New vein made with stem cells

New vein made with stem cells

LONDON

For the first time, doctors successfully have transplanted a vein grown with a patient’s own stem cells, another example of scientists producing human body parts in the lab.

In this case, the patient was a 10-year-old girl in Sweden who was suffering from a severe vein blockage to her liver. Last March, the girl’s doctors decided to make her a new blood vessel to bypass the blocked vein instead of using one of her own or considering a liver transplant.

Metallica helps FBI in search for killer

WASHINGTON

Metallica has recorded a public-service video as part of a law-enforcement publicity blitz to try to catch a man wanted in the death of a Virginia Tech student who disappeared after leaving one of the heavy-metal band’s concerts.

Composite sketches of the suspect will be featured at bus shelters and on digital billboards up and down the East Coast, and a video on the Internet from lead singer James Hetfield urges people to come forward with tips and to contact police if they think they recognize the man. The FBI and Virginia State Police announced the campaign Wednesday.

Morgan Harrington, a 20-year-old aspiring teacher and Virginia Tech student, disappeared while attending an October 2009 concert in Charlottesville, Va. Her skeletal remains were discovered about three months later in a remote hay field about 10 miles from the concert venue.

Rock risk forces Yosemite closures

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif.

Falling boulders are the single biggest force shaping Yosemite Valley, one of the most-popular tourist destinations in the national park system. Now swaths of some popular haunts are closing for good after geologists confirmed that unsuspecting tourists and employees are being lodged in harm’s way. Today, the National Park Service will announce that potential danger from the unstable 3,000-foot-tall Glacier Point, a granite promontory that for decades has provided a dramatic backdrop to park events, will leave some of the valley’s most popular lodging areas permanently uninhabitable.

Ex-‘Goodfellas’ gangster Hill dies

LOS ANGELES

Henry Hill spent much of his life as a “goodfella,” believing his last moment would come with a bullet to the back of his head. In the end, he died at a hospital after a long illness, going out like all the average nobodies he once pitied. Hill, who went from small-time gangster to big-time celebrity when his life as a mobster-turned-FBI informant became the basis for the Martin Scorsese film “Goodfellas,” died Tuesday at age 69, longtime girlfriend Lisa Caserta told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Cops seek surgeon in woman’s death

BUFFALO, N.Y.

Police were searching for a trauma surgeon Wednesday as a “person of interest” in a fatal shooting at a Buffalo hospital and warned the public that the former Army Special Forces weapons expert may be armed and dangerous.

The morning shooting of a 33-year-old woman locked down the Erie County Medical Center complex for more than four hours. The woman was shot four times while in the stairwell of a hospital building.

A person familiar with the investigation said Jacqueline Wisniewski, a receptionist at the hospital and the mother of a young son, was killed.

Police later blocked a road leading to Dr. Timothy Jorden’s home in an isolated area of private Lake View residences near the Lake Erie shore.

Associated Press