The Progress Report: Legislative Transplants

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Emma Varvaloucas: Hello, What Could Go Right? listeners. Welcome to The Progress Report, which is our Friday accompaniment to our usual Wednesday interview style podcast. And The Progress Report is when we try to highlight some of the substantive good news stories that you might have missed in your algorithms, in your social media feeds, in your newsletters, wherever it is that you get your news.

These good news stories might not have filtered up and reached you. So, we’re going to go over some of those today. I’m actually flying solo today. Zachary is not with us. He is off in India. Our first story today comes from Wired. So we’ve talked before on this podcast about how it’s very difficult for bone marrow recipients to find a donor that matches them 100%, and there is a drug now that.

So, we’re Means that instead of finding a match that’s 100%, you can find someone that, let’s say, it’s 75 percent and that will work. So we’ve talked about improvements and innovations on this front before, but there’s actually another one today that I wanted to talk about. This is likely the first time, not for sure, but very likely the first time that a cancer patient has received a bone marrow transplant from a cadaver.

So let me tell you how this, how this works. This is a 68 year old black patient which matters because if you are somebody that is looking for bone marrow, your options right now are that you need to find a donor within your family, and if no one matches you within your family, you need to look on the registry of people who have voluntarily signed up to give their bone marrow.

That registry is not very diverse, so particularly if you are a minority patient, it can be quite difficult to find a match on the registry. So there is this startup that’s called Osseum that is trying to get around this issue by transplanting bone marrow from organ donors. So this is how it works. An organ donor, when they go in to harvest, for lack of a better term, all of the organs, you know, the liver, the heart, the kidney, all the things that you normally think of when you think of organ donors, they will now also take the bone marrow from this person through a spinal tap.

They take that bone marrow and then they freeze it. So they are trying to create a frozen bank of a diverse bone marrow options for patients who cannot find a donor match on the live registry. So that’s what happened with this patient. As I mentioned, the patient was black. They were able to find a bone marrow match.

for this person from an organ donor. They have done the transplant. The transplant went well. The patient is recovering. There were some post transplant complications, but nothing out of the ordinary. And so far, so good. So, osseum is what the startup is called. They are still in clinical trials. So we don’t know, it’s a little bit early to say this is a success or this is not a success.

But this is what their, their goal is to essentially take as much bone marrow as possible from organ donors and get that into the already existing system of what happens when an organ donor perishes and builds up a frozen bank that is kind of like a, you know, find your match for people in need of bone marrow.

And they’re on their way. So I, you know, if you can get over the creepy factor this is actually quite cool. It’s a literal lifesaver for this patient and might be for people in the future. And it’s all credit to Wired who produced this article. So that’s our number one science doing crazy things article for today.

I’m going to move on to Columbia. The country, not the university, which has outlawed child marriage after a 17 year campaign. So, you know, this one really hit me because, first of all, I mean, child marriage is sort of like a pet issue for me because it’s legal, stunningly legal in many places in the United States and many places in the world.

So, Colombia became, I believe, the 12th country in Latin America and the Caribbean to entirely ban marriage for minors. Previously, there was a loophole in the law where You could get married under 18 if you had parental consent, so they have closed that loophole and it is quite a serious issue in Colombia where they say about one in four girls and women in Colombia get married before the age of 18, so it’s fairly common.

It is one where I think it’s a great example of advocacy 17 year campaign. This legislation failed to pass the House and the Senate there, Eight times. So this was the ninth time that it was finally successful and clearly people didn’t give up. I think it’s something that’s important for us to remember going into the administration turnover now where there might be changes that people don’t like.

Do not give up. Be like the Colombians who did not give up even after 17 years and eight failed campaigns. So Happy 4 Columbia here. Of course, there’s always the issue when you’re talking about legislation, what the gap is going to be between the legislation and enforcement, but I do think, as we’ve said many times before, legislation is always the first step.

Let’s keep moving around the globe here, moving from Columbia to the Solomon Islands, where Scientists, well researchers, have found the world’s largest single piece of coral. Before that record used to belong to a coral in American Samoa, this new one is the size of two basketball courts. So it’s not a coral reef, which is many different corals together, this is just one single coral, but they didn’t know that it existed, which is the the first exciting thing that they found something that they didn’t know existed.

In fact, there are probably quite a A few of these are hiding in various places in the world because we’ve only really explored 5 percent of marine habitats, but yeah, this one was hiding in the deeper waters near the Solomon Islands. It is exciting in the sense that this coral seems to be very climate resilient.

It is probably centuries old. It has gone through warming water events in the past, so it might be just naturally resilient to heat or it might have adapted to be that way, which is a good sign for this particular coral. It doesn’t necessarily, it’s not like a huge find for the future of coral reefs.

which are more susceptible to bleaching because of warmer waters. It’s still a serious issue. It doesn’t fix that conservation problem, but it is exciting. It probably means that there are other corals like this out there that we are not aware of. And it’s massive. And it’s, it’s cool to look at. You can go on Vox.

This is where I’m pulling this information from. Just look up world’s biggest coral found, something like that. And you’ll see The photos and last piece of news for today. We’re really going all around the world as we tend to do. Let’s go to Africa. Let’s go to Gabon. The backstory is that the president of Gabon had been ruling the country for 41 years.

Their constitution had no term limits for president and after his 41 year tenure, Gabon year tenure, His son took over when the president died and people were very unhappy with the son and there was a military coup in the country about a year ago, so sometime in 2023. That worries people because as we know with military coups, you never really know what’s going to happen after that.

Are they going to keep power? What’s going to happen? So on and so forth. So There is a good sign because voters just voted through a new constitution for the country. It needed, you know, something like 50 percent to pass, and it passed with 90%. So people seem to be overwhelmingly excited by this. Part of the constitution is that it does introduce term limits.

It’s going to be seven years, and then with two terms. So after two terms, you are done. It also prohibits dynastic succession, which is the fancy way of saying it. When you die, your son just can’t claim the presidency because it’s your son. So they seem to be moving forward. Of course, this is just the first step of many.

We don’t know exactly where this is going. The military does seem open to putting this country onto a democratic route, a more functional democratic route, I should say. We’ll have to see how it goes. So that is our roundup. for today i hope you enjoyed the the wide variety of things that that we try to collect certainly things that don’t receive a huge amount of media attention and we hope that you will join us for our last episodes the first week of december after that we will be going on a break to prepare for the next season which will be out sometime in february so stay tuned We will have a break, or you guys will have a break from hearing from us, but I hope that you’ll join us again in February for an entirely new season.

So, until then, if you are in the US, have a very happy Thanksgiving, and we’ll see you on the other side of the tryptophan comas. So, thank you so much for listening, as always.