This is amazing stuff. The stem cells are able to do amazing things; basically it tells the body to rebuild or regenerate; it’s a fountain of youth- if they get that far.
Who’s to say that rubbing stem cells on a burn victim will recover 90% of their original tissue. Or using it help soldiers re-generate limbs lost in combat zones.
They’ve already used it to re-generate whole fingers, but I think it’s best uses are yet to come. The ability to fool the human body in to thinking something, other than reality, is/can be a good thing.
It’s very fascinating.
Harald C. Ott, of Massachusetts General Hospital, said: "When we saw the first contractions, we were speechless.
"We just took nature's building blocks to build a new organ."
His team took a dead rat's heart and stripped it of all its cells, leaving only the essential structure of chambers, valves and the blood vessels.
They added stem cells from baby rats and placed the organ in a laboratory.
Four days later, it began contracting. And eight days later, it started pumping, a report in the journal NatureMedicine said.
The experiment could open a new field of heart repair.
Surgeons could take a donated dead organ, renew it with the patient's own cells and then patch it on to a damaged heart.
It would overcome the dangers of rejection because the body will not reject its own cells.
