Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind from how stop
Speaker 1: works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I am Christian Sager. Hey, Robert,
Speaker 1: would you eat an artificially grown organ? Well? The phrase
Speaker 1: is a number of questions, doesn't it is it? Is
Speaker 1: it an animal organ, a human organ? Let's say it's uh,
Speaker 1: let's say it's an animal organ for now. Let's say
Speaker 1: it's chicken. It's a chicken. It's just a slab of chicken. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it's been nice and um fried up. It's covered
Speaker 1: in in juicy oils and breading, and there's some butter
Speaker 1: and spices on there. But you know this didn't come
Speaker 1: from a real chicken. It was grown in a lab. Okay,
Speaker 1: So on one level, I don't have to worry about
Speaker 1: I was the chicken humanely raised? How did it live?
Speaker 1: How did it die? A was it's diet? Yeah? These
Speaker 1: were just grown from cells scraped off a chicken. Okay.
Speaker 1: But then I have to worry about that side of it.
Speaker 1: This is something artificial. It's something that has been grown
Speaker 1: in a vat or or or grown over some scaffolding.
Speaker 1: As well to discussing this episode. So how am I
Speaker 1: supposed to feel about that? And then how am I
Speaker 1: supposed to feel about eating needed all in this scenario?
Speaker 1: Is it? Is it worth it? Why am I going
Speaker 1: to these means, uh, these extremes to eat this food
Speaker 1: to get this protein when I could conceivable we get
Speaker 1: it from something that is a little less uh Frankensteiny
Speaker 1: if you will. Yeah, and it raises a lot of questions,
Speaker 1: a lot of Frankensteiny questions, as we're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: throughout this episode today. We are talking about artificial organs
Speaker 1: fresh from the vat, grown grown in a vat. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this is sort of a spinoff from our penis
Speaker 1: transplant episode because we ended and said, wow, there was
Speaker 1: some research on artificially grown penises and vaginas and we
Speaker 1: wish we had time to cover that, and we said,
Speaker 1: let's just build a whole episode out of that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it it actually follows nicely an episode that I
Speaker 1: recorded with Joe that I think we'll publish directly before
Speaker 1: this one that tackles the synthetic biology area from at
Speaker 1: a more of a genetic genomic level. Yeah. Well, and
Speaker 1: it's I mean, it's fascinating what we can do, uh,
Speaker 1: and and also what we can't do. So we're gonna
Speaker 1: sort of walk you the listener through, you know, the
Speaker 1: general process, and then we're gonna go organ by organ
Speaker 1: through the human body as to what we can actually
Speaker 1: grow and potentially transplant. And at the end, I'm going
Speaker 1: to try to keep track of this on a piece
Speaker 1: of paper as we're going along here. And at the
Speaker 1: end we're going to talk about what are artificially grown
Speaker 1: Frankenstein looks like, like, what parts are we pretty close
Speaker 1: to being able to sew together here for our Frankenstein? Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're going to provide we're potentially going to provide a
Speaker 1: scaffolding of knowledge here that you may grow your own.
Speaker 1: But but I think it's it's cool to sort of
Speaker 1: take it piece by piece. And because this is how
Speaker 1: science works, right, scale by scale we build out the
Speaker 1: entire picture, and it's important to Let's let's get two
Speaker 1: things out of the way before we dive into the vat. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's the first is that you know some of you
Speaker 1: are probably asking why would we need to grow organs
Speaker 1: in a vat? Why why would we even do that
Speaker 1: unless you're a mad scientist. Well, biomaterials are historically used
Speaker 1: to replace diseased or damaged tissues. So you know, if
Speaker 1: somebody's got a bad ticker or kidney or lung or whatever,
Speaker 1: wouldn't be great if you could just swap in another
Speaker 1: one that you grew in tank, rather than getting a
Speaker 1: donation from somebody else, Which leads me to, uh, the
Speaker 1: how organ transplantation works aspect of this as well. Now
Speaker 1: we don't have time in this episode to cover it,
Speaker 1: but if you haven't listened to our penis transplant episode,
Speaker 1: we cover pretty much the whole process, not just penises,
Speaker 1: but for all organ transplants. At the beginning of that episode,
Speaker 1: you know how how you go about finding a donor
Speaker 1: the immuno suppressive of medicine that's required all of that
Speaker 1: bone marrow transplants. So we're not going to really do
Speaker 1: a deep dive on that today, but keep in mind
Speaker 1: a lot of the same principles apply here. Yeah, indeed,
Speaker 1: and just to drive them, two of the just key
Speaker 1: sobering facts here is that a there's a worldwide shortage
Speaker 1: of donor organs out there, and every day, just in
Speaker 1: the United States, twenty two people die while waiting for
Speaker 1: organ transplants and escorting to federal statistics. And this is
Speaker 1: a great time as well. If you're feeling that that
Speaker 1: information hit you, UH, make sure that you're a registered
Speaker 1: organ donor. And if you have any um, you know,
Speaker 1: issues surrounding that, I encourage you to sort of work
Speaker 1: your way through them. And also I believe in depending
Speaker 1: on where you are, you can put certain you can
Speaker 1: put certain limits on your own organ donation. So if
Speaker 1: you do have like a weird thing about your your heart,
Speaker 1: you know that I wanted to remain inside of a
Speaker 1: coptic jar in your pyramid, I believe you can. You
Speaker 1: can specify that. Yeah, and and I'll red or ate
Speaker 1: this from the penis transplant episode. Some organs are not
Speaker 1: automatically covered on your regular old organ donor transplant card
Speaker 1: H so you need to specify, for instance, that they
Speaker 1: can take your penis or they can I don't know
Speaker 1: what the other ones would be. Penis was the one
Speaker 1: that we really feel. And I want to stress if
Speaker 1: you're worried about what's gonna happen to your penis after
Speaker 1: you die, um, virtually if you do nothing, if nothing
Speaker 1: happens to if it's not donated, nothing good is going
Speaker 1: to happen to your penis? Trust me? Um, so why
Speaker 1: not donated so it can do some good? Uh, So
Speaker 1: let's just cover this. There's a general kind of approach
Speaker 1: that has multiple angles for growing human organs, although we
Speaker 1: do sometimes grow animal organs to test out the process
Speaker 1: in a vat in a culture. Right there, they're actually
Speaker 1: you know, a few different approaches. This is a really
Speaker 1: exciting area of science. And if you if you follow
Speaker 1: the literature like we do, uh, there's always some new
Speaker 1: technique that's that's you know, being experimented with or just
Speaker 1: sort of rolled out as a theoretical possibility. It's gotten
Speaker 1: to the point where, like I'd say, there's weekly there's
Speaker 1: a headline about somebody using a three D printer to
Speaker 1: buy print some kind of bio material, to the point
Speaker 1: where like it doesn't even maybe to us because we
Speaker 1: look at it so often, but it doesn't feel shocking anymore.
Speaker 1: The first time I was like, WHOA, you can print
Speaker 1: skin on a three D print. There, that's cool, And
Speaker 1: now it's kind of like yeah, of course, yeah. And
Speaker 1: some of them are basically that like ink jetting cell
Speaker 1: types into organized structures. Essentially three D printing with stem
Speaker 1: cells in some cases. Other times you're talking about the
Speaker 1: use of scaffolding, which we'll get into, or letting cell
Speaker 1: spontaneously self organized into proto organs. Uh. You know again
Speaker 1: within a vat of some kind or some sort of
Speaker 1: a culture. Um. Yeah, the floating I believe it's called
Speaker 1: the floating culture is what we're going to get into later.
