Starting with kidneys, we've expanded the transplant options

Q. Take a look at the paper currency in your purse or wallet and notice that, except for the $1 bill, the $5, $10, $20, and higher amounts have larger portraits, more colorful backgrounds and embedded security details. Why has the $1 bill remained virtually unchanged since 1929?

A. The decision to redesign a paper currency stems primarily from the security needs of the nation and the concern about counterfeiting, says Dan Lewis on his “Now I Know” website. Older bills lack the security features of the newer ones, making them easier to fake. For larger denominations that’s a big problem, but it’s questionable if the same is true for smaller bills like the $1. Imagine trying to buy a television with all singles; it would take a stack more than 2” tall to equal $500.

And there’s a second reason why the $1 hasn’t been updated: The National Automatic Merchandising Association, a trade organization and lobbying arm of vending machine owners, opposes any change, since vending machines take $1 bills, and the reader on those machines is built for the current $1 configuration. “Whenever the Treasury floats some ideas for a new George, the vending machine lobby fights back — successfully to date.”

Concludes Lewis: “So long as people like potato chips, sodas and candy bars, expect the bill to remain as is — unless someone figures out a profitable way to counterfeit George Washingtons.”

Q. In 1954, the first successful kidney transplant was performed, and within some 15 years, the liver, the heart and the pancreas followed. Now, after 10 failures, a breakthrough implant involving a deceased organ donor has been achieved. What is the organ? A. The uterus. The recipient was a 32-year-old woman born without a uterus due to a rare genetic disorder, the donor a 45-year-old who had died of a brain hemorrhage, reports “New Scientist” magazine. Surgeons in Brazil spent 10 1/2 hours connecting veins, arteries, ligaments and the vaginal canal, after which the recipient was given immunosuppressant drugs and others. Once the organ was successfully incorporated, the woman received her own fertilized eggs produced from in-vitro fertilization.

After 35 weeks and three days, a healthy baby girl weighing 2.55 kilograms (5.6 pounds) was born by caesarean section. During delivery, the uterus was removed so that the immunosuppressant therapy could be ended.

Commenting on the lack of live donors, Brazilian team leader Dani Ejzenberg said, “The use of deceased donors could greatly broaden access to this treatment.”

Q. Bloodletting, lobotomy, cautery, and enemas are just some of the “tools” used in the past to slice, dice, douse and drain the human body in the name of “curing” it. What was behind the “water cure” touted in the 1990s?

A. “Our modern medical advice to drink ‘eight glasses of water a day’ originates from hydropathy treatments…” but some quacks took this good idea and pushed it to excess, say Lydia Kang MD and Nate Pedersen in “Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything.” In his 1992 book, “Your Body’s Many Cries for Water,” Dr. Fereydoon Batmanghelidj claimed that “dehydration was the cause of ‘many painful degenerative diseases, asthma, allergies, hypertension, excess body weight, and some emotional problems, including depression.’ The cure? Drink water. A lot of water.” Eight glasses? Try thirty. [DON’T!]

The physician drew on his own experience as a political prisoner in Iran where he treated his fellow inmates; lacking proper medical tools, he turned to water, the only thing available. Pain, he argued, was the body’s way of calling out for more water. Though his claims had no scientific basis, his book became a bestseller in the 1990s and remains in print and popular today.