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Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Body parts made from paper

News in Science - Body parts made from paper :

"The idea behind organ printing is relatively simple: print cells onto thin sheets of biodegradable paper; stack thousands of sheets of the paper on top of each other; and when the paper disintegrates, the cells are left intact to form a 3D shape, such as a hollow blood vessel."

Yesterday it was about turning poo into papaer and today it's about turning papaer into organs!! So you go out and buy a ream of bio paper and some bio ink and you can print your own organs!!! It sounds that simple, but I think it's a trifle more complex than that. The new bio paper works. They had tried seaweed extracts and collagen to get the rusults, but they didn't work now:

"Cells embedded into the bio-paper secrete enzymes that eat up the hydrogel; produce a biological matrix for new cells; and multiple and divide to create new cells. Eventually, the cells migrate, fuse together, and become a functioning tissue."

I am stunned. Not only are we clever, we are ingenious...so how come we make such dumb decisions when we can do such awe-inspiring things like this?? I am fast becoming aware that paper is going to be organic in the future!

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