Speaker 1: That when you have to grow something three dimensionally. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And this is all interesting because we're we're playing with
Speaker 1: life here. We're manipulating self building, self organizing systems in
Speaker 1: order to build or grow specific structures and tissues for
Speaker 1: specific bodies. So it's not like you're just building something
Speaker 1: out of the bricks. It's like you're building something out
Speaker 1: of bricks and the bricks had their own agenda already. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: these are not your father's legos. These these well they
Speaker 1: might be, but yeah, they do they like we like
Speaker 1: we've talked about before, whenever you're kind of rearranging cells
Speaker 1: on human level and trying to get them to attach
Speaker 1: to other cells. There's all kinds of different things that
Speaker 1: they're doing. Uh. And that synthetic biomaterials one that we
Speaker 1: talked about that as well too in terms of how
Speaker 1: the how you can sort of program them to have
Speaker 1: different powers. Right. Yeah, Now we're gonna talk about stem
Speaker 1: cells a little bit in this, so I just want
Speaker 1: to go ahead and throw out just a quick reminder
Speaker 1: what stem cells are for everyone. And this is just
Speaker 1: information that comes right from how stuff works How stem
Speaker 1: cells work article. Check that if you want a deeper die.
Speaker 1: But stem cells essentially the building block of human body.
Speaker 1: Stem cells are capable of dividing for long periods of time,
Speaker 1: they're unspecialized, and they can develop into specialized cells. So
Speaker 1: stem cells inside an embryo will eventually give rise to
Speaker 1: every cell, tissue, and organ in the fetus's body. But
Speaker 1: unlike a regular cell, which can only replicate to create
Speaker 1: more of its own kind of cell, a stem cell
Speaker 1: is pluripotent. When it divides, it can make any one
Speaker 1: of the two twenty different cells in the human body.
Speaker 1: But we don't just have embryonic stem cells, which of
Speaker 1: course come from the embryo or the fetus or the
Speaker 1: umbilical cord blood. We also have adult stem cells, which
Speaker 1: are These are an already developed tissues, such as those
Speaker 1: of the heart, the brain, the kidney, and they usually
Speaker 1: give rise to cells within their resident organs. And then
Speaker 1: we also have induced pluriphoton stem cells, and these are
Speaker 1: stem cells that are their adult. Uh, they're differentiated cells
Speaker 1: that are then experimentally reprogrammed into a stem cell like state.
Speaker 1: And this is in portant to distinguish the difference between
Speaker 1: the embryonic stem cells and the adult stem cells because
Speaker 1: I feel like, you know, this was probably over ten
Speaker 1: years ago that the big controversial debate about using stem
Speaker 1: cells and science was going around in political circles. But
Speaker 1: I believe that most people think embryonic stem cells when
Speaker 1: they just hear stem cells, they're not thinking about that
Speaker 1: that there's the possibility for other types of stem cells
Speaker 1: to be used in this. Yeah, the politics kind of
Speaker 1: loaded the term a bit, so it's good to to
Speaker 1: to be specific. So let's talk about the main process
Speaker 1: that's used for growing flesh. I guess is the best
Speaker 1: way to say it, because there it's not always an organ,
Speaker 1: you know, it could be any kind of flesh depending
Speaker 1: on what you're what you're scrape in and what you're
Speaker 1: kind of protein gel you're soaking it in. But the
Speaker 1: process is generally generally called de cellular ization and essentially
Speaker 1: what you're doing here's your making replacement parts out of
Speaker 1: the raw materials from a patient or from undifferentiated stem cells.
Speaker 1: So you take cells from that organ, you put them
Speaker 1: into lab dishes, and you bade them in a fluid
Speaker 1: that prompts them to multiply. Now, I don't want to
Speaker 1: dive super deep into the biochemistry of all of this
Speaker 1: because I think it would confuse us, and it would
Speaker 1: confuse most of our listeners unless we're already a biochemist, right,
Speaker 1: But um, you know, it sounded to me like the
Speaker 1: type of fluid depended on what type of thing you're
Speaker 1: trying to grow, too, uh, And this process takes a while.
Speaker 1: For instance, if you want to grow a human bladder,
Speaker 1: that takes about six weeks scripts them cells off, you
Speaker 1: get in the right mixture, you to let it wait,
Speaker 1: takes about six weeks to go. But what you need
Speaker 1: before you can actually have an artificial organ is a
Speaker 1: temporary structure. And this is what we're talking about when
Speaker 1: we say scaffolding. Basically, this mimics the basic internal architecture
Speaker 1: of cartilage, and it also protects the growing cells from
Speaker 1: any kind of mechanical stress. Upon them. So this scaffold
Speaker 1: is what we pour the cells onto. That's pretty nuts. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It always reminds me of the Terminator movies, the exo
Speaker 1: skeleton and then you're growing the flesh on it, or
Speaker 1: specifically the toys that came out where it was like
Speaker 1: an exo skeleton toy and you had to put like
Speaker 1: on it. Oh, you put Plato on it. I was
Speaker 1: agreed if you could like peel its skin off and
Speaker 1: then put it back on again or something like that,
Speaker 1: like my flesh suit. Um. Yeah, absolutely. I wonder if
Speaker 1: James Cameron and his crew did their homework on scaffolding
Speaker 1: back then, although the eighties I don't think scaffolding was
Speaker 1: really at its height yet. You know this this my
Speaker 1: understanding and we'll find out as we go along, really
Speaker 1: kind of starting the seventies. Um, but maybe he was
Speaker 1: aware of it. So if you use what are called
Speaker 1: condroblast cells in the scaffold, it allows the cells that
Speaker 1: you attached to grow and to divide and to even
Speaker 1: regrow the cartilage. Then you coat this with other cells
Speaker 1: that are important to the organ. So for instance, if
Speaker 1: you're trying to grow bladder, you would code it with
Speaker 1: eurotheel cells. Uh, this would allow it to sort of
Speaker 1: you know, have the moisteness and allow urine to pass through. Right. Uh.
Speaker 1: Weirdest of all, you can actually design the scaffold to
Speaker 1: dissolve itself once all the cells are finished rebuilding. Right,
Speaker 1: So cells grow up around this scaffold, they create their
Speaker 1: own system of cartilage, and then the scaffold dissolves and boom,
Speaker 1: you've got an artificially grown organ. One of my favorite
Speaker 1: descriptions of the process here comes from the founder of
Speaker 1: Harvard Apparatus Regenerative Technology or heart and I think now
Speaker 1: it's actually called biostage, but the founder was made by
Speaker 1: the name of David Green and in um and is
Speaker 1: quoted in a technology review is stems. Stem cells are
Speaker 1: taken from a patient's bone marrow, and then they are
Speaker 1: rained down over the top of the scaffold, much like
Speaker 1: a chicken in a rotisserie. Yeah, I'm in mad saying
Speaker 1: that this is like stem self fondue, like dip and drip. Well.
