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Face transplant recipient’s donor face now failing

latimes.com

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Re: Face transplant recipient’s donor face now failing

#101

Post by darkerside »

wongarsu wrote: post #29
Enginerrrd wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's part of the arms race with pathogens that has been going on for a billion years since multi-cellular life first appeared. Pathogens do lots of very clever things to hide from the immune system, so the immune system is tuned to detect very subtle changes. The body largely operates on zero-trust network models, except for a few locations where the benefit of a too-active immune system has serious consequen…

To add to this: if the immune system would just check that the cell is human then every invader would just evolve to pass that check. The only viable way to defend is to mark the cells as belonging to this specific human. That way even if some bacteria evolves to trick my immune system it's unlikely to also trick yours, and the infection can't spread.

This weirdly reminds me of public private key authentication

Re: Face transplant recipient’s donor face now failing

#102

Post by PeterisP »

I mean, in medicine most "fixes" for harsh problems are temporary; nothing is permanent as in the end we all are going to die sooner or later. There's a good reason to think not in terms of "people cured" but in metrics like QALY (quality-adjusted life years) gained - even if this transplant fails tomorrow, it has given that poor woman 5 years of significantly improved (according to her own experience) life quality, and that was a good and valuable thing to achieve even if it turns out that it can't last.

Re: Face transplant recipient’s donor face now failing

#103

Post by [deleted] »

kls wrote: post #52
tempguy9999 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a pic and it's not so pretty. What's much worse to me is the description of what her husband did to her. Consider skipping this one altogether.

Yeah not good, how can men bring themselves to such violence against women. I am sitting here as I write this looking at my wife and cant for the life of me fathom doing such a ghastly act to her or even a woman that I don't know, no matter what I believed (real or imaginary) their transgressions where against me. I don't know the back story but if he was capable of doing this, she probably left him for good reason a…

[deleted]

Re: Face transplant recipient’s donor face now failing

#104

Post by markkat »

sushid wrote: post #94
markkat wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The annual storage fees ($250/yr) cover our banking costs. The banking needs little more than invoicing to remain viable, and with the numbers we have banked, it could survive as a stand-alone entity, or would be an asset that could be acquired by another banking service. My cells are in there, as are those of many of my family members. I want them available 20 years from now. Of course, we aspire to mature beyond a…

What is the value prop for extracting and storing stem cells now vs. extracting them later? Is it just that you’ll have to extract less bone marrow now vs later? Isn’t there a decline in quality and quantity of viable stem cells when they’re stored?

There's actually a significant decline in quality and quantity that continues with age. That's why we cryopreserve them. If brought down to liquid nitrogen temp properly, they can remain viable nearly indefinitely.

Re: Face transplant recipient’s donor face now failing

#105

Post by rcthompson »

lr4444lr wrote: post #93
rcthompson wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if there is no acute rejection event, long-term accumulation of damage from the host's immune system attacking the graft at a low background level is still very likely. Immune suppression has to walk a tightrope that in addition to being very thin is also constantly moving around. Each time you get sick, if your immune suppression is too aggressive, you might just die. If it's not aggressive enough, the pro-immu…

There was some talk a while back about using a modified form of HIV to suppress immune response for transplant recipients. Any update on that?

I don't have any specific knowledge about that. Our lab was mainly focused on diagnostics for transplant rejection, with the idea being that a quick and easy test for rejection would allow immune suppression to be adjusted more accurately and more often, since the current standard test is a tissue biopsy manually inspected by a specialist, which is not something you can do very frequently for a number of reasons.

Re: Face transplant recipient’s donor face now failing

#106

Post by onemoresoop »

PeterisP wrote: post #91
onemoresoop wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that most cells in the human body regenerate. What I don't understand is how cells that are part of the transplant regenerate. Do they use the host or the transplanted DNA to regenerate?

Cells (re)generate by splitting, there's no other way. For non-mobile tissue, the tissue regenerates itself from whatever DNA the cells in that tissue have locally. There are some types of cells that are "manufactured" in one place and "shipped" throughout the body (e.g. blood cells in bone marrow) but for the transplanted tissue any new cells would still have the donor DNA forever. Also, that applies for chimeric hu…

Now makes more sense. Thanks for the explaination

Re: Face transplant recipient’s donor face now failing

#107

Post by stickfigure »

monktastic1 wrote: post #67
plutonorm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a live and let live, everyone has their own pain and their own story, we all are just doing our best sort of guy... But I want to string that guy up.

> I'm a live and let live, everyone has their own pain and their own story, we all are just doing our best sort of guy... But I want to string that guy up. I don't think empathy and punishment are at odds with each other. It's perfectly possible (and, I think, healthy) to have deep compassion for both victims and perpetrators, while still taking the right corrective measures. Depending on what exactly "stringing up"…

It's incredibly sad that a horribly abused dog viciously attacks humans; it didn't didn't deserve that life. You still put it down.

Re: Face transplant recipient’s donor face now failing

#108

Post by whermans »

paggle wrote: post #77
robohoe wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s supposedly dead [0]. https://www.vnews.com/Man-Convicted-of-Maiming-Vermont-Woman...

Cases like this are why torture should be a legal sentence for the worst crimes where guilt is not in doubt.

What would be the point?

It won't teach the perpetrator not to commit the same crime again. Malice only breeds malice.

If it is deterrence, you're too late as the act has already been done; you may argue that it might stop others from committing it, but since this was a deeply irrational crime reasonable consequences didn't factor into it.

Making the victim feel better? Seeing their attacker hurt may seem cathartic on a visceral level but it won't undo the damage.

Making you feel better? That wouldn't be justice, that'd be sadism.

Torturing criminals to "make them feel the same pain" is a visceral response that brings brief gratification, but it's not a solution to anything.

Re: Face transplant recipient’s donor face now failing

#109

Post by skosch »

apathy wrote: post #97
mkl wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans almost certainly are vulnerable to contagious cancer (there are a few known in other species: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonally_transmissible_cancer ) . We just haven't acquired/discovered any yet.

HTLV, EBV, HPV you better believe we have! It’s just rare (thank goodness).

Those are cancers caused by viruses, and it's the viruses getting transmitted.

On the other hand, clonal transmission refers to the cancer cells themselves leaving sick individual A, entering healthy individual B, and continuing to reproduce there.

Re: Face transplant recipient’s donor face now failing

#110

Post by paggle »

whermans wrote: post #108
paggle wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cases like this are why torture should be a legal sentence for the worst crimes where guilt is not in doubt.

What would be the point? It won't teach the perpetrator not to commit the same crime again. Malice only breeds malice. If it is deterrence, you're too late as the act has already been done; you may argue that it might stop others from committing it, but since this was a deeply irrational crime reasonable consequences didn't factor into it. Making the victim feel better? Seeing their attacker hurt may seem cathartic o…

What exactly would be the loss? What’s the harm in torturing a guy like this?
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