Building a Better Human

From The Week: "In 20 years, we will have stem cell banks like pharmacies. You will get a specific diagnosis and take a specific type of stem cell. ... Meantime, scientists are using cells to produce pig hearts, rat livers, and mice teeth that grow independently in a lab. Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, grows human bladders, and has implanted more than two dozen of them in human patients since 2006. ... Hollow organs are easier to create than solid ones, but researchers have recently made strides with livers, hearts, and even lungs. Major challenges remain. But sometime in the future, scientists hope, humans will be able to mimic the processes that enable other animals to regenerate body parts. When a salamander loses a leg, it sprouts a new one. A zebra fish can even regenerate a portion of its heart. Humans can regenerate bones and skin, but like other higher species, lost the capacity to regrow limbs and organs during the process of evolution. By manipulating specific genes, scientists may turn this miraculous power back on. ... In a world in which aging or diseased people can swap a damaged heart, liver, or other organ for a new one created from their own DNA, a majority of children alive today might live to 100 or beyond. It's hard to know how far-reaching the effects might be because we're still only at the dawning of the biological revolution. But true believers have seen enough to predict changes of historical import. ... We're beginning to understand how life is coded and how life makes things. How we make things, where we make things, is going to change on a scale similar to that of the Industrial Revolution. It's already happening."

Link: http://theweek.com/article/index/206480/building-a-better-human

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