Anthony Atala Quotes

You can put a kidney in your body - and somewhere down the line, your body might reject it.

Don't forget my new kidney is a foreign object. My body attacks it. So I have to take these anti-rejection drugs to stop my body winning.

The slow rejection of the foreign skin grafts fascinated me. How could the host distinguish another person's skin from his own?

The risk from viruses is an unanswered question - and it won't be answered until you have had organs transplanted into humans over many years.

The third stage was the reaction that came when the body struggled to compensate for its ills - when, for instance, the white count not only returned to normal but increased to much higher than normal levels.

The production of antibody is not the only, nor I believe the most important, manifestation of immunity, but for reasons both historical and of experimental convenience, antibody is likely to remain the touchstone of immunological theory.

The immune system's goal is to protect the body against invaders either from without, such as microbes, or from within, such as cancers and different types of neoplastic transformation.

You can make pigs that are essentially much closer to being universal donors. If it works, their organs will be going into people like you and me.

In 2003, the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and a year later, a national ethics committee in France, said that face transplantation would be going too far. The risk of complication would far outweigh the benefits.

The difficulty of finding organs suitable for transplantation on man must be met.

Often, lectins can get in the way of important cells communicating with one another. And when that happens, the body's response is usually inflammation or some other type of reaction to toxicity, like nausea, diarrhoea, or vomiting.

I was in kidney failure. I ended up having a kidney transplant on my 21st birthday.

Lectins are like little barnacles that look for specific sugar molecules in our blood, the lining of our gut, and on our nerves. When they find a good spot to land, they cling to those cells, breaking down their ability to communicate with our immune systems.

There are two main types of immunity to an infection. Innate immunity comes from circulating cells that attack any invader the body views as foreign. Adaptive immunity is specific to the pathogen presented. Through adaptive response, immune cells are programmed to secrete antibodies that are primed to target a viral invader.

If your body is working correctly, and then you get a cold or something, that cold probably won't knock you out as hard as it would have if you weren't healthy.

Think about your immune system as being an army, and it's fighting infection.

Lectins are plant proteins that protect the plant and its seeds from being eaten by basically hacking into the animal's immune system, causing the animal to have inflammation.

I started taking medication to weaken my immune system because that is what was attacking my kidneys. The problem was when I went on different medication, I suffered side effects. And the side effects caused 'moon face,' where my face swelled up. It was a reaction.

Healthy people have a natural skill of avoiding feverish eyes.

CD4 being the level of the lymphocyte that indicates the level of your immune function.

There is only one constant element in immunity, whether innate or acquired, and that is phagocytosis. The extension and importance of this factor can no longer be denied.

People who are living donors who give kidneys. You can't give a heart and you can't give a liver, but you can sure give a lung - well, kidneys, anyhow. And that's where the main part of this whole thing is - one out of every eight people, I believe, is going to have some kind of kidney problem during their lifetime.

I like to read general biology - things about the immune system and advances in that area - because it lays the foundation for my part of the dialogue at the foundation about what things we ought to pursue.

You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you frees you from a dangerous dependency.” “Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency.

It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more then half of the people in the position H's family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. We abide the surgeon's scalpel to save our own lives, out loved ones' lives, but not to save a stranger's life. H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you'd call her.