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|| health & wellness | SCIENCE AND MEDICINE
Columbia University Medical Center in New York City
are making progress in growing lungs; bioengineers at
the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor have been able
to grow heart muscle tissue; and the Swiss scientists
Simon Hoerstrup and Dorthe Schmidt at the University
of Zurich have grown heart valves. A group led by
James Wells at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Med-
ical Center in Cincinnati, Ohio has grown three-dimen-
sional structures of the human stomach “in a test
tube,” and molecular biologists at the Genentech
Corporation in California have succeeded in grow-
ing a prostate. A group of Japanese scientists at
the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University led
by Thomas Cervantes grew an ear, while a group
Swiss scientists at the University of Zurich
has grown human skin threaded with blood
and lymphatic vessels.
ARTI:
The question is how to grow organs that
possess nerves and blood vessels ready to be
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installed into the body. And scientists have found an an-
swer to that question by proposing to grow human or-
gans inside the body of… an animal. The technology
has already been shaped: while a pig is still in embry-
onic form, a gene responsible for, say, kidney develop-
ment is turned on, and human stem cells are implanted.
The embryo’s immune system hasn’t yet developed,
and so the human cells establish them-
selves and develop into the pro-
grammed tissue or organ. The result
is an ordinary pig with human kid-
neys—kidneys suited to the person
whose cells were introduced into
the pig’s embryo at the very begin-
ning, and with already prepared
innervation and blood and
lymph supply. Thus a human
organ grown in the body of
a living pig will be com-
pletely ready to be trans-
planted and to function
when the need arrives.