for all those people that think that we can grow a heart in vitro any time soon:
Nature 421, 884 - 886 (2003)
Tissue engineering: The beat goes on
some quotes:
Perhaps it was just millennial hubris, but in 1999 the world seemed full of enthusiasm for science and technology. The NASDAQ high-tech stock market was booming; the Human Genome Project was racing towards completion. And one group of scientists was talking up a plan to grow a fully functioning heart in the lab, starting with a culture of human cells in a petri dish. All they needed was ten years, plus about US$5 billion, and our worries about the shortage of organ donors would be over.
The initiative, known as Living Implants from Engineering (LIFE), would rival the Human Genome Project in scale and in its potential to change medical practice. But four years later, LIFE has lost its lustre. The grand project remains largely unfunded, and functions mainly as a loose coalition of researchers who share their findings at meetings. "LIFE collapsed into the form of a club," admits its chief visionary, Michael Sefton of the University of Toronto in Canada."
"In retrospect, Sefton concedes that LIFE's ten-year timescale was unrealistic. "We were trying to capture the attention of the public," he admits. He now thinks that it may be 25 years before a patient receives a lab-grown heart, and refuses to speculate on the price tag. But he is still pursuing funding, and remains convinced that the project could produce tangible results within ten years. "We could probably have something that could work crudely," Sefton claims. "Not something ready to transplant into patients, but something you could hold in your hand."
and those 25 years is probably bullshit
Nature 421, 884 - 886 (2003)
Tissue engineering: The beat goes on
some quotes:
Perhaps it was just millennial hubris, but in 1999 the world seemed full of enthusiasm for science and technology. The NASDAQ high-tech stock market was booming; the Human Genome Project was racing towards completion. And one group of scientists was talking up a plan to grow a fully functioning heart in the lab, starting with a culture of human cells in a petri dish. All they needed was ten years, plus about US$5 billion, and our worries about the shortage of organ donors would be over.
The initiative, known as Living Implants from Engineering (LIFE), would rival the Human Genome Project in scale and in its potential to change medical practice. But four years later, LIFE has lost its lustre. The grand project remains largely unfunded, and functions mainly as a loose coalition of researchers who share their findings at meetings. "LIFE collapsed into the form of a club," admits its chief visionary, Michael Sefton of the University of Toronto in Canada."
"In retrospect, Sefton concedes that LIFE's ten-year timescale was unrealistic. "We were trying to capture the attention of the public," he admits. He now thinks that it may be 25 years before a patient receives a lab-grown heart, and refuses to speculate on the price tag. But he is still pursuing funding, and remains convinced that the project could produce tangible results within ten years. "We could probably have something that could work crudely," Sefton claims. "Not something ready to transplant into patients, but something you could hold in your hand."
and those 25 years is probably bullshit
