http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/48976348/ns/health-mens_health/#.UFAyLFHkpfw

Awesome stuff. Growing ears, bladders, male six organs (so ridiculous that the word is censored), skin, muscles ... Curing ALS, blindness ...

Every few months I read a new article and I'm awestruck by the advances being made. I don't think I can get used to how amazing this all is, ever.

Science! [censored] yeah!

But Stem Cell research is evil!

Too true.
Stem cell research could have saved my Mother.
That's neither politics nor is it ethics. It's simply an empirical fact.

I heard something the other day where you make them specialize by putting them into a kind of grid of a certain shape, e.g. square, circle, triangle. So you can make e.g. new cartilage for a hip replacement. The question is why this happens this way. They don't really know.

There is one theory that life evolved with "cell walls" made of some fractal porous mineral structure, like a volcanic rock or something, I don't remember. I guess the cell takes into account the shape of its surroundings as additional information as to what it should become. The DNA has a boot sequence in it somewhere maybe.

Think of how you get a cut and how the skin mends itself, I think its something around that.

That's amazing.

Will this stop people from goinnbg to China to buy "black market" organs?

Depends what kind of stem cells we're talking about, and the person making the classification.

Eventually, ya. I know that the most complex thing that's potentially viable at the moment is growing lungs. The only problem scientists still have there is that sometimes the cells metastasize. They've grown and transplanted rat lungs, from those rats' own cells, and the resulting lungs have 95% of the efficiency of a fully healthy set.

Livers are too complex at the moment, but we're slowly getting there. And although there have been some small experiments done with brain tissue any real developments there will probably take decades; which isn't really a problem, because medicine isn't concerned with transplanting brains, but with curing ailments, which just requires stem cell therapy, which doesn't take nearly as much research and effort as organ growth.

That seems far from the only potential use; repair of neural damage would be a pretty big thing.

If you get a tamping rod through your head like Phineas Gage, it can change who you are. If you had the lesion repaired with stem cells, they would wire up all different to how they were before. So you might get back mental functionality, but not be quite the same person...

Yup, you can't stop science

It really is amazing what humanity is able to accomplish nowadays. Robots on Mars, growing spare parts for humans... That was all science fiction not too long ago. And what is science fiction now will be reality not too long from now.

It wouldn't surprise me though if people in a place like China set up baby farms, abort them and then harvest their stem cells. I could see that being a reality unless it already is.

If this isn't proof that the future is bright for those whom choose to make it so, than I don't know what is. All these people saying how our world is doomed and crap really need to take a look at articles like these.

I haven't had a chance to read the article posted. I will though.

The last time I remember learning about these things, artificial organs grown couldn't compete with donor organs. Diddnt come close. This was 2 years ago about. Not sure if the competitiveness between the two improved.

That would not be cost effective. It is better to farm them directly in culture.

As for the world ending, global warming is off topic.