Growing a Heart…Unbelievable
January 20th, 2008 Posted by: admin
Well, I opened up firefox today to find my normal yahoo homepage running full screen. However, something that caught my attention was the main news section. It read, “Growing an organ in a jar.” Curious, I watched the video and read the article. The organ turned out to be a heart, specifically a rat’s. These scientists have found a way to take all the muscle cells out of a damaged heart, leaving behind only the matrix structure. They then injected stem cells back in, resulting in a “renovated” heart. The hearts have seemed to recuperate well and beat normally after 7-8 days. These scientists have also been successful in doing the same procedure with pig hearts. This means that we may be able to do the same, with the thousands of patients that need new hearts in our own nation. Even though the researchers have agreed that they have a long way to go, this may be a start of something great in the medical field. Heart Failure patients might even have something to look forward to. Here is a link to the article with the video.