Medicine: Tissue Transplanted

Of large significance to all sufferers from subnormal thyroid or parathyroid glands was last week’s news from Johns Hopkins where Professor Harvey Brinton Stone has developed a method of cultivating grafts so that they take lasting hold in a new body. Thyroid and parathyroid happen to be the material which furnished him spectacular results. No longer did his hypothyroids and hypoparathyroids need glandular extracts. His method may apply to all kinds of tissue. Possibly diabetics and other glandular sufferers can get similar relief.

Transplantation of tissue is no new thing. But, before Dr. Stone’s work, skin was the only graft which took with regular success. Gland and other tissue grafts quickly died, because they were a foreign substance in the patient’s system. The patient then needed another operation or was obliged to go on a life-long regime of drugs.

Dr. Stone’s work endures because he acclimatizes tissues before he fixes them in their new home. To acclimatize new gland tissue, Professor Stone takes a quantity of the patient’s blood, drains out the serum. The serum, placed in proper containers under proper conditions, becomes a culture medium in which the gland tissue to be grafted is placed. The gland tissue gradually becomes accustomed to the serum, and thus to the biological character of its owner-to-be. When Dr. Stone finally fits a thyroid or parathyroid graft into a new body, the graft suffers no shock, takes firm and lasting root, grows and supplies essential hormones. In the Stone technique whole glands are not necessary for grafting. A few strong cells suffice, and their surrender causes the donor no discomfort.