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Usually even more abrupt than the body's rejection of a first graft is its rejection of a second, even from a different donor. Surgeon David Hume of the Medical College of Virginia has just reported a notable exception to that rule. James Connor, 37, got a kidney transplant from his brother-in-law. It worked well for two months, then was rejected and had to be removed. For 40 days, Connor was kept alive on an artificial kidney. Then a cadaver kidney became available, and Dr. Hume tried a second transplant. Surprisingly, it has worked for three months and shows no signs of being rejected.
The New Orleans housewife whose own kidneys were not working because of long-standing infection was unlucky in that the eleven-doctor team at Tulane University could find no suitable human donor to help her. Despite generous use of an artificial kidney, her condition was getting worse. The patient was fortunate, though, in that Tulane has a special interest in the subhuman primates—apes and monkeys—and has its own collection of them. When there seemed to be no other alternative, the doctors decided to put a pair of monkey kidneys in the woman's right groin.
Dr. Keith Reemtsma and his col leagues picked a 25-lb. rhesus monkey. The doctors knew that a monkey's kidneys work in almost exactly the same way as a man's, filtering out virtually the same poisonous wastes from the blood.
When Dr. Reemtsma had his patient nearly ready, other doctors across the street in the Tulane University School of Medicine anesthetized the monkey, removed its kidneys, and flushed all the blood out of them with salt solution. (An overdose of anesthetic then killed the monkey humanely.) Dr. Reemtsma implanted the two kidneys in the woman's groin. He joined the arteries and veins of both kidneys to major branches of the woman's aorta and inferior vena cava. The ureters were attached to her bladder. After the monkey kidneys failed, the surgeons still hoped to replace them with a single human kidney installed at the same site if a suitable donor could be found.