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Organs from pigs could be widely available for transplanting into patients in a decade, Lord Winston said yesterday. The first organs suitable for transplanting, most likely kidneys, are expected to be ready within three years and, if tests are successful, their use could be widespread by 2018. A herd of as few as 50 pigs is expected to be kept as breeding stock to provide organs “to order” and to slash waiting times for thousands of people needing transplants. Professor Winston, of Imperial College, London, and his collaborator, Carol Readhead, of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, are leading research...

Belgrade, 8 April Belgrade, 8 April (AKI) – Swiss authorities banned former chief prosecutor at the UN's Hague-based Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, Carla del Ponte, from presenting on Tuesday her recently published autobiography in her hometown of Lugano, according to media reports. The Swiss federal department of foreign affairs also banned Del Ponte (photo) from presenting the newly published Italian translation of her book 'The Hunt' to journalists and the public in a bookshop in the northern city of Milan on Monday. "Carla del Ponte's book on her work as chief prosecutor of the Hague tribunal contains statements which are...

I have written in today's paper about the revelations from Carla del Ponte's new book "The Hunt: Me and War criminals". I wanted to talk to her before writing the piece, but was unable to get an interview. Some readers of this blog have already posted snippets of the book in their comments. Most of these excerpts - translated from the original Italian - have come from Serb media outlets - perhaps not the most objective source for a story about Serbs being tortured. So with the help of our Rome correspondent, Malcolm Moore, I have put together a transcription...

Regenerative Powder Helped Re-Grow A Man's Fingertip, And Could Change Medicine (CBS) A new generation of researchers is changing the way we heal, one cell at a time. This is the second in a CBS News series on the innovative field of regenerative medicine. You might become a believer in the power of magic dust, when you see how a special powder re-grew the tip of Lee Spievack's finger. He sliced off a half inch of his finger in the propeller of a hobby shop airplane. His finger never even formed a scar. "Your finger grew back flesh, blood, vessels...

New Jersey would become the first state in the country to require people renewing or obtaining a driver's license to decide whether they are willing to become registered organ donors under a bill a Senate committee approved today. The "New Jersey Hero Act" (S755) also would make New Jersey the first state to require high school health classes to teach the importance of organ donation. The Senate Health, Human Services and Senior Citizens Committee unanimously approved the bill over the objections of the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission. MVC Chief of Staff Denise Coyle said neither the commission's 30-year-old computer...

Mart Laar, two-time Prime Minister of Estonia, has been credited with lifting the small Baltic nation out of economic and social collapse under communism to becoming a prosperous, free society. Currently a member of the Estonian Parliament, Laar first became Prime Minister of Estonia at age 32. During his tenure from 1992-1994, he initiated sweeping economic reforms that included unilateral free trade, privatization, and the introduction of the world's first flat tax. Laar was re-elected in 1999 and served until 2002. Known as the Baltic Tiger, in the past two decades Estonia has experienced unprecedented economic growth and has dramatically...

US medi-boffins believe they may have developed a new way of obtaining potentially useful stem cells, which could be key to a range of therapies in future. The catch is that they plan to harvest the basic material from human testicles.  Stem cell research is considered one of the more exciting fields in medicine at the moment. It uses the body's basic "master," or stem cells, which can at least theoretically be made to produce any other type of cell. This might allow injured or wasted tissues to be healed, or perhaps even permit failed or degraded organs to be...

Federal Appeals Court Rejects Demand of "Transsexuals" for Special Rights DENVER, September 26, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A federal appeals court has issued a significant ruling saying that an employer's concern over the use of restrooms by "transsexual" employees is legitimate, according to Alliance Defense Fund Senior Legal Counsel Brian Raum.  Raum explained further that the court ruled that "transsexuals" do not qualify as a protected class under Title VII. "The court delivered a significant legal punch to political special interest groups who are demanding that persons with Gender Identity Disorder be treated as though they were members of the opposite...

LONDON (Reuters) - Everyone should be treated as a potential organ donor unless they explicitly ask to opt out of the system, the chief medical officer said on Tuesday. Sir Liam Donaldson said reversing the current system would help tackle a chronic organ shortage that leads to the deaths of hundreds of patients on waiting lists each year. "There are simply not enough organs donated to meet the need for transplants, with one person dying every day while waiting," he said. The number of people on the NHS donor register needed to treble to meet the growing demand. "I believe...

