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….
Filed under: Science Rules
A new quarter, and just one class needed to fulfill the degree requirements. A protein engineering course. Now, you may be asking yo’self, what is an ME grad doing taking a Bioengineering protein engineering course with basically no background knowledge or experience? My response is that you need to mind your own business. With just one course hopefully I can get all my experiments I need to do done this semester. I hit a major milestone when my cells weren’t floating off like bitches.
Submitted a publishable abstract for a summer conference in Naples, Florida so I am excited for that trip, since A. maybe I can book via united and I’ll get some sweet mileage out of it, and B. the website for Naples makes it look inviting since it’s beachside, so maybe I’ll get to see a hurricane while drinking a hurricane.
Speaking of dry-clean only, I’m looking into getting a suit for this conference, so I’ll be dressed better than what I usually have on which is khaki’s and a polo. That shit’s undergrad level.
My favorite hip-hop song of all time:
Today 11 new stem cell lines were approved for use since the ban on new lines was lifted. As a recap, the ‘newest’ stem cells until now were still from 2001.
A big problem that was happening with the old cell lines were people were simply getting worse and worse quality cells to use as time went on, so this is a big step in spurring ALL research done with stem or un-differentiated cells.
A quick rundown on the cell preservation process:
1. grow cells out in some sort of nutrient media. This needs to be done quickly and with as little ‘doubling’ as possible, since there are always mutations with each iteration, and each iteration of doubling exponentially builds more and more of these mutated cells. You need to basically balance creating as many cells as you can, with time spent in a dish in an incubator being exposed to non-body like conditions and causing weird cell changes.
2.Freeze them down with a whole bunch of preservatives and stabilizers that would kill the cell normally
3. Hope you can keep ice-crystals from ripping the cells apart while they sit in cryo-preservation for 8+ years.
You see, this is just like the problems facing Darth Vader when he was trying to freeze Luke Skywalker, that’s why he tested it out on Han Solo first.
Imagine you were Leia Organa, beautiful princess of destroyed planet Alderaan, and there was no lifeform display on the side of the carbonite slab. The only way to check on Han’s status is to chip off part of him and thaw it. As you start chipping off parts of him, you have to locally thaw that area and parts of Han get damaged (hopefully not the roguish charm). Then, Boba Fett (The 2001 Stem Cell Ban) steals your carbonite frozen love-interest and stashes him in Slave I (National Stem Cell Databank). Meanwhile, Chewbacca (The National Institute of Health) is trying to rescue Han Solo with the help of Lando Calrissian (National Science Foundation) who initially didn’t put up enough of a fight because he’s a dirty double-crossing scoundrel. R2D2 (Congressional Vote on the 2001 bill) is still trying to locate a data port to open that damn blast door and help you all escape and chase after Han but gets shocked by a power inlet instead because C-3PO (George Bush) doesn’t know his sockets.
ITS ALL SO SIMPLE.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/12/02/new.stem.cells/index.html
