ABSTRACT

At the end of the 1970s and early 1980s transplanters exuberantly hailed the "advent" of a new immunosuppressive drug, cyclosporine. The discovery and pervasive use of cyclosporine, coupled with the evolution of surgical and organ procurement techniques, were the key biomedical factors that led to what the transplant community termed a "boom" or "explosion" in the range, number, and combinations of tissues and solid organs that were transplanted from the early 1980s through 1990. The multiplicity of clinical moratoria and of moratorium-relevant phenomena that developed around transplantation during the 1980s included experimental efforts in cardiac xenotransplantation, multiple abdominal organ transplants in children, the transplantation of adrenal gland tissue into the brain of patients with Parkinson's disease, and attempts to use anencephalic newborns as organ donors to help alleviate the scarcity of transplantable organs for infants.