Now scientists create a sheep that's 15% human 25.03.07   Scientists have created the world's first human-sheep chimera - which has the body of a sheep and half-human organs.The sheep have 15 per cent human cells and 85 per cent animal cells - and their evolution brings the prospect of animal organs being transplanted into humans one step closer.Professor Esmail Zanjani, of the University of Nevada, has spent seven years and £5million perfecting the technique, which involves injecting adult human cells into a sheep's foetus.  Chimera: sheep have 15 per cent human cells and 85 per cent animal cells  He...

Scientists are a step closer to growing replacement organs and tissues which can be transplanted into patients. Their breakthrough uses tiny protein scaffolds that encourage stem cells to grow into three-dimensional structures for the first time. Growing organs that are genetically matched to patients is one of the great hopes of research using stem cells. These are the body's master cells, which can turn into any type of tissue given the right chemical signals - a process called differentiation. Although scientists are beginning to better understand how stem cells differentiate they face a stumbling block when it comes to growing...

A bionic eye implant that could help restore the sight of millions of blind people could be available to patients within two years. US researchers have been given the go-ahead to implant the prototype device in 50 to 75 patients. The Argus II system uses a spectacle-mounted camera to feed visual information to electrodes in the eye. Patients who tested less-advanced versions of the retinal implant were able to see light, shapes and movement. "What we are trying to do is take real-time images from a camera and convert them into tiny electrical pulses that would jump-start the otherwise...

China's military is harvesting organs from unwilling live prison inmates, mostly Falun Gong practitioners, for transplants on a large scale — including to foreign recipients — according to a study.

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — Inside the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine’s spacious new headquarters here, when asked how many siblings he has, Anthony Atala gives a long gentle laugh instead of a reply. Just to have shared that he was born in Peru and comes from a large family is more than he normally divulges about his personal life to journalists. But asked about his work with urothelial cells — the cells that line the bladder, ureter and urethra — Dr. Atala bends forward and talks a blue streak. Which might be expected of a urologist and tissue engineer who...

"They told me my kidney came from an executed prisoner because you get them fresh that way. From the taking of the kidney, it is only a few hours to get it transplanted in me." So said one of six prisoners recovering from a transplant operation at Huaxi University of Medical Sciences in Chengdu, China, whose comments were secretly recorded on videotape in 1994 by Chinese dissident and former political prisoner Harry Wu. Five other patients in the room had also received a "fresh" kidney that day. It is unlikely that it was a mere coincidence that, one the same...

NASSEM Kausar has done it. So, she says, have her sister, six brothers, five sisters-in-law and two nephews.Each has sold a kidney to a trade that has led some Pakistanis to dub the country a "kidney bazaar". It even undercuts the Chinese organ business. "We do this because of our poverty," said Ms Kausar, who is in her 30s and lives with her family in Sultanpur Mor, a village in eastern Pakistan. A kidney nets the donor ?1,300, sometimes less than half that amount, while recipients - about 2,000 a year - pay ?3,100 to ?6,300, compared with ?36,700 in...

Evolution's "vestigial organ" argument debunked How many have been taught in school about our body's supposed "vestigial organs"? The standard definition of a vestigial organ is a body part that was once useful in a species' ancestral past but has now become virtually useless. Evolutionists have used the vestigial-organ argument for decades to show the supposed evolution of animal and human bodies. They claimed that vestigial or diminishingly useful organs, which Charles Darwin called rudimentary, proved that bodies had evolved from more primitive forms. However, research has shown the supposed vestigial organs or structures of the human body—such as...

Shocking new evidence of the trade in human body parts has revealed how British patients could be buying organs from executed prisoners for £50,000.An undercover investigation has found doctors in China are willing to sell organs from death row prisoners to foreigners in need of a transplant. The grisly practice add to mounting evidence of how human organs are being traded around the globe. Only last week it emerged at least 40 British patients may have been given transplants using body parts stolen by a corpse-snatching gang. More than 1,000 bodies including that of veteran broadcaster Alistair Cooke, were stolen...

