Word: transplants
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...JDF/Harvard Center is a special undertaking because it involves an unusually broad spectrum of specialists, from transplant surgeons to immunologists to embryologists, all cooperating and challenging one another to find an effective path forward on this important problem," says Douglas A. Melton, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the College and a leading researcher at the Center. Melton's seven-year-old son suffers from Type I diabetes...
Forget, for a moment, the hubbub about human cloning. French surgeons on Wednesday wrote another page of science fiction into the medical books by sewing a dead man's hand onto a living patient. A multinational team of doctors working in Lyon spent three and a half hours transplanting the hand and part of an arm from a brain-dead donor to a 48-year-old Austrialian businessman who lost his lower arm in a logging accident almost a decade ago. [Ed. Note: In a bizarre twist, it was later reported that the patient actually lost his limb using...
...nerves, blood vessels, tendons, muscles and bones, but it's the sort of delicate operation that hand surgeons have been doing for years. The big question, when a borrowed hand is involved, is rejection. While new immunosuppressant drugs are improving the success rate of all kinds of organ transplants--from hearts and lungs to kidneys--a body part composed of as many different tissues as the hand poses special immunological challenges. A similar transplant was attempted in Ecuador in 1964, but the donor hand was rejected within two weeks...
...expected, the statement elicited a flurry of second opinions. "It would be revolutionary," said Dr. Neil Jones, chief of hand surgery at UCLA Medical Center, who acknowledged that the Kentucky doctors are among the best in the business. But would the transplant take? "Based on what we know of their animal research," he says, "I'd say they're premature." Dr. Andrew Palmer, president of the American Society for Surgery of the Hand, characterized the announcement as "driven as much by marketing as by betterment of the patient...
Still, the Louisville team is optimistic. Heartened by their animal experiments, in which flaps of bone, tendon and muscle were attached to young pigs for up to three months, the doctors convinced their review boards at the University of Louisville and Jewish Hospital that a hand transplant was, as the team's chief surgeon, Dr. Warren C. Breidenbach of Kleinert, Kutz and Associates Hand Care Center, put it, "the next logical step...