内容摘要：Doctors already know that heart attacks, especially severe ones, are a bit more common on Mondays generally — and in the morning, when blood is more clot-prone.

Doctors already know that heart attacks, especially severe ones, are a bit more common on Mondays generally — and in the morning, when blood is more clot-prone.

In Palm Springs, California, Carl McNew emailed NYU to ask about volunteering while he’s still fairly healthy.McNew donated a kidney to his husband in 2015 but later his remaining kidney began declining, something very rare in living donors. Medications and intermittent dialysis are helping but McNew knows he’ll eventually need a transplant.

Carl McNew watches television with his husband Steve Hunter in Palm Springs. (AP Photo/Shelby Lum)Carl McNew watches television with his husband Steve Hunter in Palm Springs. (AP Photo/Shelby Lum)“There’s just something about being part of something like that, that is so cutting-edge,” said McNew, who spotted news of NYU’s xenotransplant research in 2023 and emailed his interest.

For Louisville’s Berrios, donor scarcity isn’t the only hurdle. Born with a single kidney that failed in his late 20s, a living donor transplant restored his health for 13 years. But it failed in 2020 and he has since developed antibodies that would destroy another human kidney, what doctors call “highly sensitized.”Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Berrios quietly slips out of his home before dawn to spend nearly four hours tethered to a dialysis machine. Getting the grueling treatments at 5 a.m. is the only way the father of two can both stay alive and hold down a fulltime job.

But dialysis doesn’t fully replace kidney function – people slowly get sicker. So even as Berrios tried an experimental therapy to tamp down his problem antibodies, he told NYU he’s interested in a pig kidney.

FDA rules require that pig organs be extensively tested in monkeys or baboons before humans. And while researchers have extended those primates’ survival to a year, sometimes longer, they were desperate for experience with people. After all, the pig organs are genetically altered to be more humanlike, not more baboon-like.Gervase Ndyanabo, a prominent lay leader in Uganda, said there should be more participation of the laity and women in the administration of parishes and decision-making at all levels. Progress, he said, has come “at a snail’s speed.”

Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, left, and Cardinal George Pell wait for the arrival of Pope Francis in St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican, June 29, 2015. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia, File)Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, left, and Cardinal George Pell wait for the arrival of Pope Francis in St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican, June 29, 2015. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia, File)

An anonymous letter circulated among Vatican officials in 2022, highlighting what it called Francis’ “disastrous” pontificate and what a new pope must do correct thehe had wrought. Its author was Australian Cardinal George Pell, but that fact emerged only after his death in 2023. Once a close adviser to Francis but always conservative, Pell grew increasingly disillusioned with his papacy, signing the letter with the pen name, “Demos” — the common people.