Who Did He Kill That You Loved?

The medical miracle
Mother-of-two becomes first transplant patient to receive an organ grown to order in a laboratory

Claudia Castillo, who lives in Barcelona, underwent the operation to replace her windpipe after tuberculosis had left her with a collapsed lung and unable to breathe.

The bioengineered organ was transplanted into her chest last June at the Hospital Clinic in Barcelona.

Four months later she was able to climb two flights of stairs, go dancing and look after her children – activities that had been impossible before the surgery. Ms Castillo has also crossed a second medical frontier by becoming the first person to receive a whole organ transplant without the need for powerful immunosuppressant drugs.

Doctors overcame the problem of rejection by taking her own stem cells to grow the replacement organ, using a donor trachea (lower windpipe) to provide the mechanical framework. Blood tests have shown no sign of rejection months after the surgery was complete.

Emphasis added by me.

We've eight years of an ass in the White House. An ass who has no problem wiping out unarmed civilians in Iraq but gets all moral when the subject of stem cell research popped up.

How many people that you knew, how many people that you loved, have died these past eight years who might have been saved had stem cell research been allowed to proceed as it should have?

"In 20 years' time the commonest surgical operations will be regenerative procedures to replace organs and tissues damaged by disease with autologous [self-grown] tissues and organs from the laboratory. We are on the verge of a new age in surgical care."

Professor Birchall said the technique could initially be extended to growing other hollow organs such as the bowel, bladder and reproductive tract but could later be extended to solid organs including the heart, liver and kidneys. "They have all got scaffolds [natural frameworks] on which new cells can be grown," he said. "We will need units next to hospitals to generate the cells. The trick is turning it into a therapy for thousands of patients – [the process] will have to be automated."

Emphasis added by me.

The worst irony is, that lame duck bastard will probably have his life saved years from now -- thanks to stem cell therapies.

Professor Anthony Hollander, of the University of Bristol, said the advance had been achieved as a result of developments in stem-cell technology. "For stem-cell science, this is really exciting," he said. "Without stem cells this procedure would not have been possible."

Emphasis added by me.