A MAJOR investigation has been launched at a Dublin hospital after the remains of a British tourist were sent home containing two hearts and four lungs. The organs were discovered inside the body of 55-year-old Louis Selo during a second post-mortem examination in the UK. Mr Selo, from New Malden in Surrey, died of a massive heart attack at Dublin Airport on 2 August. Mr Selo hit the headlines five years ago when he flew his son to Australia for extremely rare brain surgery.

TWO YEARS ago, the New York Times ran a story about a 48-year-old Brooklyn woman who, facing death after years of dialysis treatments and failing health, received a kidney from a Brazilian peasant who was paid $6,000 for the organ. The chilling story bared the human misery that surrounds the black market on human parts. Some donors faced ill health and even (unlike the recipients) prosecution. The kidney recipient talked to the Times reporter, but felt enough shame that she did not want her name in the newspaper. Last week, The Chronicle ran a story by reporter Vanessa Hua about...

Top British transplant surgeons have accused China of harvesting the organs of thousands of executed prisoners a year to sell for transplants. The British Transplantation Society condemned the practice as unacceptable and a breach of human rights, in a statement released on Wednesday. The move comes less than a week after Chinese officials publicly denied the practice.

April 3, 2006 — The news is being hailed as a medical milestone: Several years after receiving new bladders engineered entirely in a laboratory, seven young patients are all still healthy. It marks the first long-term success of total-organ tissue regeneration, an area of medicine that until now was more the stuff of science fiction than clinical reality. Dr. Anthony Atala, the director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, reports in tomorrow's issue of the medical journal The Lancet on the success of the new procedure, which was performed on children born with...

Bladders created in the laboratory from a patient's own cells and then implanted in seven young people have achieved good long-term results in all of them, a team of researchers reported yesterday in a medical journal. It takes about two months to grow the new bladder on a scaffold outside the body. After implantation, the engineered bladder enlarges over time in the recipient. The researchers say they expect that the new bladder will last a patient's lifetime, but the longevity will be known only as the children grow older. The hope is that someday the experimental reconstruction procedure will be...

1. Report: China Selling Prisoners' Body Parts Chinese doctors are "harvesting" kidneys, corneas and other organs from live concentration camp inmates and selling them for up to $100,000 apiece. That's the shocking report from a former employee at Liaoning Provincial Thrombosis Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine, where the organ removal has allegedly been taking place. In an interview with The Epoch Times, the ex-employee said the Sujiatun Concentration Camp in Shenyang City is part of the hospital and since 2001 has secretly detained approximately 6,000 Falun Gong practitioners - none of whom has left the camp alive. "The...

ORANGE, Calif. - Over the last two years, more than 30 people died awaiting liver transplants at UCI Medical Center here as the hospital turned down scores of organs that might have saved them, according to a federal report. Following that report, the federal government yesterday rescinded its approval for the liver transplant program. The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, in a letter to UCI chief executive Ralph Cygan, said that, effective immediately, it would stop paying for liver transplants for Medicare recipients on UCI's waiting list. While the agency's action does not close the program, it will...

Tatyana Karaulnova, 45, lives in the village of Ust-Serta of the Kemerovo region. She is a unique human being because she has a mirror-like arrangement of internal organs. She does not regard herself unique, though. According to Tatyana, there is nothing unusual about her heart located on the right or her liver which is on the left. She believes everybody might have been built that way in the past and "changed" later on. Tatyana looks like an ordinary woman. She works as a receptionist in a local hospital. However, she has a special ability which she can feel in her...

Iran's Sahar 1 TV station is currently airing a weekly series titled "For You, Palestine," or "Zahra's Blue Eyes." The series premiered on December 13, and is set in Israel and the West Bank. It broadcasts every Monday, and was filmed in Persian but subsequently dubbed into Arabic. The story follows an Israeli candidate for Prime Minister, Yitzhak Cohen, who is also the military commander of the West Bank. The opening sequence of the show contains graphic scenes of surgery, and images of a Palestinian girl in a hospital whose eyes have been removed, with bandages covering the sockets. In...

