Word: transplanting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Leukemia and other cancer patients who need bone-marrow transplants may now have a larger pool of potential donors. Israeli and Italian doctors say they have vastly improved the odds of a successful transplant between family members whose tissue types don't match perfectly. It's done by transplanting large numbers of stem cells--the bone-marrow cells that make blood. In Japan, doctors report that sophisticated DNA analysis is enabling them to better match donors and recipients who are not related...
Still, surgeons who perform radical, headline-grabbing operations know the value of good publicity. So it was something of a shock to an international team poised to perform the world's first successful hand transplant to discover that they had chosen a man with a record as long, so to speak...
...they might have been, the surgeons had no grounds for canceling the operation--especially given how badly Hallam wanted that arm. He was so eager to be a guinea pig, in fact, that he'd also registered with a U.S. group that had hoped to be the first to transplant a hand. The winning team insisted they were not in a race with the Americans or anyone else, but they couldn't help crowing last week. "They may well be in a race with us," Australian microsurgeon Dr. Earl Owen told the New York Times, "but they will never catch...
Saudi thieves take note: A 48-year-old New Zealander who three weeks ago underwent the first hand-transplant in decades held a press conference Thursday to confirm that the new limb felt just like his old one. Hallam lost his hand in 1984, in what he told French doctors was a logging accident. The accident was later revealed to have occurred in a New Zealand prison, where Hallam had been serving a two-year sentence for fraud. "Embarrassed as they might have been, the surgeons had no grounds for canceling the operation," says TIME correspondent Michael D. Lemonick...
...prelude to transplant is brutal, however. The children receive near lethal doses of radiation and chemotherapy that kill the rapidly dividing sick cells. This leaves the patients without any immune system, so the most minor infection could kill them. It also kills the cells lining the gut, making digestion difficult, and those lining the mouth, producing painful sores...