Speaker 1: The method was first pioneered by a guy named Larry
Speaker 1: Hench and this was in the late nineteen sixties. Basically,
Speaker 1: he and his team were seeing a lot of amputees
Speaker 1: coming back from the Vietnam War, and they wanted to
Speaker 1: try to do something. So they discovered and used a
Speaker 1: material that's called hydro zala petite, and this is a
Speaker 1: mineral that actually occurs in the human body and bonds
Speaker 1: really well with bone. So they found that when they
Speaker 1: experimented with it in the form of what they called
Speaker 1: a bioactive glass, it had excellent properties for this application
Speaker 1: of artificial organs. Bone cells could actually live on it
Speaker 1: and then subsequently create healthy new bone. So it seems
Speaker 1: like it it would work perfectly. Right. You grow the
Speaker 1: cells for the muscle, the meat, I guess as we
Speaker 1: would call it, and then the bone itself will regrow
Speaker 1: in the cartilage as well. So that's the sort of
Speaker 1: origin of this starting off. And that's sixties. That's that's
Speaker 1: time enough to terminator. Yeah, all right, James Cameron probably
Speaker 1: was down with a scaffolding science by then. Do you
Speaker 1: think the eight hundred had any organs? It definitely had skinned,
Speaker 1: good question blood. Yeah, it had at least something that
Speaker 1: looked like eyeballs over its robotic I couldn't eat. I
Speaker 1: can't remember. Could a tight hundred eat or did it
Speaker 1: just like I'm also like, give it to me that. Wow,
Speaker 1: I didn't know you had that Arnold Schwartz. We all
Speaker 1: have an Arnold. Um. I keep getting my Terminator timelines
Speaker 1: confused with all the new movies and the Sarah Connor chronicles,
Speaker 1: which makes me I don't know if those are considered
Speaker 1: cannon anymore. But they don't think even they know those. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't think they do either. But those robots were
Speaker 1: doing all kinds of weird things that yeah, well we'll
Speaker 1: have to throw that one out the listeners. I think
Speaker 1: they did like a kind of scaffolding type thing though
Speaker 1: in those like they sort of tried to explain how
Speaker 1: it works. I remember they would like in the show. Yeah,
Speaker 1: never watched the TV show, but I heard people and
Speaker 1: put their bodies in like a bathtub and melt down,
Speaker 1: melt them down so they could then subsequently kind of
Speaker 1: like this process like regrow the flesh on top of them,
Speaker 1: so they basically took their place. So organ scaffolding um,
Speaker 1: in the real sense that we're talking about here, also
Speaker 1: entails a great deal of bio mimetic material possibilities. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this is an area where I've I've kind of
Speaker 1: dealt with the topics some over the years. Uh. For
Speaker 1: how stuff works, a scientist continue to take inspiration from
Speaker 1: such diverse wonder materials of the natural world as spider
Speaker 1: silk and also the squid sucker in protein responsible for
Speaker 1: their ringed sucker teeth on a squid centacle. Both of
Speaker 1: these materials are ideal is they're strong, they're malleable, and
Speaker 1: they're organic. Yeah. That's the really difficult thing here, is
Speaker 1: like we can grow skin all the livelong day, but
Speaker 1: being able to grow materials that are both strong and
Speaker 1: flexible the same way our actual organs are is tough. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Scientists in Germany have proposed using spider silk as a biocompatible,
Speaker 1: biodegradable adhesive matrix for skin repair specifically, and this involves
Speaker 1: using dragline silk, which is like the premium silk because
Speaker 1: I'm maybe even minus the spiders have different types of
Speaker 1: webbing that threadcount. Yeah essentially, Yeah, I mean spider silk.
Speaker 1: I think we have an old episode in the in
Speaker 1: the archives about it. Go back and listen to it
Speaker 1: if you want more. But it is uh, yeah, this
Speaker 1: fascinating strong, malleable substance and uh, and and the spider
Speaker 1: is is like a musician creating these different different notes
Speaker 1: of web. But this particular a bit of research. They
Speaker 1: they were talking about weaving matrices on steel frames and
Speaker 1: seeding them with the fire blasts, which provides the structural
Speaker 1: background for all the connective tissue. And if you want
Speaker 1: something even crazier, and this is this is the one
Speaker 1: that I read about back in two thousand ten. We
Speaker 1: were just talking about this off air. This is blockers,
Speaker 1: this is it's two thousand tents, so it's actually a
Speaker 1: little bit old at this point. It was a Rice
Speaker 1: University scheme to inject cells with a metallic gel, and
Speaker 1: the researchers then would have would have succeeded in the
Speaker 1: suspending cultured cells in a three dimensional magnetic field, and
Speaker 1: this would serve as a magnetic scaffolding and organs would
Speaker 1: be grown around that in the right shape without any
Speaker 1: foreign materials at all. Wow, which is that's pretty crazy,
Speaker 1: said sadly. That doesn't seem to be a lot of
Speaker 1: new information on this. I don't know if they're still
Speaker 1: working on it or if it's an idea that is
Speaker 1: kind of shelved. But I'm also trying to imagine how
Speaker 1: the metallic substances, uh, dissolve in the same way that
Speaker 1: like the organic scaffoldings that we're using to you know,
Speaker 1: like or would you just have it? Would you be
Speaker 1: like Wolverine and you just have like metal built into
Speaker 1: your I don't know, flesh somehow, just in flex here
Speaker 1: and there. What's It's interesting you mentioned Wolverine because I
Speaker 1: feel like the second X Man movie, there's a scene
Speaker 1: where Mystique injects like a prison guard with a metallic gel,
Speaker 1: so that Magneto Canes has that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: He sucks the like metal dust out of this guy's body. Right,
Speaker 1: you can make little like or that's my favorite scene
Speaker 1: in that movie. Oh yeah, that makes the little orbs
Speaker 1: and he's grinning while he's shooting the orbs around smashing everything.
Speaker 1: Ian McKellen, if only we could artificially grow Ian McKellan now.
Speaker 1: In order to pull off this the scheme, though, with
Speaker 1: the magnetic at least suspended organ scaffolding, they need to
Speaker 1: be able to program a detailed magnetic field that would
Speaker 1: float the stem cells and in the exact spots needed
Speaker 1: to grow the full organ. So hopefully, you know, here
Speaker 1: we'll hear more about that one in the future, because
Speaker 1: I think it's a pretty crazy cool idea. Yeah, But anyway,
Speaker 1: they're numerous studies out there, the quest for new and
Speaker 1: improved ways of scaffolding out in Oregon, everything from synthetic
Speaker 1: collagen to biommetic materials, self assembling scaffolds, et cetera. So, however,
Speaker 1: you scaffold out the artificial organ that you're working on.
Speaker 1: Once you've done that, the organ needs to be nurtured
Speaker 1: in an incubator that mimics our body's conditions so that
Speaker 1: the cells can grow together some more. You're looking basically
Speaker 1: to recreate the temperature and humidity of the human body. Now,
Speaker 1: remember when we talked to um Mary Roach, right, we
Speaker 1: talked on the penile transplant episode. We talked about why
Speaker 1: the the nose is particularly good for doing penis transplants, right,
Speaker 1: because the nose has the same sort of properties of
Speaker 1: moisteness that you need for that spongy tissue and a penis.
Speaker 1: So this is the same kind of thing. Basically, like,
Speaker 1: you want to get these cells to react and deal
Speaker 1: with their environment the way that they're going to need
Speaker 1: to inside the human body, then you implant it into
Speaker 1: the patient the scaffold gradually dissolves. The biggest problem for
Speaker 1: this method is maintaining a blood supply to the artificial
Speaker 1: tissue once it's implanted in the human body. There are
Speaker 1: also a cup other weird methods that haven't similar to
Speaker 1: the like this metallic scaffold link thing I haven't really
Speaker 1: quite taken off yet. Um. But the first one, you know,
Speaker 1: we mentioned at the top is the three D printing, right, So, yeah,
Speaker 1: you can three D print uh flesh right now. I
Speaker 1: don't know that you can three D print organs in
Speaker 1: the same way that we do when we grow them
Speaker 1: in cultures like this, right because it's because as we've
Speaker 1: kind of laid out here, it's like, on one hand,
Speaker 1: you have cells and then you have tissue. And it's
Speaker 1: one thing you have the tissue, but then you have
Speaker 1: the tissue, uh and and or various tissues forming into
Speaker 1: an organ. That's a more complicated endeavor. So there's this
Speaker 1: company called Organovo. I wonder how long they spent like
Speaker 1: trying to come up with that one, or is it
Speaker 1: organ organ Ovo? Maybe very nice? That one that makes
Speaker 1: more sense out of there, based out of San Diego,
Speaker 1: and they distribute body part printers, and these basically go
Speaker 1: to the labs that are already working on these artificial organs.
Speaker 1: It basically works just like an incent printer. It sides
Speaker 1: droplets of cells and scaffold materials onto a platform that
Speaker 1: gradually builds the tissue in three dimensions. So the labs
Speaker 1: all around the world use this. They mainly build skin, muscle,
Speaker 1: and blood vessels out of it. One lab has actually
Speaker 1: refined it to be able to make a mouse sized
Speaker 1: heart in forty minutes. And I want to use this
Speaker 1: as an opportunity to let you the audience know that
Speaker 1: we're about to get into some mouse brutality big time.
