Today the rat's lung, tomorrow yours
Saturday, July 10, 2010 at 12:03AM 
WSJ story on latest in a series of “groundbreaking experiments in the burgeoning field of regenerative medicine,” involving the creation in a lab of lungs for a rat (and I mean a real rat and not some Wall Street banker!).
Described as a “small but tantalizing step,” you have to think that doing this for a rat can’t be all that different than for a human—scale yes, but complexity not so much. When transplanted into the rates, the lungs exchanged oxygen for CO2 just like they’re supposed to do.
Impressive.
Other labs have already done livers and hearts, to varying degrees of success.
Right now over 100k Americans are on waiting lists for organ transplants (kidneys #1, then livers, then lungs).
To me, this is the most crucial part of life-extending technologies—not so much the super-extension of a few but the rescuing of a lot of people cut down in the primes and thus allowed to live far longer lives than they otherwise would have been able to.
Reader Comments (2)
Tom,
I expect that "regen" biotech will be common place in the next few decades. If it can be made cheap and accessible we should all give thought to the changes society. I might see it. My kids almost certainly will. Pretty cool stuff.
"and I mean a real rat and not some Wall Street banker!" Ha!
This is the stuff I love, outside of conflict, security and the other stuff I spend a lot of time thinking about, its the sci-fi/sci-reality that I really enjoy. It's the stuff of hope and possibility. The idea that what defeats us in the area of health today might be something we look back at a sneer at and say remember when that was a real worry for us.