In contrast to the continuously increasing success in kidney, liver, heart, and pancreas transplantation, small-bowel transplantation has not shown simi larly impressive progress until recently. The few clinical attempts at small-intestinal transplantation in the late 1960s and early 1970s were unsuccessful. In spite of these initial failures, a few groups of surgeons continued to investigate the problems of small-bowel transplantation from the technical, functional, and immunologic point of view. Now, about 15 years later, conditions have changed. Total parenteral nutrition has made...

Preclinical experimental transplantation research that is based on microsurgical models in rats fulfills two indispensable conditions for modern organ transplanta tion research: Almost all organ grafts can be performed on the rat with an amount of technical effort that is still justifiable. Thus transplantation models that are analogous to human organ transplantation can be developed, tested, and evaluated. This fulfills a necessary condition from the standpoint of surgery. With the species rat, we have a great variety of genetically different inbred strains. From the immunological point of...