This is only indirectly a neuroethics story. But its importance seems hard to overstate. The New York Times reports that researchers have constructed a rat heart, capable of beating:
The researchers removed all the cells from a dead rat heart, leaving the valves and outer structure as scaffolding for new heart cells injected from newborn rats. Within two weeks, the cells formed a new beating heart that conducted electrical impulses and pumped a small amount of blood.
With modifications, scientists should be able to grow a human heart by taking stem cells from a patient’s bone marrow and placing them in a cadaver heart that has been prepared as a scaffold, Dr. Taylor said in a telephone interview from her laboratory in Minneapolis. The early success “opens the door to this notion that you can make any organ: kidney, liver, lung, pancreas — you name it and we hope we can make it,” she said.
The description above is odd ("removed all the cells from a dead rat heart"--what was left?), but I think I get the basic idea. The story seems important enough that it should have made the front page.
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