Scientists Sucessfully Grow Heart in Lab
By Heather Sells
CBN News
January 15, 2008
CBNNews.com - There's new hope for the five million people in the United States who live with heart failure. Scientists say they have been able to grow a rat heart in a lab. They were also successful at getting it to start beating.
For more on the ethical questions involved in this technique, watch David Christensen, from the Family Research Council, following this report.
About 50,000 people die each year waiting for a heart donor. But that all may change thanks to a rat heart, built by scientists at the University of Minnesota.
"Everyone has cells," Dr. Doris Taylor told CBN News. "What's lacking is a way to put that together in a 3-D structure that lets you create an organ," she explained.
Taylor calls the challenge the 'holy grail' of tissue engineering. But then she got her "crazy idea" and made not just a heart, but history.
"It was one of those 'wow' moments," she said.
Heart Cells
Taylor and her team took the heart of a dead rat and washed it out. They were left with a gelatin-like shell. They injected that shell with heart cells from a baby rat. A few weeks later, the heart actually began to beat.
"Give nature the tools and get out of the way," Taylor said.
But will this procedure work in humans?
"We've been able to do this with a pig heart and a pig heart is the same size as a human heart," Taylor explained. "It's really not at all outside the realm of possibility."
Playing God?
Taylor says all sorts of replacement organs are possible, which means Americans might no longer have to endure agonizing waits when their hearts or lungs or kidneys give out.
However, plenty of obstacles remain - including questions of ethics.
"Who plays God?," asked Dr. Glen McGee of the American Journal of Bioethics. "I mean really, are we going to create bodies that can go for a 150 to 200 years? When you start to fix a heart, you are headed in that direction," he said.
There may be a great deal of time to answer such questions. Scientists believe it will be at least ten years before they can begin to create viable organs for humans, if they can accomplish that feat at all.
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