Towards Tissue Engineered Livers
Randall Parker comments on a recent advance in engineering liver tissue: "We cannot build a fullsized liver yet. That will take about 10 years. But this is the first important step. We expect this to really take off in the next 18 months or so. ... Livers are relatively simpler things to grow than 3 dimensionally more complex structures such as hearts and kidneys. So I'm expecting we'll see replacement livers before replacement hearts or kidneys. ... For a number of types of organs replacement to treat cancer might end up saving more lives than replacement due to accidents and other diseases. Got pancreatic cancer? Replace it. Got kidney cancer? Replace it. ... If a cancer is still contained within a single organ then an excellent solution might some day be to just replace that whole organ. ... We can develop the technology to grow replacement parts for just about every part of the body and this can be accomplished within the lifetimes of most of the people reading this. So why aren't we trying much harder?"