Future of Organ Regeneration Addressed by Anthony Atala
Our friend and scientific advisory board member Anthony Atala of the Wake Forest University for Medicine discussed the advances of regenerative medicine in the fourth installment of The University of Rhode Island's Honors Colloquium. The lecture began with a progress report for the new field of regenerative medicine and, reminding the audience that it was only in a few decades ago in 1954 that surgeons transplanted an organ into a human for the first time in history, it's astonishing that as 2012 quickly approaches, medical science has progressed to allow organs such as kidneys, uteruses, bladders, urethras, and even the skin to regrow.
He outlined the process a surgeon goes through to regenerate an organ--the easiest organs being flat, such as the skin. For the larger, tubular organs such as the kidney and liver, that happens to be a different, much more difficult ball game.
For skin regeneration, the surgeon simply extracts a bit of cells the size of less than half a postage stamp from the patient. Then, after being mixed with a solution to keep the cells alive, the cells are then sprayed back onto the patient. Should the patient be immobile, he would be scanned by a machine and his cells delivered to a bio-printer. The printer would produce a sticky sheet of gel cells to be administered to the patient to help regenerate his skin.
Nearing the end of his presentation, Atala played a short clip of an interview with former patient Luke M., whose surgery was performed 10 years ago. A new bladder was engineered for him out of his own cells. Prior to the operation, he said he was faced with a lifetime of dialysis. He could barely get out of bed, constantly missed school, and couldn't play basketball with his friends without feeling faint.
"After surgery, I was able to do more things, like wrestle in high school," said Luke, proudly. "I even became captain of the team. Because they used my own cells to build this bladder, I got it for life. So I'm all set."
Atala reminded the audience how 50 years ago, the iron lung was thought to be revolutionary technology. Now, we look back on it and think "Boy, wasn't that primitive?" The goal of medical science is to keep pushing forward and breaking boundaries, he said, so that in the next 50 years, people can look back on his technology and find it primitive as well.
"My goal tonight was to make this look easy to you," he stated. "But I assure you, the work we do is anything but easy. We still have many challenges ahead, but the promise this field holds is to try and make our patients better."
Reference:
Delande, Kimberly. "Colloquium Speaker Addresses Future of Organ Regeneration through Technology." The Good 5¢ Cigar. College Media Network, 5 Oct. 2011. Web. 6 Oct. 2011.
http://www.ramcigar.com/colloquium-speaker-addresses-future-of-organ-regeneration-through-technology-1.2630806#.ToyEoJxZhG8.
Comments
Aging Is Also An E/m Matter,
Like each and all things in the universe.
A.
There is neither alchemy nor mystery in aging. Aging, like everything else in the universe, is an E/m, energy/mass, matter.
The universe is a two-poles affair. It evolves cyclically between two poles: an all-mass Big-Bang pole and a nearly-all-energy pole. Presently all the singularity mass is reconverting to energy, to energy that drives apart the galaxies clusters. In the energy-mass dualism mass thus diminishes as energy increases and the speed of separating clusters is, in accordance with Newton, accelerating.
Since thus every mass format, the totality of its components, are destined to reconvert to energy, the format must continuously take in energy or mass to postpone its own constitutional reconversion events. The in-takers of energy range from the biggest black hole to the smallest particle, including living organisms. This is what “natural selection” is all about. Natural selection is about ALL the E/m reconversions in the universe.
B.
See “ Aging Seen Without The Emperor’s New Clothes”
March 9, 2009
http://ouroboros.wordpress.com/2009/02/18/the-link-between-protein-synthesis-and-mitochondrial-degradation-and-towards-a-unified-mechanism-of-aging/#comment-4750
C.
Slowing aging is postponing of mass reconversion(s) event(s) of organisms, including the organisms genes/genomes, and/or of the other system’s components.
About time that “scientists” refresh conceptions and comprehensions and attitudes and research plans and anti-subversion peer-reviewing. Let their science evolve…
Dov Henis
(comments from 22nd century)
http://universe-life.com/
tags: aging, longevity, naturalselection
Posted by: Dov Henis | October 25, 2011 4:52 AM