Growing Replacement Organs

Sir Magdi Yacoub, a professor of cardiac surgery at Imperial College London, has succeeded in growing a human heart valve from stem cells. He believes that we will be able to grow an entire heart within 10 years. If this is possible for the heart then it must also be true for all of the other organs in the body. Organ replacement, though, is no substitute for healthy living. Hopefully when we achieve full organ replacement capabilities it will not have the secondary effect of causing people to live unhealthy lifestyles believing that they can just replace the parts when they go bad. I believe this would have negative social consequences if this were to happen. Now is the time to start thinking of ways to head off negative secondary effects while the technology is still in its infancy. Click here to read more about the discovery.

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