Bank For Spare Human Organs Planned

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28929, 24 June 1959, Page 20

Bank For Spare Human Organs Planned

(N.Z. Press Association —Copyright)

LONDON, June 22. The British “hole-in-theheart” operation team are planning a bank for spare kidneys and other organs to replace those which have become diseased. Professor lan Aird, director of the Department of Surgery at Hammersmith Hospital, where the team works, said their aim was to remove diseased organs and either keep them alive, cure and replace them, or, to put in their place another organ. The professor, who was speaking at the opening of a new surgical laboratory at the hospital, said the project entailed an extension of the use of the Melrose heart-lung machine demonstrated sc successfully by the seven-man team in Moscow last month. Dr. Denis Melrose, inventor of the machine, said the actual removal and replacement of the same kidney had been done. “The next thing for us to overcome is the technical problem of storing these organs. We shall have to build a bank,” he said.

“If we could keep an organ alive for two or three weeks, we could do it almost indefinitely.” Dr. Melrose explained that his machine would be used to change over the supply of blood to the kidney to a solution of simple salts, while its temperature was lowered. Finally, it would be stored and the process reversed when the kidney was taken out of the bank.

He said some work on the problem had been done about 10

years ago and put aside in favour of work on the heart.

The team were encouraged to find that in Moscow, experts had devoted the last three years tc this research and had achieved some remarkable results. “They were, in fact, able to demonstrate to us animals whose single kidney had been removed, stored for a day. and replaced and functioned well,” he said. The British team would begin experiments on rats, mice, and dogs in the next few days. But there was the “implacable barrier” of removing an organ from one body and transplanting it into another. Dr. Melrose said. “We have overcome it with blood, tone, skin, and the cornea, but nowhere has it been possible yet to transplant a complete organ save in the case of identical twins," he said.