Fritz Bach, Who Aided Transplant Survival, Dies at 76

The cause was cardiac arrest, his son Peter said. In a transplant, a major worry is that the body will reject the new organ. So the goal is to find as compatible a donor as possible. A kidney transplant between identical twins in 1954 had proved to work, but most people needing transplants do not have twins. Dr. Bach&rsquo;s seminal contribution was to develop a process for systematically mixing cells from the patient with cells from potential donors until a donor is found whose cells do not react adversely with those of the patient. The technique provides a measure of how compatible the tissues from the two bodies are likely to be. The more likely, the less the possibility of rejection. In the 1960s, Dr. Bach applied his approach to bone marrow, which contains the stem cells that produce the body&rsquo;s blood cells. In the 1950s, scientists had succeeded in transplanting bone marrow into people whose own marrow had been ravaged by nuclear radiation or cancer-killing chemicals. By the late 1960s, doctors were beginning to try transplants on different kinds of patients. Dr. Bach&rsquo;s techniques <a href="http://www.cheapcigarettesonlineoutlet.com/newport-c-78"><strong>Newport brands Newport</strong></a> made it possible to determine in advance that antibodies from the donor and the patient would not fight to the death. His primary procedure was used twice in 1968. The first use was when Dr. Robert A. Good, considered the father of immunology, saved the life of a 5-month-old boy who had been born with a bone marrow defect. Then Dr. Bach led a team that operated on a 2-year-old boy who bled constantly and suffered repeated infections. In both cases, bone marrow from a sister was used for the transplant. In 1975, Dr. Bach announced a way to speed up his process of analysis to hours, rather than days. That made it applicable to transplants of cadaver kidneys, which must be used within 48 hours. Adding to the efficiency of his technique, he described how infection-fighting white blood cells could be classified and frozen for use in screening many potential donors. His work on the compatibility of donors paved the way for experiments that led to the identification of the Major Histocompatibility Complex, a large gene family whose molecules play an important role in the immune system. Fritz Heinz Bach was born into a Jewish family in Vienna on April <a href="http://www.cheapcigarettesonlineoutlet.com/"><strong>Newport cigarettes on sale</strong></a> 5, 1934. After Nazis and their sympathizers attacked Jews in planned riots called Kristallnacht, or Night of broken glass, in November 1938, Fritz and his older brother fled to England. They were among nearly 10,000 mainly Jewish children rescued by the British and put in the care of British families. They later reunited with their family in Bath, England. An American soldier sponsored their emigration to the United States, and they settled in Burlington, Vt. Dr. Bach graduated from Harvard in 1955 with a degree in physical science. He studied medicine at Washington University in St. Louis and Harvard Medical School, from which he received an M.D. in 1960. He taught and did research at the University of Wisconsin, the University of Minnesota and the Columbia and Harvard medical schools. He published more than 800 scientific papers. Dr. Bach was married twice, to Marilyn Lee Brenner and Jeanne Elizabeth Gose. Survivors include his six children, David, Peter, Wendy, Kathryn, Erika and Dana, all of whom have his last name; and four <a href="http://www.cheapcigarettesonlineoutlet.com/buy-cheap-555-cigarettes-online-p-354"><strong>cheap 555 gold cigarettes</strong></a> grandchildren. In recent years, Dr. Bach was concerned with transplanting pig organs to humans as a way to alleviate a persistent shortage in organs to transplant. He worried that swine tissue could unleash new diseases in humans, and did scientific research on ways to stop this. He advised proceeding, but methodically, and involving the public &mdash; not just experts &mdash; in making decisions about literally mixing species. Dr. Bach&rsquo;s many awards included the Peter Medawar Award of the Transplantation Society. His life came full circle in 2004 when the University of Vienna, where he had started a laboratory and was training young scientists, gave him an honorary doctorate. In recent years he found evidence that carbon monoxide, inhaled at very low concentrations, could help damaged arteries. He was also working to find ways for people to tolerate transplants without having to take medication for the rest of their lives. He treasured a photo taken of him early in his career, in which he is shown delivering a lecture on a new genetic hypothesis he had constructed. It turned out to be completely wrong.