Mar
27
2007
Margaret Atwood wrote about pigoons in her book, Oryx and Crake - pigs modified with human stem cells in order to grow organs to be used for transplants. Looks like now scientists have actually created sheep that are “15% human” by “injecting adult human cells into a sheep’s foetus.” According to an article in The Mail On Sunday, Professor Esmail Zanjani (University of Nevada) has spent the last seven years working on the process:
He has already created a sheep liver which has a large proportion of human cells and eventually hopes to precisely match a sheep to a transplant patient, using their own stem cells to create their own flock of sheep.
The process would involve extracting stem cells from the donor’s bone marrow and injecting them into the peritoneum of a sheep’s foetus. When the lamb is born, two months later, it would have a liver, heart, lungs and brain that are partly human and available for transplant.
Let’s hope these “sheeple” don’t evolve the way of Atwood’s pigoons…
(via /. )
Feb
20
2007
When I was young, I had a recurring dream theme that really used to freak me out: loose, missing, or in-the-process-of-falling-out teeth. Later versions of the dream usually entailed some measure of relief after the initial stomach-turning horror, as my dream-self discovered that upon losing a tooth another one was there growing in its place (despite it being an adult tooth, go figure). I’ll leave the dream analysis as an exercise for the reader, but I’m thinking now that maybe I was just having visions of the future… 
According to a Reuter’s article, Japanese scientists have been successful at bioengineering a tooth and transplanting it into a mouse:
They used primitive cells, not quite as early as stem cells, and injected them into a framework of collagen, the material that holds the body together.
After growing them, they found their structures had matured into the components that make teeth, including dentin, enamel, dental pulp, blood vessels, and periodontal ligaments.
<snip>
The teeth grew and developed normally when transplanted into a mouse, said Takashi Tsuji of the Tokyo University of Science in Chiba, Japan and colleagues.
Nifty.
