Transplants And Growing Organs

Transplants are an invention of the twentieth century and an important part of medicine. We are performing more types of transplants than we ever did and many people are getting the benefit and living a longer life. The latest figures I could find state about 122,344 people are currently on a waiting list in the United States for an organ transplant. Eighteen people die every day on the list, because they couldn’t receive one in time. This has to make one wonder how some people like David Rockefeller could receive 6 heart transplants and 2 kidney transplants. Could it be when you run a hospital that has gotten big donations from people like Rockefeller, you give him anything he needs even if it means jumping him to the head of the list many times?

A mother is complaining that her 23 year old son needs a heart transplant, but the hospital is refusing to do it. This seems outrageous, what could the reason possibly be for refusing a transplant in such a young man. The mother is saying the hospital won’t do it because the boy has autism. The doctor responsible for the transplant states, “I have recommended against transplant given his psychiatric issues, autism, the complexity of the process, multiple procedures and the unknown and unpredictable effect of steroids on behavior." Is this a sound reason if you consider 99 year old Rockefeller was given a heart when his life expectancy is about only 2 years according to the tables?

Erik Compton the famous golfer is on his third heart. He has had two heart transplants. He is still a young man so in his case it seems to make sense as long as they don’t allow him to jump the list. Having a transplanted heart is not easy. The rejection factor is high so medicine has to be taken to counteract it. Compton has to take 15 pills every day just for this reason. One of the most important discoveries science could make would be how to stop the body from rejecting foreign organs and objects which are transplanted into a body. Scientists have been trying to find a way to eliminate all those pills and allow the body to consider a new organ as its own. I can’t help but recall a conversation I had with Dr. Leir. Dr. Leir was the doctor who was removing strange objects from human bodies which he believed were alien. He told me the tiny objects were surrounded by some sort of membrane which eliminated the rejection factor and if he could figure out how to grow this, it would revolutionize medicine.

The first known heart transplants occurred in 1945 when Dr. Nikolai Sinitsyn transplanted a heart from one frog to another and one dog to another and both animals survived the operations. The first human heart transplant was performed on December 3, 1967 by Dr. Christiaan Bernard a South African surgeon. The patient was Louis Washkansky. The amount of heart transplants being done is about 3,500 per year, with most of these being performed in the United States. When patients are considered for a heart certain things are considered. Some of these things are if the patient is over 60 years old and if they have Kidney, ling or liver disease. The reason I mention this is it seems Mr. Rockefeller had both these problems and had two kidney replacements along with the hearts. Oh it must be good to be extremely rich.

When I see people stepping over others just because they belong to the ultra-rich class or powerful class it still bothers me. I guess I should get over it since there is nothing to be done about it and I try, but then I read some headline like how a former Governor of Pennsylvania gets a heart transplant immediately jumping the list and I remember how I feel about this all over again. Survival rates are not that great overall. If we use 5 years as a guideline, it is said about 73% of males are still alive and about 69% of females. If a man receives a female heart, his risk of dying increases by 15%. I never gave this much thought, because I believed men got male hearts and women got female hearts. I was certainly wrong about that. Some famous people have received heart transplants, but the one person we are probably most familiar with is Dick Cheney. One thing I have to admit about Cheney, it doesn’t seem he jumped the heart transplant list. He was 71 years old when he received a new heart and many people were discussing this fact. The person who has lived the longest with a single heart transplant is John McCafferty. He received his new heart on November 21, 1984 and is still alive as of the writing of this article and thankful for every day.

When we talk about creating some sort of way to stop the body from rejecting new organs, scientists think they may have found a way to prevent this rejection. They want to grow new organs for people using their own cells. They have discovered a new type of stem cell and believe eventually it will allow them to grown human organs inside certain animals. The stem cell was discovered by Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a biologist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. Taking stem cells from us to grow organs for us would eliminate rejection, because the body would recognize these organs as its own.

The first organ grown from cells was a liver which was grown in 2013. It was very tiny and transplanted into a mouse. It grew inside the mouse and began to perform functions as a normal liver. The liver didn’t have all the features of a full grown liver when it was grown, but developed them inside its host. Even more incredible was the fact that later that year scientists grew human heart tissue which contracted spontaneously in a petri dish. We seem to be heading to a point where a waiting list may be a thing of the past. As soon as a doctor in the future suspects an organ is starting to fail, he can take some cells from you and he or she will be able to grow a new organ for transplant. The younger generation may eventually have a collection of spare parts.