable man who enjoys chatting with patients, he's also an opinionated, imposing figure who can intimidate friends and foes without even trying. University president Hasselmo sees Najarian's situation as "a tragedy in the classic sense. It's the story of a hero who is destroyed...
Just wait for the trial, says Najarian, who believes he will be vindicated. In the meantime, his downfall has already produced heavy casualties. Transplant patients have lost a good drug, the University of Minnesota has lost millions of dollars in annual income, and the field of transplant surgery has lost a charismatic leader...
...Transplanting a pig's heart into a human being sounds like an experiment only a mad scientist would dream up. But researchers at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina believe they are quite sane -- and getting closer to making such a bizarre operation possible. In the journal Nature Medicine last week, they reported overcoming some of the obstacles that Mother Nature has put in the way of transplanting organs between species. By altering the genetic makeup of a strain of pigs, Duke's team, led by Dr. Jeffrey Platt, was able to fool the immune systems of three baboons...
...persistent shortage of organs from human donors has motivated some researchers to reconsider the possibility of transplants from animals. In the U.S. alone, there are 40,000 people on the national transplant waiting list and only 5,000 donors a year. As a result, about one-fifth of the people who need a heart transplant, for example, die before one becomes available...
There are several more complications to clear away before surgeons can start stitching pig hearts into people. For one thing, viruses that normally attack only swine might literally piggyback a ride into people during transplant surgery, leading to new diseases in humans. Yet transplant doctors are optimistic that such technical obstacles can be surmounted. Then it will be up to the patients to decide how they feel about having a pig's heart beating in their breast. --Reported by Alice Park/ New York