Word: year
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...with World War II, when massive carnage forced military doctors to experiment with anesthesia and the other elements of modern surgery. Dr. Dwight Harken, a young Army surgeon, managed to remove shrapnel and bullets from some 130 soldiers' chests without killing one. Buoyed by such successes, in the postwar years surgeons made rapid advances in heart treatments. But they struggled to perform operations that lasted longer than four minutes, because the interruption in circulation caused brain damage. That changed in 1953, when Dr. John Gibbon Jr. of Philadelphia used a heart-lung respirator to keep an 18-year-old patient...
Still, the fleeting success made Barnard an overnight sensation and inspired surgeons around the world to try their hands at working the same miracle. Within two years, more than 60 teams had replaced ailing hearts in some 150 patients. But keeping a patient's immune system from turning on the new organ often required large doses of immunosuppressant drugs that left patients vulnerable to deadly infections. Eighty percent of transplant recipients died within a year. Surgeons grew discouraged; by 1970, the number of transplants had plunged to 18, down from 100 just two years earlier. (See TIME's Wellness blog...
...technique to determine whether a patient's body was gearing up to reject an organ, allowing them to tailor their prescriptions of immunosuppressants. The results were impressive. From 1968 to 1980, nearly 200 heart transplants were performed at Stanford. About 65% of Shumway's patients survived at least one year, and half hung on for five...
Such efforts will take years to bear fruit, however time the global economy may not be able to afford. Economists agree that China and the United States must alleviate the imbalances that contributed to the current crisis if the world economy is to find renewed, and healthier, growth. China saves too much and spends too little, leading to giant surpluses and hard currency reserves, while the U.S. saves too little and spends too much, creating giant deficits and debt. Unless China can transform its citizens from savers to spenders, the reform of the entire world economic system could suffer...
...perhaps there is reason for optimism, thanks to Xi'an residents like Lu Bo, shopping one recent evening for a new fridge at a Suning appliance store. The 32-year-old, who works as an salesman in the air-freight department at China Eastern Airlines, says his salary was reduced by a third last year when his company was hit hard by the financial crisis, but that hasn't stopped him from spending. With China's future so bright, he doesn't worry too much about saving for the future. "Judging from my job, my life, I think everything will...