The wife is stoked: researchers at the University of Minnesota have engineered a bioartificial heart. That's right. The era of organ farming is at hand, and for those of us with Gordian masses of writhing vipers instead instead of hearts, this is great news!
By using a process called "whole organ decellularization" scientists have proven beyond all doubt that they should never be allowed to speak in anything but maths and advanced programming languages. But, ridiculous grammar aside, this process is nothing short of astonishing. The anti-stem cell folks should be placated by now, simply because this looks so much like a miracle that Yahweh has to have had a hand in it. Yahweh or Dr. Frank-N-Furter, it isn't clear.
If anyone saw the controversial Bodies Exhibit, in which preserved Chinese cadavers of contested origin were leeched of their water and lipid content and injected with polymers for display, this is a similar process. 
Except, instead of injecting the surviving non-lipid matrix with polymers, the U. Minn. folks inject it with stem cells.
Specifically, the researchers took the dead, preserved heart of a pig and chemically rinsed the cells of their dead interiors. Then they forced pig stem cells into the empty scaffolding. By assuring that the stem cells had entirely populated the lattice, plopping it all in a nutrient bath, and then simply waiting 8 days, the researchers created a beating heart. I wish I'd been in the room with that intern, because after she shook several turds of astonishment out of her pantsuit leg, I know she got tanked and started singing, "In just 8 days I can make you a heart, man!"
The implications are revolutionary; let not my whimsy distract you from this. Says Dr. Doris Taylor of the U. of M. Center for Cardiovascular repair and director of the project: "It opens the notion that we can make any organ. At first we focused on the heart, but our hope is that if you need it, we can make it." Taylor again: "We are certainly several years away, but not tens of years away [from a human transplant trial]."
Check this video for an incredible little window in on the U. Minn. genius in process:
Oh, I mean here.
Nobel Prize anyone? I don't know about you guys, but I've got my $4.25 a blog post and complementary lime-green Tic-Tacs on Dr. Taylor.
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