Filed under: Science Rules
I went to an interesting talk by Dr. Anthony Atala over spring break. Double A, as he’s known in the scientific community, is pretty much the foremost and most successful tissue engineer ever. He holds such records as first lab-grown organ implanted into a human, and basically popularizing scaffolding to grow quasi-stem cells on.
Some interesting tidbits:
-Science can grow entire bladders, kidneys, heart valves, arteries, and a plethora of organ cells outside of the body now
-amniotic fluid basically should be saved in order to store these valuable cells for a baby’s future.
-We need to get about 100,000 different lines of cells, then we can cover 99% of the population with cells that won’t get rejected when implanted
Due to the shortage of organ supply from donors, and the high probability of organ rejection, we need to invest in these banks of cells as a hedge that we’ll discover the silver bullet that will enable us to grow fully usable matched tissue for people.
What’s crazy is that we’re now able to grow simple organs outside of the body. At the same time, there’s the other arm of science making entirely synthetic replacements like artificial hearts, replacement joints, and mechanical limbs, and at some point we’ll have both organic and tech theories functioning and practical.
Basically I think eventually we’ll have super-strong low-orbit capable robot exoskeletons holding a organic core supplied with an endless genetically-enhanced disease-impervious supply of super organs. Yea, ladies will dig that.
Fitting with this theme, and since Iron Man 2 is coming out….
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