Transplants

For those of you struggling with your weight, here's a future transplant list you will want to be on: Receive some brown fat from a lean, healthy donor, have it injected in or around your belly fat, and quickly see your metabolic function improve, your white-fat deposits make way for lean muscle and your scale show a downward trend. That tantalizing prospect for fighting fat took a small step closer to reality Monday with the publication of a study that found that, in chubby mice, at least, such as procedure worked.

In a small but hopeful step for researchers working on therapies to treat Parkinson's disease, a team in Japan has used stem cells harvested from bone marrow to restore function in monkeys with the debilitating condition. The cell transplants didn't cure the macaques, but did improve motor skills in the animals and appeared to do so safely, the scientists wrote Monday in the Journal of Clinical Investigation - suggesting that stem cells from bone marrow might someday be a useful source for treatments of Parkinson's in humans.

Since ancient times, surgeons have dreamed of transplanting healthy organs into patients disabled by disease and injury, but the human body's powerful immune system stymied all such attempts, leading many observers to conclude that the procedure was impossible. But on Dec. 23, 1954, Dr. Joseph E. Murray of Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston removed a healthy kidney from 23-year-old Ronald Herrick and implanted it in his identical twin, Richard, who was dying of severe kidney disease.

E. Donnall Thomas, a physician who pioneered the use of bone marrow transplants in leukemia patients and won the 1990 Nobel Prize in medicine, died Saturday in Seattle of heart disease. He was 92. The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, which Thomas joined in 1974, announced his death. Thomas' work is among the greatest success stories in the treatment of cancer. Bone marrow transplantation and its sister therapy, blood stem cell transplantation, have improved the survival rates for patients with some blood cancers to around 90% from almost zero.

David Trujillo's torso is a web of scars. Shunts in his arms, hoses in his stomach, garish gashes left from biopsies and scalpel incisions. In the summer when he goes shirtless, people often stare. Sometimes, to lighten the mood, he'll say he was bitten by a shark. In reality, his body tells the tale of multiple bouts of kidney failure. David recently received yet another transplant. No. 4. He is 29 years old. According to the United Network for Organ Sharing, only about 150 people since 1988 have received four kidney donations.

For years, transplant surgeons have struggled with a vexing problem: seriously ill patients desperate for new kidneys and healthy people who were willing to donate an organ but had the wrong tissue type. Somewhere in the country, they knew, the right combinations of donors and recipients existed, but matching them often proved impossible. With most other items, freely set prices enable markets to allocate goods efficiently. But in areas such as organ transplants, societies shun the idea of a cash transaction.

Last fall, Dena Harris went to a rehab facility to visit her 90-year-old mother, who was recovering from a broken hip. Harris knew something wasn't right: Her mother's skin was pale and her eyes glassy. The doctors diagnosed her with a raging gut infection of Clostridium difficile , a nasty bacterium that causes watery diarrhea. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that C. difficile kills 14,000 people each year in the U.S. alone. Harris' mother, Ann Hart, received the standard treatment - a hefty dose of antibiotics - but the drugs provided only temporary relief.

After surviving a planned four-day "brain surgery" operation, the most advanced rover yet sent to Mars will take its first drive next week, NASA scientists said Tuesday. The Mars Science Laboratory rover, nicknamed Curiosity, had been stretching its limbs and checking out some of its cameras since it touched down on the Red Planet's surface Aug. 5. This weekend, engineers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada-Flintridge installed fresh software that will arm the rover with the know-how to do its job on Mars.

The Curiosity rover's landing wasn't quite perfect -- but if the Martian robot were an Olympic gymnast, it could earn a gold medal for its gymnastic contortions, according to NASA engineers. The Mars Science Laboratory's climactic Aug. 5 landing essentially happened on autopilot, with scientists and engineers in the control room at Jet Propulsion Laboratory waiting several minutes as the rover's signals traveled the roughly 150 million miles back to Earth. But Curiosity ended up roughly 1.5 miles away from its predicted touchdown zone - not bad, given that their projected landing zone was an ellipse 12 miles wide, mission engineers said Friday.

"#calebskidney is almost ready to arrive in Caleb's surgery room!" So says a Twittercast of a kidney transplant now underway at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Kristofer Karol, public relations coordinator at Indiana University Health, told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday morning that this isn't the first time a hospital has live tweeted a surgery -- laying bare on a social media platform what goes on behind the closed doors of an operating room -- but it's a first for Indiana.