Speaker 1: Like this is a field where without mice and rats,
Speaker 1: we wouldn't have been able to go far. And I'm
Speaker 1: going to have nightmares about these swarms of rats that
Speaker 1: are going to be coming at me with artificially grown
Speaker 1: human organs attached to them in various positions. There's one
Speaker 1: other thing I mentioned Wolverine earlier, right, because the whole
Speaker 1: metal thing. The ultimate goal here is that you wouldn't
Speaker 1: grow the organs in a vat, but rather that you
Speaker 1: would diagnose that there's something wrong with the organs ahead
Speaker 1: of time and that you would then inject health these
Speaker 1: cells and growth inducing molecules into these injured organs and
Speaker 1: prompt them to regenerate on their own, so repairing the
Speaker 1: organ as opposed to replacing it exactly. And we would
Speaker 1: be wolverines. We would just our skin would regrow if
Speaker 1: we had a bad laceration or a burn, or you know,
Speaker 1: our lungs would rego grow if we had a smoking problem, whatever,
Speaker 1: whatever you need, just inject some of those cells. That's
Speaker 1: the future oriented goal of this. We are not there yet,
Speaker 1: but that that's what they're looking at now. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: the best places we've discussed. We talked about the essential
Speaker 1: step and getting that synthetic organ inside a human body,
Speaker 1: growing in and just the right conditions, etcetera. So obviously
Speaker 1: the best place to grow human organ is probably inside
Speaker 1: a human. Failing that, what about a non human animal.
Speaker 1: So we've utilized as xeno transplantation in the past, say,
Speaker 1: you know, from a pig or a bad boon. You know,
Speaker 1: we've all we've all read about those various transplants and
Speaker 1: they come with their share of concerns and complications as well.
Speaker 1: I'm envisioning like you just take like a blue whale,
Speaker 1: and you just fill it up with human organs, like
Speaker 1: it's just a giant blue whale organ growing farm. I
Speaker 1: do love that idea. It reminds me of one of
Speaker 1: my favorite Invader Zim episodes where he's going around the
Speaker 1: school as Zim as a as an alien disguised as
Speaker 1: a child. This is Yeah, in one of the darker episodes,
Speaker 1: he's going around harvesting organs from the children and implanting
Speaker 1: them in his own body until he's just a bloated
Speaker 1: balloon of Pilford organs and all the children are sick. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I couldn't help but have dark thoughts as as I
Speaker 1: was doing this research. This is fertile ground for some
Speaker 1: horror material. Yeah. And but but more to the point,
Speaker 1: fertile ground for growing organs. Why not just grow a
Speaker 1: human ready organ inside of say a pig. Well, there's
Speaker 1: research into the Researchers at the University of California Davis
Speaker 1: have done just that, created embryos that have both human
Speaker 1: and pig cells. They've used human stem cells from an
Speaker 1: adult skin in her hair, use them in a pig embryo,
Speaker 1: and then injected it into the uterus of a pig. Now,
Speaker 1: in these experiments, after twenty eight days, the they terminate
Speaker 1: the pig's pregnancies and then they analyze the cell remnants.
Speaker 1: But essentially the the idea here is pretty awesome because
Speaker 1: you just you knock out the section and an animal's
Speaker 1: DNA that concerns a particular organ, and then you replace
Speaker 1: it with human adult stem cells. Embryos don't have an
Speaker 1: immune system, so they can't reject the foreign cells. No
Speaker 1: cells begin growing the desired organ. So it's a long
Speaker 1: way from being a viable option for organ replacement, but
Speaker 1: it you know, it makes a lot of sense, right
Speaker 1: if you're ethical, depending depending on your moral uh yeah, standing, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: ethical issues aside, you are growing needed transplant organs within
Speaker 1: a domesticated animal and then harvesting them for use. It
Speaker 1: also makes your question at the top of the episode
Speaker 1: a little more problematic. It does. If I'm eating an
Speaker 1: organ from a pig, is it actually humanized pig or
Speaker 1: those human organs? Yeah? Uh? And speaking of ethical quandaries,
Speaker 1: I suppose this is probably a good time to remind
Speaker 1: the audience, uh that I'm the vegetarian on stuff to
Speaker 1: blow your mind. Uh, And we are about to talk
Speaker 1: about exactly that not being a vegetarian, but growing synthetic
Speaker 1: meat to eat the same way that we grow very
Speaker 1: similar way to how we grow artificial organs. And I
Speaker 1: wanted to throw this in here as well, because my
Speaker 1: natural thought goes to, well, if we can grow these
Speaker 1: human organs, should we eat them? You know, are you
Speaker 1: a cannibal if you eat human bladder that's been grown
Speaker 1: in of that? Hm, I don't know. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it makes eating medical waste all the more problematic, so
Speaker 1: totally and uh and also like you know, who knows
Speaker 1: how it tastes, but if you want to know, maybe
Speaker 1: you want to know what human flesh taste slight, but
Speaker 1: you don't want to, you know, go that far down
Speaker 1: the extreme path. It provides a safe outlet for the
Speaker 1: hannibal electric of the world. Exactly, yeah, exactly. I was
Speaker 1: thinking of Hannibal and all those perfect feasts he put together. Well,
Speaker 1: so the synthetic meat thing works a little differently. But
Speaker 1: here's a quick overview. You take some muscle cells from
Speaker 1: a living animal and you use it to culture lumps
Speaker 1: of tissue ostensibly to be eaten. Uh. They're said to
Speaker 1: look a little bit more like calamari than beef. So
Speaker 1: I used to work in a kitchen, a seafood kitchen
Speaker 1: and cut calamari all the time, thinking like white kind
Speaker 1: of plastic e strips rather than you know, what we
Speaker 1: think of is like ground beef. Yeah, it's pretty bland stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what it sounds like. But the plan that they're
Speaker 1: talking about to make it taste better is to mix
Speaker 1: in artificial blood and fat so it actually tastes like meat.
Speaker 1: Uh So that then subsequently like where do you get
Speaker 1: the artificial blood? Where do you give the fat? You know?
Speaker 1: But but anyway, um in twenty in two thousand one,
Speaker 1: bioengineers at New York's Touro College did this with a goldfish.
Speaker 1: They immersed the goldfishes cells in a nutrient rich fetal
Speaker 1: bovine serum. The muscle cells then divided and reproduced like normal,
Speaker 1: producing chunks of fish flesh. But none of these researchers
Speaker 1: would eat it after even after the lead researcher flavored
Speaker 1: it and fried it in oil, he said, come on,
Speaker 1: somebody eat it. Nobody would. Where are Here's the thing.
Speaker 1: I'm a vegetarian. I think i'd eat that. I mean
Speaker 1: in the name of science. I would give it a try. Yeah,
Speaker 1: why not. Uh, Well, inven somebody did have the guts
Speaker 1: to go ahead and do this at the University of Missouri. Uh,
Speaker 1: they had a specialist produced a sample of synthetic muscle
Speaker 1: and then he ate that at a conference. Now he
Speaker 1: has started his own company called Modern Meadows to sell
Speaker 1: grown meat to consumers. Uh. It's not on the market yet,
Speaker 1: but they are talking about using a three D printer
Speaker 1: to build fake meat, and a team of researchers in
Speaker 1: the Netherlands is working on something similar. In two thousand seven,
Speaker 1: they said that they could manufacture fake meat. And I'm
Speaker 1: not talking about like soy meat like you're buying the
Speaker 1: grocery store corn or something like that is more biologically
Speaker 1: cellularly it is meat. Yeah. Uh. They think that they
Speaker 1: can manufacture it for five thousand dollars a ton, And
Speaker 1: I heard that and I thought, wow, that's a lot
Speaker 1: of money. But it's actually economically competitive with the costs
Speaker 1: of actual meat nowadays, especially when you take into account
Speaker 1: just the environmental footprint of raising account. Absolutely. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: part of the big argument. I mean this, a lot
Speaker 1: of this research isn't being done because of like a
Speaker 1: vegetarian style ethical argument. It's being done for exactly what
Speaker 1: you're talking about, which is the impact that the meat
Speaker 1: industry has on our environment. Uh so these are really
Speaker 1: they're just chunks of meat. But here's the thing, like,
Speaker 1: let's say you want your steak, right, Well, steaks a
Speaker 1: little bit more complex. It's got fibers, is blood vessels,
Speaker 1: there's fat involved, right, So you can't just grow a
Speaker 1: steak right now. Um. And then the question really is
Speaker 1: is if you put this out there and marketed it,
Speaker 1: would people actually eat that grown meat? I think they would.
