"Growing human hearts"--- great headline. And for a great first line, how about this? "As I type, 17 human hearts are currently forming and there is much anticipation as to whether they will beat."
This from a blog put out in the framework of the Independent, in the UK, and the author is Siva Nagararajah.
The work uses what's termed "whole organ decellularisation," which means taking an actual heart from a deceased donor, then washing out the original heart cells to "leave only a pale fibrous matrix--'a ghost heart.' That forms a scaffold on which stem cells are placed and left to --- hopefully--- grow and then beat.
The work was led by Dr. Doris Taylor. Commenting on other break-through research her team performed, she said --- very memorably, I think: “A member of the media asked me: ‘If it’s so simple, why someone hasn’t done it before?’ And what I realised was that no one had done it before because no one had believed it was possible.”
". . .no one had done it before because no one had believed it was possible.”
Which echoes The Life After Life Conspiracy. What comes to be in the fictional Hauenfelder Clinic is, I am convinced, not so very far ahead of what will be actual--- maybe not in mainstream labs, but likely in obscure labs in dictatorships, where legal and medical ethics are of no concern . . . as at Hauenfelder.
Actually, Dr. Taylor's work is one aspect of the larger field of regenerative medicine. As we've noted in other posts here, stem cells are being used in a variety of regenerative medicine labs, with other organs and human body parts under development. Also, in Dr. Taylor's lab in Wisconsin, and in others around the country and the world, chimeras (blends of human and other animals including chimps, rats, pigs and others) are being grown and tested.
Independent blogs: "Researchers on the verge of growing human hearts."