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[Senn Typhos]

I saw this on NatGeo, in a segment about lab-grown, living tissue and the potential for bioreactors to grow working organs. This is the "skin gun," which in a test of its applicability managed to heal a severe burn in days. Whereas skin grafts are fragile, and take weeks to grow, the procedure healed extensive second-degree burns in four days on this patient.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXO_ApjKPaI

Included in the description is a link to the NatGeo site, which shows a picture of the bioreactor mentioned before. Through a procedure using this device, scientists managed to extract the heart of a rat (not pictured, that one's human), remove everything but the bare, translucent tissue, coat the remaining tissue in living stem cells, and "train" the cells to expand and contract via electric stimulation. At the end of the process - and this is where I REALLY regret I can't find a clip from the show - the rat's heart was able to be jolted with an electric shock, and began beating on its own, without an external electric current feeding it.

I'm no expert on science, so you'll have to go research yourselves, or try to find the episode online. But, suffice to say, it looks like a step forward for artificial growth of working human tissue. Probably nothing we'll see in the next two decades, but its positive evidence, at least.

[Akrasjel Lanate]

It's blocked.

[Milo Caman]

This video contains content from National Geographic, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds.

Well there goes my NG subscription.

[Kybernetes Moros]

I think this is the same video, based on the description?

(You can also see the skin-related one if you click the image just below it.)

[Valdezi]

I grew one myself recently, but using a more old-fashioned method.

Here he is, wearing his awesome hat:

[spoiler][/spoiler]

[hellgremlin]

I grew one myself recently, but using a more old-fashioned method.

Here he is, wearing his awesome hat:

[spoiler][/spoiler]

Needs a caption. Something like "I CAN SEE FOREVER" in 72pt impact.

[Senn Typhos]

Yeah, but you didn't grow him in a glass jar with wires and stuff. So, thats way less cool. :/

But kudos.

[Valdezi]

Needs a caption. Something like "I CAN SEE FOREVER" in 72pt impact.

I was thinking something like: "STEVE, I THINK YOU GOT THE CRAZY EYE!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2Ufjpb8UOY

[scagga]

I saw this on NatGeo, in a segment about lab-grown, living tissue and the potential for bioreactors to grow working organs. This is the "skin gun," which in a test of its applicability managed to heal a severe burn in days. Whereas skin grafts are fragile, and take weeks to grow, the procedure healed extensive second-degree burns in four days on this patient.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXO_ApjKPaI

Included in the description is a link to the NatGeo site, which shows a picture of the bioreactor mentioned before. Through a procedure using this device, scientists managed to extract the heart of a rat (not pictured, that one's human), remove everything but the bare, translucent tissue, coat the remaining tissue in living stem cells, and "train" the cells to expand and contract via electric stimulation. At the end of the process - and this is where I REALLY regret I can't find a clip from the show - the rat's heart was able to be jolted with an electric shock, and began beating on its own, without an external electric current feeding it.

I'm no expert on science, so you'll have to go research yourselves, or try to find the episode online. But, suffice to say, it looks like a step forward for artificial growth of working human tissue. Probably nothing we'll see in the next two decades, but its positive evidence, at least.

Pretty cool stuff.

I think it is important to emphasise that the process required stem cells, which at a certain stage are able to adapt to virtually any cell line.  To demystify the bit about the automaticity of the heartbeat - a living heart generates the electric impulse to pump by itself (the rate of which is modulated by other feedback loops), i.e. it does not require an external electric current. 

I would see it as conceivable that stem-cell based organ manufacturing could become workable within the timeframe you suggest.  Recent experiments this year have successfully implanted a cell nucleus into a de-nucleated recipient cell, creating a new working cell.  That could also be of further interest - imagine loading cells with spools of your DNA?

[Senn Typhos]

What really amazed me was the simple description; reanimation of a dead organ.

Again, I can't quite understand the difference between the cells inside the "scaffold" of an organ, and the scaffold itself. But its shocking to think that an organ can be stripped of its living cells, made into a blank slate, and repopulated with cells from a different donor. For all intents and purposes that heart was "dead" before the procedure.

What would this mean for organ donors, I wonder? Or people on dialysis? Would there be potential to cure a genetic defect this way, or would the patient's DNA make the same mistake twice, so to speak?

[Kybernetes Moros]

To take the example you just gave of a kidney, this kind of thing would be ideal if renal failure were caused by, say, overuse of aspirin / ibuprofen / any one of a collection of other drugs, or even if it were the result of infection by, for the sake of argument, hantavirus if the infection could be completely contained or, ideally, eradicated ahead of time. They grow an undamaged kidney using the patient's cells, perform a transplant as usual and hey presto, as best I can tell.

If it's the result of a genetic defect directly causing the problem, it'd be different -- they could grow a kidney from the patient's cells, put it back in, and while it might work for a time depending on the nature of the defect the fact remains that the cause of the renal failure / disease / whatever is still there. If the regrown kidney were to undergo gene therapy that remedied the defect, however, it's possible that it'd then be 'safe' to introduce to the patient's body.

That said, I'm not a biologist; everything I said could have been complete nonsense (though it seems to synch fairly well with what I'm reading about it).

[DosTuMai]

I can grow a human in my belleh. x3

[Senn Typhos]

But its NOT with a glass jar and a bunch of wires, how many times do I have to explain this to you kids? >:U

[orange]

But its NOT with a glass jar and a bunch of wires, how many times do I have to explain this to you kids? >:U

Which is less umm... "creepy" than the way the Tleilaxu do it in Dune. 

[Seriphyn]

Blocked grr...damn communist, socialist, fascist, corporatist, pigdog, capitalist, terrorist Islamist bastards