Word: transplanting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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BRING HOME THE BACON Given the serious shortage of human organs available for transplant, scientists have been hoping that parts harvested from pigs might suffice. One concern, however, has been whether a virus called Porcine Endogenous Retrovirus, which hides in pig DNA, could be transmitted to humans. Now comes reassuring news. In a study of 160 folks treated with live pig cells, not one became infected with the virus. Don't expect pig replacement parts anytime soon, though. Animal-to-human organ transplants are still years away...
Words won her the Pulitzer for The Shipping News, no question. The novel itself doesn't really track. The main character is gaumless in the first chapters and a functioning human male at the end, simply because the author has decreed a character transplant. But Proulx's language does not admit "yes, but" or "really?" When it works, which is most of the time, it sweeps aside all ideas, her own and the reader's, and allows no response except banging the hands together. Without this mad blaze of confidence, her next novel might have been a hanky dampener. Accordion...
...been banished all the way to Bravo, and though his new show is not as slick as his last (TV Nation), it's even more hard-hitting. Moore bothers Big Business again, as he does when he invites Humana execs to the mock funeral of a man whose pancreas transplant has been denied by the insurers. It's unusual to find an angry liberal in this economy, but Moore makes a better case for the working guy than any politician out there...
...that's where things get muddy. It took experimenters years to collect the volunteers they needed to give their findings any statistical oomph--in part because women didn't want to risk being in the half of the sample group that received conventional therapy instead of the transplant. Over that time, transplant methods improved, and it is thus possible that higher mortality rates from women earlier in the research are dragging down more positive results from women later on. For now, the only answer appears to be more and better studies...
...insurers will react to all this is unclear. US Healthcare (now merged with Aetna) and some Blue Cross/Blue Shield plans helped bankroll three of the recent studies, an act of good corporate citizenship that seemed to signal a willingness to keep paying for transplant treatments in breast-cancer cases. A doctor working with Kaiser-Permanente, the nation's largest HMO, offers more direct reassurance. "It will be up to the doctor and the patient," predicts oncologist Louis Fehrenbacher...