Scientists Can Now Grow a Beating Human Heart from Stem Cells

Indy100.com   by Louis Dore in tech  January 2017

A team of scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School have used adult skin cells to regenerate functional human heart tissue.

The study, published in the journal Circulation Research, detailed that the team took adult skin cells, using a technique called messenger RNA to turn them into pluripotent stem cells, before inducing them to become two different types of cardiac cells.

Then for two weeks …

Sperm and Eggs Grown in a Petri Dish Could Revolutionise Reproduction

Michael Cook  BioEdge  Jan 14, 2017

 

The imminent arrival of eggs and sperm grown from skin cells makes legislative change imperative, three Ivy League professors argue in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

IVF was a game-changing technology, write Glenn Cohen, of Harvard Law School, George Q. Daley, of Harvard Medical School, and Eli Y. Adashi, of Brown University, but IVG – in vitro gametogenesis – could revolutionise reproduction.

Although at the moment IVG has …

Scientists Create a Part-Human, Part-Pig Embryo — Raising the Possibility of Interspecies Organ Transplants

Washington Post Jan 26, 2017  Sarah Kaplan

For the first time, scientists have grown an embryo that is part-pig, part-human.

The experiment, described Thursday in the journal Cell, involves injecting human stem cells into the embryo of a pig, then implanting the embryo in the uterus of a sow and allowing it to grow. After four weeks, the stem cells had developed into the precursors of various tissue types, including heart, liver and neurons, and …