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Ihe computer is now an established member of the transplant team and its role emphasizes the need for a national approach to the transplantation effort.Pretty Marcia Gould, 19 year old co-ed from Phoenix, Arizona, might have waited weeks or months for a kidney donor if a computer hadn’t “remembered” her. A victim of kidney failure, Marcia is a rare blood and tissue type;*the odds against finding a donor for her were great. This is how the machine worked to her benefit.Recently, a kidney from an individual of a rare tissue type was made available to the University of California San Francisco Medical Center. The tissue typing in-formatinn was prepared in the new unit at the Irwin Memorial Blood Bank by Drs. Herbert Perkins and Rose Payne. At the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, Dr. Samuel Kountz who is Head of Transplantation Service and medical student Kim Bauriedel, his computer researcher, put the information into their computer. In less than three minutes the machine had searched the records of 50 patients who are being kept alive by dialysis while waiting for kidneys. Not one matched the rare tissue type of the donor. A telephone call to Stanford MedicalCenter gave the same negative result for both kidney and heart recipients.Then Dr. Kountz phoned the laboratory information on the donor kidney to Dr. Paul Terasaki at the University’s Los Angeles Medical Center. Dr. Terasaki’s computer is programmed with information about patients under dialysis treatment in kidney centers throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe.It was from this machine search that Marcia Gould's name appeared as the individual who most closely matched the tissue type of the rare kidney donor. The machine, free of human error and personal bias, located and selected Marcia; the most scientifically accurate choice had been made. Whether or not the donor and recipient are related, accurate tissue matching is essential to ensure the least possible rejection activity.Marcia’s physician, Dr. Daniel Potter of Phoenix, was reached by telephone and it was he who discussed the possibility of transplant surgery with her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Norman Gould. It was twelve hours before the surgical team in San Francisco was told that the decision to transplant had been reached. Marcia was flown to the Bay Area and prepared for surgery. Her tissuetype was rechecked and the results agreed perfectly with those of Dr. Terasaki.This procedure would not have been possible, of course, without the organ preservation machine developed by Dr. F. 0. Belzer at the San Francisco Medical Center. The machine kept the donor kidney “alive” and functioning during a 25 hour period until it could be transplanted into Marcia.Although kidney transplantation is still considered to be research, it is helping people to resume normal and productive lives. To help even more patients, the computer program must be developed and research continued to make it possible to ship donor kidneys and other donor organs by air.“Marcia’s case illustrates that successful transplantation required a regional or national approach rather than local,” observed Dr. Kountz.“Our own pool of 60 dialysis patients,” he continued, “is too small to match the range of tissue types among donors . . . even though the number of donor kidneys available to our Medical Center is small. As. Dr. Terasaki found through his computer search, there wasn’t a patient in all of California who matched the donor’s rare tissue type.”
Newspaper Details
San Francisco Synapse
San Francisco, California, US
Mon, Dec 02, 1968
Page 5
Full Page
Clipped by
Kern C.
CA, USA 16 Mar 2023
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