ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, September 23, 1996 TAG: 9609230089
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ.
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
note: above
One moment, the laboratory bustled. People poured fluid into tubes, monitored its temperature and tended to clamps controlling its flow.
The next, all work stopped. Everyone in the lab leaned in close as the focus of their labor was removed from a beaker.
Sitting in the center of one scientist's palm was a rat heart, the size and hue of a red grape.
And it was beating.
Cheers erupted at what appeared to be the successful revival of an organ that had been frozen to its core in liquid nitrogen, at 320 degrees below zero. Several people gasped; one woman cried.
The tiny realm of cryobiology, which studies the effects of low temperatures on organisms, has been set abuzz by the successful defrosting of a tiny, pulsating organ.
So what's the big deal?
If such a heart can be transplanted back into a rat and work, some say, the procedure would be first step to storing human organs indefinitely, giving doctors limitless time to test tissue for disease and match needy recipients perfectly to particular organs. Or limbs. Or glands.
Now the only things regularly frozen and brought back are sperm, embryos and some small blood vessels.
Freezing at the temperature of liquid nitrogen has been the goal of cryobiologists worldwide for decades. It's the coldest attainable temperature, scientists believe, and would presumably immobilize anything that could invade an organ.
So far, however, no one has been able to do this without triggering massive damage.
The new method made its debut in the United States this month at Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics facility in Scottsdale. The South African researchers who invented it were flown here by local cryonicists, eight of whom witnessed the procedure. Cryonicists believe such research will eventually lead to a way to preserve, and revive, whole bodies.
The South Africans say they also have frozen and revived rat livers and a pig's heart at their lab in Pretoria. They are raising money for the next research step, transplantation of a revived organ into a lab animal.
Some cryobiologists, however, are dubious. Until a defrosted organ is transplanted into a human and functions, they say, celebration is premature.
The work of biologist Olga Visser and others at the University of Pretoria has been neither published nor presented at any major meeting of cryobiologists, so few scientists have reviewed it. Visser has shared it with a few prominent cryobiologists, and others have seen it as reviewers for Cryobiology, a British magazine that is contemplating publishing her research.
Opinions aside, cryobiologists are talking plenty about the beating rat heart.
``There is quite a lot of interest in their results,'' said Dr. Greg Fahy, head of tissue cryopreservation at the Naval Medical Research Institute at Bethesda, Md.
Fahy, who has seen Visser's formula, has been researching organ preservation for more than 20 years. While he cautions that the method is far from human application, he credits it with ``miraculously reviving'' hope among some cryobiologists.
To others, success for Visser's work is neither likely nor necessary.
With 40,000 people in the United States alone awaiting transplants, donated organs are all used immediately; there is no need for storage, said Dr. James Southard, a biochemist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a leading U.S. cryobiologist.
Aside from his inherent interest in Visser's work, Southard is also something of a competitor. He developed an organ preservation solution, marketed by DuPont, that extends the life of kidneys, pancreases, hearts and livers awaiting transplantation.
But Visser, Fahy and others say long-term preservation offers one key advantage: It buys time. Patients could be perfectly matched to donors, organs could be tested for cancer, AIDS and other diseases, and a patient's tissue could be readied for the foreign organ - all these things take time.
``A lot of people get diseases through kidney and liver transplants,'' said Dr. Grant Knight, a biochemist at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. ``And organs sometimes work for some years and then they fail because they are mismatched.''
Cancer is inadvertently transmitted in 65 of every 150,000 organ transplants, according to Joel Newman of the United Network for Organ Sharing, a federally funded entity that matches donors and recipients.
HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, has been passed on to two organ recipients in the last decade, Newman said.
Southard argues that organ rejection and infections will be eliminated by new drugs and that is where research money should go.
Knight is collaborating with Visser and is testing her technique on rat livers. Transplantation is the key to proof, he said in a telephone interview from his home in Dunedin.
``It's possible, but I haven't seen any evidence of the heart's power,'' Knight said of whether a heart could pump blood once defrosted. ``She tells me it beats. Fine, but I don't know if it can work.''
Visser first demonstrated the liquid nitrogen method in August 1995. Denied public money, the project was privately financed and done mostly on volunteered time. She said the technique has been patented in South Africa, the United States, Russia, Australia, New Zealand and the European Union nations.
``It's hard to get money. The big heavies in the science community are very skeptical,'' Knight said of Visser's method. ``But there are a lot of rumors; I think within six months or a year there will be something certain.''
LENGTH: Long : 107 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: headshot of Visser colorby CNB