Researchers at the University of Minnesota were able to create a beating heart using the outer structure of one heart and injecting heart cells from another rat.
How it worked: Researchers made a shell of the dead rat's heart and filled up the mould with heart cells of another rat.
While this obviously raises ethical issues of whether or not we are playing God, it's amazing to see that we have actually created an artificial, living heart. What do you feel about this development? Although it's far off from actually being utilised for humans, one should keep in mind that coronaries diseases are the number one killers in America (dunno about other nations). Do you believe it's worth the effort to help patients that might not be able to recieve an organ transplant due to the scarcity of such organs? Or is it morally and ethically wrong to create life?
Also, I don't know whether or not stem cells were used ~ but it does mention that the heart cells were extracted from baby rats.
How it worked: Researchers made a shell of the dead rat's heart and filled up the mould with heart cells of another rat.
While this obviously raises ethical issues of whether or not we are playing God, it's amazing to see that we have actually created an artificial, living heart. What do you feel about this development? Although it's far off from actually being utilised for humans, one should keep in mind that coronaries diseases are the number one killers in America (dunno about other nations). Do you believe it's worth the effort to help patients that might not be able to recieve an organ transplant due to the scarcity of such organs? Or is it morally and ethically wrong to create life?
Also, I don't know whether or not stem cells were used ~ but it does mention that the heart cells were extracted from baby rats.