Word: transplanters
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...Barnard was talking of sending Washkansky home in a couple of weeks. In this he could have been overoptimistic. The possibility remained that he might be as cruelly disappointed as Dr. Kantrowitz by the sudden failure of the transplant. At best, there could be endless complications. Yet the mere performance of the operation set a milestone along the endless road of man's struggle against disability...
Spare Kidneys. This explained why the first few kidney transplants, begun at Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in the early 1950s, had failed. It also explained the success of Dr. Joseph E. Murray's first transplant of a kidney between identical twins, done at the Brigham in 1954. Since only one patient in 300 or more has an identical twin available-let alone willing-to donate a kidney, researchers in a dozen branches of medical science have been trying ever since to devise a way of switching off the immune or rejection mechanism long enough...
...cancer chemicals and cortisonetype hormones. They have devised increasingly complex methods of matching white blood cells to reduce antibody formation, and of making antilymphocyte serum in horses to reduce the white cells' activity. This partial success has been sufficient to give today's recipient of a kidney transplant (from close kin or even an unrelated cadaver) at least a 65% chance of surviving...
Every normal person has two kidneys, and since he can live on one, that means he has one to spare. The corpses of healthy people killed in accidents provide two. So although the demand still far exceeds the supply, the kidney transplanter's problem is minor compared with that of the surgeon who would transplant a liver. Each man has only one, and cannot live without it. The world's pioneer in transplanting livers, Dr. Thomas Starzl of the University of Colorado, has obtained 15 so far, with encouraging results in four recent operations on little girls (TIME...
Just a Pump. For the surgeon who would transplant a heart, the problems are manifold and more difficult, with moral and ethical as well as medical considerations involved. Since ancient times, the heart has been apostrophized as the throne of the soul, the seat of man's noblest qualities and emotions-as it still is in poetry and love songs. But even the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano noted last week that "the heart is a physiological organ and its function is purely mechanical." In fact, the heart is nothing more than a pump. There is no more...