Monday, January 14, 2008

Heart grown in lab

Now this is cool. I just read this article about researchers who have successfully grown a rat heart in the lab, and were even able to get it to pump blood, albeit at a diminished rate.

Basically it sounds like they took an existing heart from a dead animal, and removed all the cells. From the remaining "mold" the injected new cells and the new cells took hold to the structure and started growing.

Here's the story from AP. Here's a more detailed NYTimes article.

Maybe lab grown replacement organs are not that far off?

1 comment:

tomlaureld@yahoo.com said...

That is cool. It might upset the folks in the bible belt but that is still OK.