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Seven years later in France, slices of rabbit kidney were transplanted into a child suffering with kidney failure in a desperate attempt to save her but the child died about two weeks later.
• Every transplant rescue attempt always failed because of some unknown biochemical barrier. The cause of rejection came in the 1940s when a London scientist defined the body's protective immune system. There to reject invading infections and infestations, the immune system would simply not allow for an organ with a foreign genetic code to be transplanted from another body.
• The first example where transplant actually resulted in helping the recipient occurred in 1950 when a kidney was transplanted from a dead donor into a 44-year-old woman with polycystic kidney disease. Although the patient's body rejected the donated kidney as expected, the working transplant gave her remaining kidney time to recover, and she lived another five years. The second successful transplant was in 1954 when the immune system problem was sidestepped as an identical twin gave up his kidney so the other twin with kidney failure could live.
• Thus the new dilemma: most of us do not have an identical twin to come to the rescue if kidneys would fail. In order to transplant non-twin organs, the rejection problem needed solving. Finally in the 1960s, as we learned more about better matching for blood transfusions, we moved to tissue typing to match donors for kidney transplants. At about the same time, we also learned more about turning down the body's immune system using medications originally used as chemotherapy for cancer.
• Now we can transplant hearts, livers, pancreases, lungs, intestines, bone mar (Continued on page 21)
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