DENVER -- Doctors who postponed a kidney transplant between two men who met through a private organ donation Web site decided Tuesday to allow the operation to proceed, despite legal and ethical concerns about the surgery. The operation, scheduled for Wednesday, is believed to be the first transplant arranged through a Web site designed to match organ donors with recipients, said Jeremiah Lowney, medical director of MatchingDonors.com, where the two men made contact. Doctors at Presbyterian/St. Luke's Medical Center initially postponed the procedure to replace Bob Hickey's kidney as he was in a hospital room with IVs running from his...

Patients Die After Getting Rabies-Infected Organs July 1, 2004 By Paul Simao ATLANTA (Reuters) - Three U.S. transplant patients died after receiving organs from a donor who was infected with rabies, the first time the disease has been spread via transplanted organs, U.S. officials said on Thursday. The victims received organs from an Arkansas man on May 4, 2004, in separate operations at hospitals in Texas and Oklahoma, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , the federal agency responsible for tracking health threats. A fourth person who received two lungs from the same donor died during the...

The parents of a little girl who died while on holiday in Spain are still waiting for her organs to be returned four months on. Debbie Ali and David Jones say they'll never recover from the horror of discovering that doctors removed every one of her organs - without their permission. Two-year-old Megan fell victim to a virus and died on the popular holiday island of Tenerife. Her parents agreed to donate Megan's liver and kidneys but it wasn't until a post mortem was carried out in Britain that they discovered pathologists had taken every organ and replaced them with...

ITALIAN police have arrested four Ukrainians believed to be part of an international crime ring in which women gave birth to babies in order to sell their organs. In co-ordinated raids in two Italian cities, they arrested a man and three women. One was the mother of a baby born just days ago. The gang had attempted to sell the baby to undercover officers for 50,000 (£35,844). The four have been charged with attempted enslavement as well as other crimes. "We are looking at an extremely dangerous form of criminality," investigating magistrate Gianrico Carofiglio told a news conference in the...

JUAREZ -- Allegations that young women in Juárez are being killed to harvest their organs are causing a sensation in a border city that has experienced a decade of unpunished sex murders. Mexican federal officials announced Wednesday that they are investigating at least 14 murders that could be linked to a band of men who abducted and killed women to remove their organs. A prostitute known only as "La Morena" and "Susana" allegedly told the authorities that one of two men who are in custody in connection with the case gave her a cell phone that belonged to Mayra Yesenia...

The whispers started as soon as Jesica Santillan was declared dead nine days ago. Should two sets of hearts and lungs -- considered the scarcest transplantable organs -- have gone to an illegal immigrant? But American citizens are more likely to benefit from organs donated by noncitizens than the other way around, according to the nation's coordinating transplant agency. "As a percentage, every year, U.S. citizens receive more organs than they donate," said Anne Paschke, a spokeswoman for the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), which links organ donors with recipients nationwide. In 2001, the last complete year for which...

The Difference between US and Them US: In 1994, The Green family with legal and valid passports and visas were on vacation in Italy. 7-year-old Nicholas Green of Bodega Bay, California, was with his parents and sister when the family was set upon by robbers. Shots were fired and young Nicholas was mortally wounded. For two days Nicholas lay in a hospital while the entire nation of Italy watched, waited and prayed. Nicholas did not live, but from the depths of this terrible tragedy came an act of goodness that touched not only all of Italy, but also Nicholas' fellow...

<p>Just over a year ago, a California prison inmate received a heart transplant while incarcerated -- an event believed to be the first of its kind in the nation.</p> <p>With thousands of people waiting for organs, the operation and follow-up care -- costing more than $1 million -- generated outrage.</p>

Faulty Genes Explain Why Cloning Is So DifficultMon May 27, 3:07 PM ETCloning may not always completely reprogramme an egg cell the way sexual reproduction does, which might explain why the process fails more often than it works, experts say. Dolly, the world's first cloned animal, stands in her pen at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh in this February 23, 1997, file photo. REUTERS WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Cloning may not always completely reprogram an egg cell the way sexual reproduction does, which would explain why the process fails so often, researchers reported on Monday. While lawmakers around the world debate...