Windpipe transplant renews Belgian's life... without anti-rejection medicine!!!

I just thought I would share this news as I think it's absolutely amazing!

This woman had a trachea transplanted in her from a donor, which has been done before except that she does not need to take and anti-rejection medicine!! They first implanted the trachea in her arm for a few months so that her body could produce enough tissue of her own on the windpipe before transplanting it in her neck later!!! I think that it's absolutely amazing!

Perhaps soon we will not need to take drugs if they come up with ways to produce organ tissue on other organs before implanting them in their "usual place"!!

CBC News, Woman gets Trachea Transplant

Peace!

Magnum

[edit on 10/1/14 by Magnum007]

[edit on 10/1/14 by Magnum007]

Indeed, tissue engineering initiatives have shown remarkable promise for improving our quality and duration of life. It's going to become even more versatile when combined with forthcoming gene therapy techniques to correct vulnerabilities to environmental factors or replication errors. The demand for organ donation will drop significantly, allowing recipients to have replacements grown and implanted in only a fraction of the time they would otherwise be left waiting. On a broader scale, future industrial production of Type O +/- blood via marrow cultures could provide a plentiful source of universally accepted blood which is currently in short supply.

CNN: 2006 - Doctors grow and implant bladder from patients own tissue.




Additionally, tissue generation is only one of several emerging technologies which will start to converge in the next decade which will bring sweeping changes to our medical and social infrastructures. Indeed, we are rapidly coming to an era when we will be forced to redefine the very definition of what it means to be human.




... and I look around at some of the daily postings and headlines here on ATS; the prayers to aliens and gods for rapture, the endorsement of violent rhetoric of armchair revolutionaries, the embrace of magic and superstition over science and technology...and... I've got to admit, I'm apprehensive. Something has got to change, because despite popular perception here - "they" (whoever they are) do not want the public to be mindless sheep. We are moving beyond the scope and breadth of the Industrial Revolution. Information itself is the most prized commodity, and it cannot be generated in bulk by mindless complacent automatons. They need us to think for ourselves, which I understand may seem like an absurdity to those who think this site is about thinking outside the box... but thinking outside of the box doesn't free someone from being demonstrably wrong. And the only difference between ATS and PubMed is a methodology for refining fact from fiction.

Information can be deadly, and it's only going to become more potent as we go forward. If we don't take the responsibility for trying to establish objective fact from subjective fiction upon ourselves - I can easily see the potential for a case being made in favor of overt social controls on information in order to promote security. And while I find it ethically repulsive to suggest halting humanities technological development - the effective indefinite perpetuation of today's level of suffering - based on fear of the dangers of progress, I find the alternative no more palatable. Even though our societies can be described in terms of complex systems and emergent trends - to treat society in those terms is deeply dehumanizing. Would human society be worth preserving if the effort to do so would require us to strip away our humanity in order to do so? Transhumanism is not synonymous with inhumanism.

I don't know how the future will turn out, but I refuse to live in fear of it. I hope it's filled with more stories like that of the OP's Kaitlyne McNamara and fewer like that of Hypatia and Alan Turing.