The Swede Alfred Nobel (1833-1896) was the inventor of dynamite and the instigator of the Nobel Prizes. Though he was a keen cyclist, back then there were no helmets for head protection. You’ve probably heard the riddle that goes: What do you call an unhelmeted cyclist riding at night? An organ donor. Organ donation, and thus transplantation, is a wonderful medical advance. But one of its major stumbling blocks is rejection of the transplant by the recipient – because the tissue match wasn’t accurate enough and the immunosuppressant medication wasn’t effective enough. Last weekend I was talking with my friend Maya in Ottawa when, for a reason I can’t recall but maybe had to do with Tasmanian Devil facial tumour disease, she mentioned the angler fish (pictured). When the male angler fish finds a female, he bites into her skin and releases an enzyme that digests the skin of his mouth and her body, fusing the pair down to the blood-vessel level. The male then atrophies into a mere pair of gonads which release sperm to fertilise the female’s egg. This is equivalent to a transplant, yet there’s no rejection. Amazing. Solving this angler fish puzzle would undoubtedly shed light on human transplant rejection. And the person who solves it would be a shoo-in for a Nobel Prize.
