The Year in Medicine 2008
In good times and bad, science doesn't sleep, and every year brings breakthroughs, setbacks, reasons for worry and reasons for joy. TIME's annual alphabetical roundup of a sampling of those stories gives you an overview of the year behind and a hint of what might be in the one ahead.
Transplants: Get the Organ And Hold the Drugs
Few things are more tragic than desperate transplant patients who finally receive a long-awaited organ only to have their bodies reject it. Now there may be a way to prevent that. In a study of five kidney-transplant patients whose donors were not exact matches, doctors primed the recipients' immune systems by lowering their level of protective T cells, then gave them some of the donor's bone marrow at the time of surgery. This created a sort of hybrid immune system. Four of the patients accepted the kidneys and were able to go off immunosuppressive drugs within a year of surgery.
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