Speaker 1: You know. I thought about this a lot in the past,
Speaker 1: not only concerning fake meat and synthetic meat, but also
Speaker 1: the use of of insect protein in food because of
Speaker 1: course some people, um, you know, have a problem with that.
Speaker 1: And I always wonder why when you especially when you're
Speaker 1: looking not at steak, but say, uh, chicken nuggets at
Speaker 1: a fast food restaurant, or fish sticks or some of
Speaker 1: the very processed forms of meat out there, Like, what
Speaker 1: is the difference? This is so removed from the creature
Speaker 1: that that it was, then you know, why why not
Speaker 1: just make it from some cheaper, more you know, easily
Speaker 1: acquired protein that is just as good for us. Why
Speaker 1: not use synthetic that grown meat and the nuggets if
Speaker 1: the neggat nuggets are essentially made from this weird, grotesque
Speaker 1: chicken slurry anyway, Yeah, I mean, I don't want to
Speaker 1: go too down. We don't have the research in front
Speaker 1: of us, and I don't want to go to down
Speaker 1: the vegetarian rabbit hole on this one. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: think most people recognize that, like a lot of fast
Speaker 1: food isn't as much meat as we'd like to think, right,
Speaker 1: There's a lot of chemical components in there that are
Speaker 1: holding it together. Yeah, it's a very processed meat based
Speaker 1: protein food. So if we're if we're okay with that,
Speaker 1: if we can all say chicken nuggets are okay as
Speaker 1: a process that we'd cut out any ethical concerns, then
Speaker 1: let's take that process and apply it to uh, you know,
Speaker 1: synthetic biology. Yeah. Yeah, Well, we certainly have come a
Speaker 1: long way with human beings, and so we're going to
Speaker 1: spend the rest of the episode going through the human
Speaker 1: body organ by organ as to what we have built
Speaker 1: so far. But let's take a quick break and then
Speaker 1: when we come back, we're gonna start off with human
Speaker 1: skin and grown in vats. Everybody here. To do list
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Speaker 1: type in stuff that stamps dot com inter stuff and
Speaker 1: start mailing things. All right, we're back. So, as we
Speaker 1: began to make our way through the human body here
Speaker 1: through some of the various tissues and parts that were
Speaker 1: able to grow, I think it is helpful to a
Speaker 1: sort of thing that Frankenstein scenario building a person from
Speaker 1: spare parts, but also maybe that terminator scenario as well,
Speaker 1: like how much how much of our terminator could we
Speaker 1: put together today? Yeah? Yeah, Well, let's start with the skin.
Speaker 1: We could do that skin is very difficult because it
Speaker 1: has seven different types of cells that are all arranged
Speaker 1: in a complicated structure, and doctors have been trying to
Speaker 1: do this since the seventies, mainly so they could help
Speaker 1: burn victims. Now, Kearra tennisites our cells. They're one of
Speaker 1: those seven cells in our skin that we're giving these
Speaker 1: doctors the most trouble. They basically make their way to
Speaker 1: the surface before we shed them off. But while they're
Speaker 1: making their way to the surface, they emit a chemical
Speaker 1: signal that activates skin growth, so they are crucial to
Speaker 1: the skin regeneration process. James F. Burke and Ionis Janis
Speaker 1: came up with the means that acted like like like
Speaker 1: a skin covering. Basically while they were encouraging Kara Tenna
Speaker 1: sites to do the thing that they do. They created
Speaker 1: a layer of skin using collagen from cows and sharks,
Speaker 1: together with a sugar molecule that served as their scaffolding.
Speaker 1: So they're using the scaffolding method even with skin for
Speaker 1: new growing cells. Once this new dermist had fully formed,
Speaker 1: the temporary model underneath dissolved and the new cells grew
Speaker 1: into its place. So basically the decelluarization process we were
Speaker 1: talking about earlier. Now, even with this membrane, where do
Speaker 1: you get the skin grafts from, right, if you move
Speaker 1: it from another part of a patient's body, well, that
Speaker 1: can be painful, as you might imagine, right, Although we
Speaker 1: do that plenty of times, it's still it's it's not
Speaker 1: a comfortable process. They also tried using cadaver skin. So
Speaker 1: we talked about this in the penis transplant episode using
Speaker 1: cadaver's penises, but in this case they tried taking the
Speaker 1: skin off of dead people and applying it to living people.
Speaker 1: That is right out of a horror story as well
Speaker 1: to me, So we we're building a flesh column already. Basically. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately it didn't work very well. The immune system completely
Speaker 1: rejected it. And because burn patients are already susceptible to infection,
Speaker 1: they didn't want to use the usual immunosuppressive cocktail that
Speaker 1: they throw into these people so that they can accept
Speaker 1: the new organs. So this was their solution, grow new
Speaker 1: skin from the patient's zone cells. They fed these cells nutrients,
Speaker 1: then they let them take weeks to grow into a
Speaker 1: sheet of skin that they then applied on top of
Speaker 1: the burn area. This is sometimes treated with antibacterial pro
Speaker 1: teens that reduce the risk of infection during the transplantation.
Speaker 1: Now all this sounds awesome, right, but uh, growing skin
Speaker 1: in a lab is real slow and it's super expensive.
Speaker 1: But I've got two fun facts for you today, Loreale.
Speaker 1: You know the cosmetics company, they actually hold the patent
Speaker 1: for lab grown skin that is derived from skin that's
Speaker 1: discarded during someone's plastic surgery. So that biomedical waste we
Speaker 1: were talking about earlier can be used in place of
Speaker 1: animals for testing reactions to cosmetics. So the pieces of
Speaker 1: flesh removed from say Hollywood actor's face can then be
Speaker 1: used to grow new skin, either for that actor or
Speaker 1: presumably for someone else. Right, yeah, and then you you know,
Speaker 1: rather than spraying hair spray into the eyes of like
Speaker 1: a ferret or a raccoon or something like that, you
Speaker 1: spray it on this thing. See how it reacts. Inner fact,
Speaker 1: new skin can also come from the foreskin of a
Speaker 1: circumcised infant. With just a little bit of skin like
Speaker 1: maybe like the size of a postage stamp, you can
Speaker 1: grow four acres of skin tissue in a lab. Now,
Speaker 1: newborn cells don't rouse a host immune system, so this
Speaker 1: is ideal. Right, It's sort of like the similar to
Speaker 1: the embryonic stem cell research, right. Uh, they don't really
Speaker 1: have any particular kind of cell things so that they
Speaker 1: don't uh make the immune system unhappy and attack it.
Speaker 1: So this may actually be better for grafting. So can
Speaker 1: you imagine them like like okay, like either every time
Speaker 1: somebody gets plastic surgery or every time a kid gets circumcised,
Speaker 1: instead of just like throwing it in the trash or whatever,
Speaker 1: they're like, you know, putting it in a biomedical bag
Speaker 1: and shipping it to some lab somewhere so they can
Speaker 1: use it to subsequently grow lots of skin. It's like
Speaker 1: cutting out biscuits and a sheet of dough. You don't
Speaker 1: just throw away extra dough. You call it back up
Speaker 1: and you make one more biscuit out of it, bingo.
