Posted 07.12.2011 at 2:48 pm
6 Comments
It's Been a Big Week for Surgery
via Wikimedia
This month in amazing medical procedures, it’s all about Europe. Last week we learned that a pan-European team of researchers and doctors have successfully pulled off the first transplant of a synthetic organ grown from the patient’s own stem cells. This week, the world’s first double leg transplant was successfully executed in Spain.
The male patient has not yet been identified, but the 13-hour surgery that involved painstakingly reattaching each of his nerves and blood vessels to those in his new legs has been deemed a success. The patient is awake and reportedly quite pleased with his new biological hardware, though it will take a good deal of immunotherapy to ensure his body doesn’t reject the new limbs, and another several months before he can be expected to gain any feeling in the transplanted extremities.
Leg amputees usually aren’t good candidates for limb transplants because there are very good prostheses available and the procedure is quite difficult. In this case, the patient had lost his legs in an accident, and the amputation had occurred so high on the thigh as to rule out attaching prosthetic limbs. With no alternative, doctors green lit the procedure. They hope to have the patient moving his knees in a few weeks, and perhaps have him walking in physical therapy within six months.
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Amazing. Medical science is Really advancing quickly these days. The Patient is a very lucky man as no one in history had this option to replace 2 legs.
I didn`t know though they could actually connect nerves together. Could this bring new possibilities for people who suffer nerve damage in car accidents. Stem cell therapy advances seem extremely hopeful as well though. When i`m old myself i hope i can look forward to many of this new research to replace damaged body parts, cure (all?) cancers, heal failing organs, etc.. Feels like Star Wars or Star Trek advances taking place these days.
So next year we will be able to grow synthetics in a lab from his own DNA and a year later nano-surgeons will do the operation and replace the doctors :D. Oh wait now that is just crazy talk.
As soon as we have brain transplants, I am up for a new brain.
Don't care how good a candidate, new working legs would be a great improvement or over a peg leg.
Hope they used a matching set marked L and R to begin with, or in this case, izquierda y derecha.
Wild! Good for him, but not so good for the donor. I don't know if I'd want someone else's legs or arms attached to my body. I suppose it's better than the alternative though. Medical progress is amazing. I look forward to 50 years from now when I can have my body cloned and upload my old brain's data to the new brain. I will live forever! Muhahaha muhaa ha ha ha!
Im going to have my legs cut off and have arms attached. Seems more functional.
Implanting a blastocyst onto a pig embryo might grow new limbs. An article in the telegraph indicates that the problem of blastosyst replacement was solved by engineering the DNA of a pig embryo to miss the limb and replace it with an injection of the human blastocyst to replace it. The pig then grows a human organ or limb. That is the theory, and coming next. This has been successfully done in mice with rat organs, and chimeras that combine animals in chickens, quail, and ducks. But, what happens if the pigs learn sign language with their human arms and hands. What conversation would we then have? “Don’t kill me, but I need these arms.”