Beginning in 1980, scientists have been trying to find a solution to the progressing problem of organ transplants. Many concerns come with transplanting an organ into the body; the two major issues are a lack of donors and a high rejection rate. A proposed solution to the rising issue is growing artificial organs in a lab. As technology advances, researchers are becoming increasingly closer to successfully growing a functioning organ that can be transplanted into a human body.
When researchers first began the climb to successfully grow internal organs in a lab, many barriers needed to be overcome; the first being growing ticker tissues. In the article “Lab-Grown Organs Begin to Take Shape,” Robert Langer, inspired by the branching of seaweed, developed polymers that had a branching structure (Ferber 1999). Branching is a way to increase the surface area of the polymers, and therefore they can absorb more nutrients to grow thick and strong enough to support a complex organ. All progressions in tissue and organ engineering following Langer’s discovery used his branch structured polymers. His design led to the first man-made tissues, skin and cartilage, which were used in clinics. Langer’s discovery brought researchers closer to developing man-made, transplantable organs because he figured out a way to make basic tissues strong enough to grow into complex organs.
The next greatest step in the biomedical engineering of tissues was led by Laura Niklason and her research team from Yale University in 2009. By placing cells on a functioning lung, the team was able to grow lung tissue. The researchers used nine different types of cells and reported that all nine types grew to perform their appropriate task as part of the lung tissue. The ...
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The cells unique nature has scientists intrigued to do research with the focus of finding a way that these cells can be used to replace patients’ injured or diseased tissues. Advancement is made to all the three types of stem cells namely embryonic stem cells, adult stem cells in addition to induced pluripotent cells. Embryonic cells are the building blocks of an embryo that is developing, and can develop into almost all body cell types. Somatic cells are found in the body tissues. They renew and regenerate in healthy bodies. The third type which is induced pluripotent is genetically modified embryo cells from skin cells.2 Research on these cells are geared towards saving humanity; a noble course.
Thesis: I will explain the history of organ transplants, starting with ancient ideas before modern science until the 21st century.
Brendan Maher, in his article “How to Build a Heart” discusses doctor’s and engineer’s research and experimentation into the field of regenerative medicine. Maher talks about several different researchers in this fields. One is Doris Taylor, the director of regenerative medicine at the Texas Heart Institute in Houston. Her job includes harvesting organs such as hearts and lungs and re-engineering them starting with the cells. She attempts to bring the back to life in order to be used for people who are on transplant waiting lists. She hopes to be able to make the number of people waiting for transplants diminish with her research but it is a very difficult process. Maher says that researchers have had some successes when it comes to rebuilding organs but only with simples ones such as a bladder. A heart is much more complicated and requires many more cells to do all the functions it needs to. New organs have to be able to do several things in order for them to be used in humans that are still alive. They need to be sterile, able to grow, able to repair themselves, and work. Taylor has led some of the first successful experiments to build rat hearts and is hopeful of a good outcome with tissue rebuilding and engineering. Scientists have been able to make beating heart cells in a petri dish but the main issue now is developing a scaffold for these cells so that they can form in three dimension. Harold Ott, a surgeon from Massachusetts General Hospital and studied under Taylor, has a method that he developed while training. Detergent is pumped into a glass chamber where a heart is suspended and this detergent strips away everything except a layer of collagen, laminins, and other proteins. The hard part according to Ott is making s...
...velopment of tissues to replace damaged organs in the human body. Scientists have discovered for the first time how stem cells could be generated from embryo’s that were produced using adult stem cells.
In Andras Forgacs, “Leather and meat without killing animals” he explains an innovative way to biofabricate leather and meat products. Biofabrication is a process in which cells can be used to create biological materials like organs and tissues.
Carruth, Allison. Culturing Food: Bioart and In Vitro Meat." Parallax 19.1 (2013): 88-100. Print. The. Chiles, Robert.
“Transplanting animal organs into humans is feasible.” USA Today. November 1999: 54-55. Gehlsen, Gale M., Ganion, Larry R. and Robert Helfst.
The first organ transplants can be traced back to the ancient times where Ancient Greeks, Romans and Chinese myths features accounts of transplants accomplished by gods and healers which involves cadavers and animals though these claims were thought to be fictitious, Indian doctors may likely begun transplanting skin from one part of the body to another to repair wounds and burns around 800 B.C. It is during the 16th Century that Italian surgeon Gasparo Tagliacozzi, also referred to as the father of plastic surgery performed reconstruction of noses and ears by transplanting the patient’s own skin tissues from his arm to the patient’s nose and ears. He dis...
...Boland, Thomas Trusk, Gabor Forgacs, and Roger R. Markwald. Organ Printing: Computer-aided Jet-based 3D Tissue Engineering. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Nov. 2013.
Recent discoveries involving cloning have sparked ideas of cloning an entire human body (ProQuest Staff). Cloning is “the production of an organism with genetic material identical to that of another organism” (Seidel). Therapeutic cloning is used to repair the body when something isn’t working right, and it involves the production of new cells from a somatic cell (Aldridge). Reproductive cloning involves letting a created embryo develop without interference (Aldridge). Stem cells, if isolated, will continue to divide infinitely (Belval 6). Thoughts of cloning date back to the beginning of the twentieth century (ProQuest Staff). In 1938, a man decided that something more complex than a salamander should be cloned (ProQuest Staff). A sheep named Dolly was cloned from an udder cell in 1997, and this proved that human cloning may be possible (Aldridge). In 1998, two separate organizations decl...
One of the most beneficial aspects to cloning is the ability to duplicate organs. Many patients in hospitals are waiting for transplants and many of them are dying because they are not receiving a needed organ. To solve this problem, scientists have been using embryonic stem cells to produce organs or tissues to repair or replace damaged ones (Human Cloning). Skin for burn victims, brain cells for the brain damaged, hearts, lungs, livers, and kidneys can all be produced. By combining the technology of stem cell research and human cloning, it will be possible to produce the needed tissues and organs for patients in desperate need for a transplant (Human Cloning). The waiting list for transplants will become a lot shorter and a lot less people will have to suff...
Cloning is another new medical advance that allows for many great possibilites. Exact organ matches for organ transplants could be made through cloning. Animal...
The idea of organ transplants has been around for centuries, tracing back to myths by ancient Greeks and other early civilizations but people were unable to perform any surgeries for many years because they did not have the right technology and science to keep someone alive with a transplant. In the 1700’s, a Swiss naturalist, Abraham Trembley, observed the powers of organ regeneration in a tiny pond animal he called the hydra but could not do much with the information he gathered (Markovitz 98). It was in the early 1900’s when doctors started to try transplanting organs from one living thing to another. During this time, European doctors had patients dying of renal failure. In order to save them, they transplanted kidneys from different animals into them such as monkeys, pigs, and goats. Unfortunately, they were not successful and the patients never lived for more than a few days. Though organ transplants had not been successful, in 1905, Eduard Zirm, an Austrian ophthalmologist, was able to perform the world’s first corneal transplant. The procedure gave sight to a man who had been blinded in an accident. It was a good start to human transplants, but they were still a long way away. “In 1912, Alexis Carrell received a Nobel Prize for his work in the field. The French surgeon had developed methods for connecting blood vessels and conducted successful transplants on d...
...ll human organs and the systems that they belong to. "This would be the most revolutionary type of alternative, especially for human related experiments"().
A number of organs have the intrinsic ability to regenerate, a distinctive feature that varies among organisms. Organ regeneration is a process not fully yet understood however when its underlyning mechanism are unreveled, it holds tremendous therapeutic potential for humans. [28]