Speaker 1: So so essentially here we we can see the skin
Speaker 1: of our Frankenstein monster. We can see the skin of
Speaker 1: the terminator. I mean, hey, maybe the eight hundred is
Speaker 1: just nothing but foreskin exactly, foreskin or discarded plastic surgery waste. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so he might might be a little lumpy, but yeah,
Speaker 1: we can do it. We've we've got plenty of skin
Speaker 1: to grow around four acres. I think we can put
Speaker 1: four acres on our Frankenstein terminator. So up next, Obviously,
Speaker 1: we want our terminator to be able to look people
Speaker 1: in eyes when it buys corn, dogs and guns exactly,
Speaker 1: and we also want our Frankenstein monster to be able
Speaker 1: to see what it's doing. What can we do about eyes? Well,
Speaker 1: the first thing we can do is make sure that
Speaker 1: a terminator can cry. Uh, so we can build it
Speaker 1: tear ducks. This is highly important. It was we discussed
Speaker 1: in our the Creepy Post episode where we talk about
Speaker 1: the loss of eyelids. Yeah. Absolutely. At the Tokyo University
Speaker 1: of Science, they actually bioengineered the glands that produced tears
Speaker 1: in saliva. Now, they didn't do it for a terminator.
Speaker 1: They did it to help people who have chronically dry
Speaker 1: eyes and mouths, so they could reinstall those glands and
Speaker 1: help them out. UH. Even further, this seems to be
Speaker 1: like an area of study that's prominent in Japan. There's
Speaker 1: an article from Scientific American in two thousand twelve called
Speaker 1: grow your Own Eye UH, and it's about further studies
Speaker 1: in Japan that have shown that they can use stem
Speaker 1: cells to actually grow a retina. UH. The same team
Speaker 1: has also grown cortical tissue and part of a pituitary gland.
Speaker 1: But they basically hope that their success with the retinal
Speaker 1: tissue methods will help treat eye disorders like macular degeneration
Speaker 1: in the future. Now, the method they use very similar
Speaker 1: to what we talked about earlier. They put embryonic stem
Speaker 1: cells in a culture dish, they expose them to chemicals
Speaker 1: that influence eye formation, and then they wait and eventually
Speaker 1: it forms into the shape of the optic cup of
Speaker 1: an embryonic eye, and they use this is where they
Speaker 1: use the floating culture I talked about, which is a
Speaker 1: three dimensional culture that allows the cells to grow into
Speaker 1: the complex topology of an eye rather than just like
Speaker 1: a flat sheet. This structure also helps communicate between the
Speaker 1: cells like they actually communicate better between one another, which
Speaker 1: facilitates growth, which makes sense because we're three dimensional beings, right,
Speaker 1: We're not. We're not flat two D creatures. So yeah,
Speaker 1: so we've got eyes now on our robot slash Frankenstein.
Speaker 1: So he's got eyes and skin, all right, So our
Speaker 1: Frankenstein's monster might be able to see, might not, but
Speaker 1: at the very at least our terminator might have eye
Speaker 1: flesh covering a robot eye. Yeah, and it can cry,
Speaker 1: but it's gonna probably need to hear, right if it
Speaker 1: needs to, like hunt down it's a John Connor for instance,
Speaker 1: Hearing is pretty important, right, or at least needs to
Speaker 1: look like it has ears and needs to have at
Speaker 1: least the physical structures of ears so they don't have
Speaker 1: to wear a hat all the time, and that we've
Speaker 1: been able to do for a while actually, um, but
Speaker 1: by harvesting car artilage from a patient's ribs. We've actually
Speaker 1: been able to reconstruct ears in the past. Physicians at
Speaker 1: Cornell have actually used a three D printer to print
Speaker 1: an ear with living cells from cows and collagen from
Speaker 1: rat tails. So the let's sorry, let me slow that
Speaker 1: down and repeat it again. The living cells come from
Speaker 1: the cows, the collagen comes from the rat tails. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then this infamous ear. You may have seen this
Speaker 1: a year or two ago, the ear that was transplanted
Speaker 1: onto a mouse's back to basically there is a picture
Speaker 1: going around of this mouse running around with a human
Speaker 1: ear on its back. Uh. They transplanted it on there
Speaker 1: so they could ensure that the ear would retain its
Speaker 1: shape before they actually put it on a human being. Now.
Speaker 1: And another example of this that I love comes from
Speaker 1: performance artist stell arc Okay with him so in two
Speaker 1: thousand seven he had a cell cultivated ear surgically attached
Speaker 1: to his left arm. Really and it's all part of it,
Speaker 1: like I believe, ongoing. I I think he still has
Speaker 1: the ear. Correct me if I'm wrong, listeners, But it's
Speaker 1: all part of this ongoing a sort of body modification
Speaker 1: performance are thing. So he started doing, yeah, like a
Speaker 1: transhumanist style thing. That's interesting. Um, well, I wonder if
Speaker 1: he did this method or if he did the old
Speaker 1: school method, which is basically taking cow and cheap cells
Speaker 1: and forming those into an ear around a flexible wire frame.
Speaker 1: So you basically take like a pipe cleaners and grows
Speaker 1: cells around it, turn it into an ear and attach it. So, okay,
Speaker 1: we got ears, we got eyes, we got skin. Next
Speaker 1: up windpipe. Now, believe it or not, this was the
Speaker 1: first engineered organ that was implanted in a human being,
Speaker 1: and it happened in two thousand and eight. Uh. They
Speaker 1: grew the whimpipe from the patient's own stem cells and
Speaker 1: this was the first step toward using the scaffolding technology
Speaker 1: that we've been talking about this whole episode. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: company that I mentioned earlier, Harvard Apparatus for Narrative Technology,
Speaker 1: which is now his Biostage. They conducted several of these
Speaker 1: each by growing the patient's own stem cells on a
Speaker 1: lab made scaffold. And they've since re engineered the technique
Speaker 1: into what they call their self frame technology, and this
Speaker 1: is aimed to quote better stimulate the regenerative properties of
Speaker 1: the organ, and they planned to move beyond the trachea
Speaker 1: and the bronchos and tackle other organs as well, But yeah,
Speaker 1: the trachea, the windpipe has an important place, and our
Speaker 1: our ongoing development of synthetic organs. Yeah, I mean, we
Speaker 1: are our terminator here. He's gonna need to at least
Speaker 1: pretend to breathe somehow, and if he's got like a
Speaker 1: voice box, you'll need to provide wind to go through
Speaker 1: it somehow so they can do his Arnold schwartzen Aker top.
Speaker 1: I think his tracky is going to be really top shelf,
Speaker 1: to the point where if anyone questions his humanity, he
Speaker 1: can say, of course I am human, look at my
Speaker 1: Maybe that's why he has the accent. Why well, why yeah?
Speaker 1: Why would they build a robot android terminator send it
Speaker 1: back in time? But it has a really thick accent.
Speaker 1: I always because I thought about this as a child,
Speaker 1: and I always assumed it's a global war, right, And
Speaker 1: maybe the computers just didn't really understand the diversity of humans,
Speaker 1: and they were like, we must capture a human specimen
Speaker 1: um manipulate, you know, capture its voice, capture its appearance.
Speaker 1: And they got essentially Arnold Schwarzenegger, and they said, there
Speaker 1: it is. That's what human sound like, that's what they
Speaker 1: look like. That's why that's why he's so their specimen
Speaker 1: is so ripped and so Austrian. Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 1: And then along the line they became a little bit
Speaker 1: more refined. They weren't really as muscular down the road
Speaker 1: where they the other ones. And the woman from Terminator three,
Speaker 1: they're a sleeker. Uh what's her name from the TV
Speaker 1: show the Sericona Chronicles, just like a ballerina. Uh, and um,
Speaker 1: I have to have not seen the latest one, the
Speaker 1: Genesis one with Calisi and uh, who's the terminator? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so maybe they explained in that one. If somebody's out
Speaker 1: there going, oh, you guys gotta see Terminator Genesis four
Speaker 1: star movie, let us know. I saw it on an airplane.
