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April 2001

The Human Body Shop

Recent advances in the field of "tissue engineering" are making it possible to grow spare parts on demand for the human machine. Today, a bladder; tomorrow, a heart?

By Doug Garr

It's a decade from now, and an elderly man gets the grim news that his heart is rapidly decaying and that the left ventricle-the chamber that squeezes blood out to the body-needs to be replaced. His physician takes a biopsy of the heart cells that are still healthy and ships the tissue to a lab that is really an organ factory. There, workers use the patient's own cells and special polymers to fashion and grow a replacement part-certified by the original manufacturer. In three months, the new ventricle is frozen, packaged and sent to the hospital, where the patient undergoes a standard surgical procedure: the insertion of a living implant created from his own tissue. The surgery saves his life.

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