Faculty Bibliography

Feeling should return to her face in six months, and most facial functions in about a year, leading to her ability to smile after physical therapy to help train the muscles for that function

'We just took nature's own building blocks to build a new organ,' [Doris Taylor] said of her team's report in the journal Nature Medicine. The researchers removed all the cells from a dead rat heart, leaving the valves and outer structure as scaffolding for new heart cells injected from newborn rats. With modifications, scientists should be able to grow a new human heart by taking stem cells from a patient's bone marrow and placing them in a cadaver heart that has been prepared as a scaffold, Taylor said in a telephone interview from her laboratory in Minneapolis. The early success, she said, 'opens the door to this notion that you can make any organ: kidney, liver, lung, pancreas - you name it and we hope we can make it.' 'If it works,' Taylor said, 'it means that there'll be many more organs available for transplants.'

Todd N. McAllister of Cytograft Tissue Engineering in Novato, Calif., said, ''[Doris A. Taylor]'s work is one of those maddeningly simple ideas that you knock yourself on the head, saying, 'Why didn't I think of that?'<0>'' Dr. McAllister's team has used a snippet of a patient's skin to grow blood vessels in a laboratory, and then implanted them to restore blood flow around a patient's damaged arteries and veins. ''The heart is a beautiful organ,'' Dr. Taylor said, ''and it's not one that I thought I'd ever be able to build in a dish.'' Beginning Jan. 15, Adam Liptak's column, ''Sidebar,'' will appear on Tuesdays. Dan Barry's column, ''This Land,'' will return on Monday, Jan. 21

The standard influenza vaccine still protects against the mutant virus, said Hayden and Dr. Alicia Fry, an influenza epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

The highly experimental procedure, performed within the last two weeks, was the world's fourth partial face transplant, the country's first, and the most extensive and complicated such operation to date. 'This is not cosmetic surgery in any conventional sense,' said Dr. Eric Kodish, chair of the clinic's bioethics department, who was part of the team that interviewed and evaluated the patient's understanding of the risks in the experimental procedure. In late 2004, a Cleveland Clinic institutional review board said a face transplant was ethical and possible and approved [Maria Siemionow]'s scientific blueprint for the experimental procedure. It was the first time any ethics committee in the world had given such permission.

''We can say we have a culprit with the smoking gun at the scene of the crime, but that still doesn't mean he's guilty,'' Dr. [Patrick S. Moore] said in a telephone interview. ''We have a long way to go to prove that this agent is really the cause,'' he said. ''But the fact that the virus is so strongly associated with the tumor is at least a very good bet that it is playing an important role.'' ''It is not every day,'' Dr. [Anthony S. Fauci] said, ''that you have some pretty compelling molecular proof that a virus is associated, likely causally, with development of a particular cancerous process.''

[...] Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the top federal official responsible for AIDS research, agreed that more fundamental knowledge is needed about H.I.V. and the way the body and experimental vaccines respond to it before the goal of a licensed H.I.V. vaccine can be reached

Progress in detecting new cases of tuberculosis is slowing, threatening to increase the risks of transmitting drug-resistant strains, the World Health Organization said Monday

There were renewed calls for strong advocacy and financing to sustain gains already made, like promoting more antiretroviral therapy in poorer countries, along with male circumcision and behavior modification. Dr. Jorge Saavedra, director of the Mexican national AIDS program, underscored the imperative for such information by saying that 'if you do not follow the epidemiology of H.I.V.' and the scientific evidence, 'then we will lose the fight against H.I.V.' Now, a new test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention promises a greater ability to pinpoint hot spots of new infections and to control them more quickly, at least in developed countries.

Jorge Saavedra, director of the Mexican national AIDS program, underscored the imperative for such information by saying 'if you do not follow the epidemiology of HIV' and the scientific evidence, 'then we will lose the fight against HIV.' 'Development of a vaccine is still more of an art than a science,' said Tadataka Yamada, an official of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle. He added, 'No one country, any one scientist, any one team of scientists will develop the vaccine.' 'The lack of secure and reliable drug supplies is the Achilles' heel of antiretroviral programs,' said Gregg Gonsalves of the AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa. 'Central medical stores in many countries often cannot handle this task.'