Speaker 1: You saw it. Yeah, it's a great airplane movie. I
Speaker 1: him watching Terminator Genesis on an airplane. Okay, Um, so
Speaker 1: next comes up. Our terminator needs arms and legs if
Speaker 1: it's going to run around and grab people and you know,
Speaker 1: jump and do all the things that it does right. Well,
Speaker 1: in Massachusetts General Hospital actually grew entire rat arms in
Speaker 1: a Petrie dish. You can actually watch this video on
Speaker 1: YouTube and it is it's nuts. They use the same
Speaker 1: decelluarization technique we've been talking about, where the living rat
Speaker 1: donate cells to regrow organ tissue. And you watch it
Speaker 1: in a in this video in um what do they do?
Speaker 1: They speed they speed up the frame rate and it
Speaker 1: can tains bones, cartilage, blood, vessels, tendons, ligaments, and nerves.
Speaker 1: So they're hoping this will make way for transplants for amputees.
Speaker 1: So for right now are our terminator would just have
Speaker 1: little rat legs and arms. But down we're getting close. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the prognosis I think is far better for the terminator
Speaker 1: as opposed to the Frankenstein monster, because because the mechanical
Speaker 1: exoskeleton will provide the movement and you can as long
Speaker 1: as you get the appearance of those gigantic arnold muscles,
Speaker 1: and then we've got yea and that we could probably
Speaker 1: do brains. How's this thing going to think? Well, if
Speaker 1: it's terminator has probably got a computer brain, right, but
Speaker 1: what about Frankenstein. Well, in scientists in Vienna at the
Speaker 1: Institute of Molecular Biotechnology actually created a miniature brain in
Speaker 1: their lab. Now this was the size of an embryo
Speaker 1: brain at nine weeks old, so it's pretty small, but
Speaker 1: it had active neurons in the same organizational structure or
Speaker 1: as our brains. And they used stem cells to grow this.
Speaker 1: So we've got a tency, tiny little brain inside our flesh. Gollumn. Now,
Speaker 1: what if we want our flesh column to be a woman?
Speaker 1: Right like the female terminators that we've seen that we
Speaker 1: have seen female terminators, And as far as Frankenstein goes,
Speaker 1: we know Frankstein's monsters. We know from the novel uh
Speaker 1: and some of the film adaptations that he's going to
Speaker 1: ask for a mate. We need to be prepared to
Speaker 1: create that mate. Uh. So we're gonna need this breasts. Well,
Speaker 1: we can grow breasts. At the Heimholtz Center for Health
Speaker 1: and Environmental Research in Germany, researchers have grown again miniature
Speaker 1: mammary glands in order to study the development of breast cancer.
Speaker 1: Same same thing. They took healthy tissue from a woman
Speaker 1: undergoing breast reduction surgery, so as somebody who's already getting
Speaker 1: rid of these cells, they turned that into a gel
Speaker 1: that allowed the cells to divide and spread the same
Speaker 1: way that memory glands do. You during huberty and they
Speaker 1: grew outwards. I mean it's the tissue, right, They're not
Speaker 1: actually growing abreast. It's not like it has a nipple
Speaker 1: on the end of it, right, But it is the
Speaker 1: same kind of tissues, so they can do tests on it.
Speaker 1: So it's theoretically we could use this and attach it
Speaker 1: to our our terminator golum. Yeah, and you know I should.
Speaker 1: I'm also I should mention that of course with humans
Speaker 1: particularly you know humans, human males can lactate. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: if the conditions are right. So we actually have a
Speaker 1: great brain stuff episode on why do men have nipples,
Speaker 1: both on the audio podcast that I host and on
Speaker 1: the video series. Yeah, I mean it's a fascinating topic.
Speaker 1: I think there's an older stuff to blow your mind
Speaker 1: that goes into it as well. But but yeah, essentially
Speaker 1: then the male uh uh equipment is just as functional
Speaker 1: as the female equipment. It just takes a little more
Speaker 1: to kick start it. Unless you're a fruit bat. Fruit bat,
Speaker 1: male fruit bats can actually lactate and do lactates for
Speaker 1: normal uh. You know, child rearing technologies are so much
Speaker 1: far further out of us, I know in many ways.
Speaker 1: You know, sometimes the the Arnold terminators take on a
Speaker 1: a nurturing role in the mid So it would be good.
Speaker 1: I I don't know if Skynett thought of this, but
Speaker 1: it would be good if, if, if the determinator could
Speaker 1: activate its manory glance. Hey wait a minute, maybe that's
Speaker 1: why his pecks are so big. He's just got like
Speaker 1: juicy pecks. Yeah. Maybe Skynet was like, all right, can
Speaker 1: you lactate though? That's what humans do? And they're like,
Speaker 1: all right, make sure it's in there. Wow. Man, we
Speaker 1: are uncovering so much about James Cameron's legacy today here
Speaker 1: on the show. Okay, next up, bladders. So we talked
Speaker 1: already bladders are possible. The Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative
Speaker 1: Medicine in Winston Salem, North Carolina, they've grown everything from muscles, blood, vessels,
Speaker 1: and skin to a complete urinary bladder and they've implanted
Speaker 1: these and more than two dozen children and young adults.
Speaker 1: And I was like, wow, that's why. Uh, And it
Speaker 1: turns out it's because they were all born with defective bladders.
Speaker 1: These are the first lab generated human organs implanted in humans. Now,
Speaker 1: this seems to contradict the windpipe thing from earlier. I
Speaker 1: think the wind pipe was actually the first one. But
Speaker 1: these bladders are more along the lines of like an
Speaker 1: actual organ, whereas the wind pipe is like a structure structure. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: so their hope is that this will become the standard
Speaker 1: procedure for dealing with people with bladder defects. But so
Speaker 1: now our flush column. He's got a bladder, and uh,
Speaker 1: while we're at it, why don't we give him some kidneys? Uh?
Speaker 1: So kidneys. Remember mass general, they were growing all kinds
Speaker 1: of stuff. They've also grown kidneys using the decelluarization process. Uh.
Speaker 1: And guess what they did with that kidney. They attached
Speaker 1: it to a rat. They they even produced urine once
Speaker 1: they were attached to the rats. So there you go.
Speaker 1: So you've got your bladder and your kidneys. So this, uh,
Speaker 1: this thing can at least mimic the effect of urination. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Essential for our Frankenstone's mons, but also for the terminator
Speaker 1: if its skin is you know, it's never really explained
Speaker 1: how that skin stays alive, how it stays, how it
Speaker 1: produces blood, but presumably it might need to drink water
Speaker 1: in order to stay hydrated and look like something other
Speaker 1: than a mummy. Yeah, you would think and if the
Speaker 1: skin and the muscle tissue that we've grown to put
Speaker 1: on this thing has blood vessels, we're going to need
Speaker 1: something to pump blood through those vessels. Right, Well, we
Speaker 1: can grow artificial hearts. At the University of Pittsburgh, scientists
Speaker 1: used skin cells from humans to create heart cells and
Speaker 1: then they developed those into heart muscle, and once you
Speaker 1: supplied them with blood, these little mini hearts actually contracted spontaneously.
Speaker 1: This made me think of the strain, which we've covered
Speaker 1: on the show before. But you know, like the guy
Speaker 1: keeps his wife's heart in a bottle and he learns
Speaker 1: and he like drops like one drop of blood into it,
Speaker 1: and it and it starts contracting. This is what I
Speaker 1: wasn't mentioning. This creepy heart, little tail tale heart thrown
Speaker 1: in there as well. Um, and guess what they did.
Speaker 1: They grew this human heart on a mouse's heart. Now
Speaker 1: I can't imagine what that looked like or what the
Speaker 1: procedure was, but it worked, and we could theoretically advance
Speaker 1: this technique to replace heart tissue when somebody has a
Speaker 1: heart attack. Uh. And the reason why this is important,
Speaker 1: like a lot of you are probably out there thinking, well,
Speaker 1: wait a minut. I've seen artificial hearts has been around
Speaker 1: for decades, right, they are, but standard artificial hearts are
Speaker 1: only used when a patient is about to die because
Speaker 1: they don't last very long. So this kind of artificially
Speaker 1: grown heart tissue would be much better for our purposes.
