Word: transplanters
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Surgeons at Loma Linda University Medical Center in California only last October transplanted a heart into Newborn Paul Holc. What made the transplant different was that the donor, a Canadian infant known as Baby Gabriel, was born anencephalic, that is, without most of her brain. Like virtually all anencephalics, she could not have survived more than a few days outside the womb; unlike most, Gabriel died before her healthy organs deteriorated. Then, early in January, surgeons in Mexico City announced that for the first time, they had successfully grafted tissue from a miscarried fetus into the brains of two Parkinson...
...many, the fetal-tissue transplant raised a troubling question: Should doctors be allowed to use tissue from intentionally aborted fetuses to alleviate an otherwise hopeless condition? The Baby Gabriel case focused on even knottier dilemmas: Should laws defining death be rewritten to allow the "harvesting" of anencephalic donors? Should their existence be prolonged solely to enable doctors to take their organs...
...graft takes, Lazarchick, 32, will be numbered among a handful of patients around the world who have undergone at least a partly successful full-knee transplant. More than 100,000 transplants and grafts are performed each year on femurs, skulls and other bones, but replacing an entire knee, a procedure that has been tried on and off since the turn of the century, is especially tricky. Reason: doctors have not been able to save the sensory nerves that monitor the complicated three-dimensional movements of the knee. Explains Dr. Henry Mankin, chief of orthopedics at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston...
...them for infections such as hepatitis and AIDS, encase them in plastic and store them at -112 degreesF in freezers. Though the living tissue is killed by the extreme cold, the bone's structure survives. Thus, once surgeons implant the new graft, tissue rejection -- the unforgiving nemesis of most transplant attempts -- occurs in only 3% to 5% of cases...
Although Lazarchick has been home for five weeks now, her ordeal is far from over. Her leg is still immobilized by a cast, and the threat of infection deep within remains. "If the site gets infected, you lose the transplant," Schmidt warns. "It's way too early to tell if there are going to be any complications," says Dr. Steven Gitelis, director of the bone bank at Chicago's Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center. The once frozen ligaments and tendons may not properly hold the knee together, and the original cartilage may fail to cushion it from shocks...