Each year, around 100,000 people worldwide receive solid organ transplants, and from the day of their surgery to the day they die almost all of them have to take daily immunosuppressant drugs to prevent the body from attacking the new organ. But an experimental procedure in which patients receive some of the donor's bone marrow in addition to the organ hopes to eliminate the need for lifelong drug therapy. Elie Dolgin talks to the scientists who are rejecting the idea of transplantation as usual.
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Change history
06 February 2012
In the January 2012 issue, the article entitled "An act of tolerance" (Nat. Med. 18, 12–16, 2011) incorrectly stated that Ray Owen's 1945 experiment showed that twin cattle sharing a common placenta but different fathers had the same set of human leukocyte antigen markers. Human leukocyte antigens had not been discovered yet, and Owen's work showed that the cattle shared red blood cell types instead. The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.
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Dolgin, E. An act of tolerance. Nat Med 18, 12–16 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm0112-12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nm0112-12
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