Speaker 1: And finally, what brought us to this whole episode to
Speaker 1: begin with artificial genitals? Well, on one hand, our Frankenstein's
Speaker 1: monster needs genitals. Um, if it is going to be
Speaker 1: an approximate convincement. Yeah, and I assume the terminator has genitals.
Speaker 1: We never see them, but it is implied that they
Speaker 1: are there. Yeah, I just yeah, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: nude Arnold Schwarzenegger, but you never really see any any frontness. Huh.
Speaker 1: It's usually shot in such a way. I don't know.
Speaker 1: Maybe he's like a Kendall down there, but PACK doubt it. Uh.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and eight that we've mentioned these guys already,
Speaker 1: the Wake Institute for Regenerative Medicine, they were able to
Speaker 1: grow artificial penises for twelve rabbits. Now you're probably saying,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, what rabbits. Well, eight of these rabbits
Speaker 1: were actually able to ejaculate with these artificially grown penises,
Speaker 1: four of them were able to produce offspring with them. Now,
Speaker 1: the team this is the same team that announced the
Speaker 1: bioengineered bladder that we talked about earlier, but they followed
Speaker 1: this up by giving four women bioengineered vaginas. And actually
Speaker 1: the artificially grown penis is trickier the penis as we
Speaker 1: talked about in our penis transplant episode. It is structurally complex,
Speaker 1: it has a dense mass of cells, and you've got
Speaker 1: that spongy tissue that unique to it, so it's really
Speaker 1: difficult to replicate. So they basically used the scaffolding technique
Speaker 1: that we talked about earlier. They took a donor's penis,
Speaker 1: soaked it into detergent and enzymes, and washed away all
Speaker 1: of the donor's cells. What they're left with is the
Speaker 1: collagen scaffold of the penis. They recede it with the
Speaker 1: patient's own cells that are grown in a culture, both
Speaker 1: muscle cells and endo field cells. And even though they've
Speaker 1: engineered half a dozen of these penises, they're not ready
Speaker 1: to do any transplants just yet. So based on our
Speaker 1: penis transplant episode, we're still stuck with the methodology that
Speaker 1: we talked about there. They need to assess the safety
Speaker 1: and effectiveness of this first. They literally have a machine
Speaker 1: that they use to squish, stretch, and twist these artificially
Speaker 1: grown penises to make sure that they stand up to
Speaker 1: everyday life. So it's kind of like the machine it
Speaker 1: ikea that like pommels a chair constantly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Uh.
Speaker 1: They test erections in these things by pumping fluid through them.
Speaker 1: In the short term, they're looking at growing small penis
Speaker 1: parts to help replace partially damaged organs, usually from degradation
Speaker 1: at old age. Now let's talk about those vaginas to write.
Speaker 1: You know, we don't just have to give this terminator
Speaker 1: a penis. We could give it a vagina. Hey, maybe
Speaker 1: we give it both? Maybe both? Right? Um? Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: For those four patients that I talked about earlier, they
Speaker 1: were assessed for this, uh, and they had vaginal aplasia,
Speaker 1: and so a similar technique was used to the one
Speaker 1: above described for the bladders, the one that I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: the same Wake Forest Institute structure, basically scaffolding. In two
Speaker 1: thousand five, they implanted the first of vagina. Eight years later,
Speaker 1: all four of the recipients have the normal structure and
Speaker 1: function in these artificial vaginas. These patients were young at
Speaker 1: the time that they were implanted there, thirteen to eighteen
Speaker 1: years old. The scientists involved took volvar biopsies and then
Speaker 1: they cultured and expanded those cells outwards, same same process
Speaker 1: basically that we've been talking about here. There's been no
Speaker 1: long term post operative complications. And the areas that they've
Speaker 1: tested these in include desire arousal lubrication for orgasms, satisfaction,
Speaker 1: and whether or not they were able to have painless intercourse,
Speaker 1: all of which succeeded from the research. Yeah, so there
Speaker 1: we have it. I mean, that's that's the end of
Speaker 1: our organs list, as far as we could find in
Speaker 1: the research. So we got a brain, ears, and eye
Speaker 1: or two eyes, tear ducts, a windpipe, skin, little tiny
Speaker 1: limbs or if we if we built out the exoskeleton,
Speaker 1: it can have normal limbs with the skin stretched over it.
Speaker 1: It's got a bladder and some kidneys, it's got some genitals,
Speaker 1: so we're missing a lot of stuff. We don't have
Speaker 1: lungs yet, you know, and everything else. So the prognosis
Speaker 1: is better for the terminators for our frame, but you
Speaker 1: could like build a semi convincing exterior fake human. I
Speaker 1: think so. Um, you know, I can't help but think
Speaker 1: back to the episode that Joe and I did on
Speaker 1: the Science of doone. Yeah, it was a two partner
Speaker 1: and one of them we talked a little bit about
Speaker 1: the skin dancer. I don't know if you're familiar with this,
Speaker 1: that one. They're essentially shape shifters, like engineered shape shifter
Speaker 1: organisms that work for the benefit. These aren't in the
Speaker 1: movies then, I don't think there's one that shows up
Speaker 1: in the Sci Fi channel. Um, but there were a
Speaker 1: couple of different sources where people said, all right, how
Speaker 1: would you make a humanoid? How would you engineer a
Speaker 1: human to change its shape, to change its sex even
Speaker 1: And one of the two theories involved like engineering essentially
Speaker 1: what appears to be a vagina, but the vagina can
Speaker 1: open and then male genitalia descent through it, so it
Speaker 1: would be all about just the appearance rather than a functionality. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but some of this research that we would just discussed
Speaker 1: here he's getting Oh yeah, we can get very very
Speaker 1: similar to that. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, those of you
Speaker 1: out there who are listening and made it this far
Speaker 1: through our our construction of our flesh. Goleumn Uh. I
Speaker 1: want to hear from you. Did we miss some organs
Speaker 1: because this was everything that we could find. Are there
Speaker 1: other organs out there that have been artificially grown that
Speaker 1: we didn't hear about? That we should add to the list.
Speaker 1: Let us know. Uh? And I want to know from
Speaker 1: you too, would you eat artificially grown meat? Uh? And
Speaker 1: in particular, would you eat artificially grown human meat? Would
Speaker 1: you eat flesh from a T eight hundreds exo skeleton? Yeah? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Would you eat that? Seer it up that? I wonder
Speaker 1: why they haven't done that in the movie. It seems like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that trap somewhere they just like, yeah, whips off some
Speaker 1: forearm bacon and fries it up. Yeah. I believe, Like
Speaker 1: again my comic Nerd coming out, I'm pretty sure or
Speaker 1: Wolverine's done that in the comments before well, that that
Speaker 1: raises so many quests cut off his own flesh, cooked
Speaker 1: it and eating it while it regrows so that he
Speaker 1: can sustain himself. That I feel like there's some basic
Speaker 1: problems in area, but they we'll have to discuss those
Speaker 1: another time. The auto cannibalism, um of Wolverine. Well, where
Speaker 1: can they write it to us to let us know
Speaker 1: about their thoughts on all of these depraved ways to
Speaker 1: eat things? Well, of course you can always go to
Speaker 1: stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is the mothership,
Speaker 1: and that's where you'll find links out to various social
Speaker 1: media accounts that we're on. So just Facebook and Twitter
Speaker 1: where bow the mind and both of those you also
Speaker 1: find us on Tumbler and Instagram. Um, and also stuff
Speaker 1: to way Mine dot com just has all the podcast episodes,
Speaker 1: all the videos, blog posts, you name it, and hopefully
Speaker 1: uh hopefully, um, certainly it is going to be redesigned
Speaker 1: soon you know, will look all the snap here. And
Speaker 1: if you want to write to us about artificial organs
Speaker 1: the old fashioned way, you can hit us up at
Speaker 1: below the Mind at houstof works dot com for more
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics. Isn't how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com The big