LIFE-GIVERS, THE

Based on personal relationships, the author recounts the revolutionary lives of these young medical pioneers and their contributions to organ transplantation in this book. Organ transplantation was one of the greatest innovations in medicine during the second half of the 20th century. The young surgeons who pioneered organ transplantation persisted in their goals during long periods when the surgical techniques were not yet perfected and when rejection of the grafts seemed almost uncontrollable.

Contents:

• Foreword 1 (Peter Friend)
• Foreword 2 (Tatsuo Kawai)
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Setting the Scene
• The 'Historic and Heroic' Period of Kidney Transplantation (René Kűss, Jean Hamburger, David Hume, John Merrill, Joseph Murray)
• Pharmacologic Immunosuppressive Therapy and Liver Transplantation (Roy Calne and Thomas Starzl)
• Biological Warfare — A Different Form of Therapy to Prevent Rejection (Michael Woodruff, Paul Russell, Anthony Monaco, John Najarian, Ben Cosimi)
• Expanding the Donor Pool — Brain-Death and ABO Blood Group Incompatibility (Guy Alexandre)
• A Change of Heart — Heart Transplantation (Norman Shumway and Christiaan Barnard)
• Sweet Success — Controlling Diabetes by Pancreas and Islet Transplantation (David Sutherland)
• Breathing Better — Lung Transplantation (Joel Cooper)
• Hand, Limb, and Face Transplantation (Jean-Michel 'Max' Dubernard)
• The Tissue Typers (Jean Dausset, Johannes 'Jon' van Rood, Paul Terasaki)
• The Nobel Prize
• The Future — Cross-Species Transplantation
• Who Were These Men?
• Further Sources of Information
• Index

Readership: Primary audience: The interested lay person. There are millions of people worldwide who have either received an organ transplant or who know someone who has. Furthermore, organ transplantation is currently of wide public interest because of the initial pig organ transplants in patients (a topic also covered in this book). Secondary audience: Healthcare workers.