Pieces of a Human: The Science of Artificial Organs

Imagine a future in which much-needed transplant organs are printed on demand, grown within the bodies of humanized animals or plucked fresh and dripping from the organ vats. It's the age of artificially grown organs and yes, gentle listener, we already have one foot planted within this amazing, Frankenstein-tinged world. Join Robert and Christian for a discussion of artificial organs in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind from how stop
works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Christian Sager. Hey, Robert,
would you eat an artificially grown organ? Well? The phrase

(00:24):
is a number of questions, doesn't it is it? Is
it an animal organ, a human organ? Let's say it's uh,
let's say it's an animal organ for now. Let's say
it's chicken. It's a chicken. It's just a slab of chicken. Uh.
And it's been nice and um fried up. It's covered
in in juicy oils and breading, and there's some butter

(00:45):
and spices on there. But you know this didn't come
from a real chicken. It was grown in a lab. Okay,
So on one level, I don't have to worry about
I was the chicken humanely raised? How did it live?
How did it die? A was it's diet? Yeah? These
were just grown from cells scraped off a chicken. Okay.
But then I have to worry about that side of it.
This is something artificial. It's something that has been grown

(01:08):
in a vat or or or grown over some scaffolding.
As well to discussing this episode. So how am I
supposed to feel about that? And then how am I
supposed to feel about eating needed all in this scenario?
Is it? Is it worth it? Why am I going
to these means, uh, these extremes to eat this food
to get this protein when I could conceivable we get
it from something that is a little less uh Frankensteiny

(01:30):
if you will. Yeah, and it raises a lot of questions,
a lot of Frankensteiny questions, as we're gonna talk about
throughout this episode today. We are talking about artificial organs
fresh from the vat, grown grown in a vat. Uh.
And this is sort of a spinoff from our penis
transplant episode because we ended and said, wow, there was

(01:50):
some research on artificially grown penises and vaginas and we
wish we had time to cover that, and we said,
let's just build a whole episode out of that. Yeah,
and it it actually follows nicely an episode that I
recorded with Joe that I think we'll publish directly before
this one that tackles the synthetic biology area from at
a more of a genetic genomic level. Yeah. Well, and

(02:15):
it's I mean, it's fascinating what we can do, uh,
and and also what we can't do. So we're gonna
sort of walk you the listener through, you know, the
general process, and then we're gonna go organ by organ
through the human body as to what we can actually
grow and potentially transplant. And at the end, I'm going

(02:36):
to try to keep track of this on a piece
of paper as we're going along here. And at the
end we're going to talk about what are artificially grown
Frankenstein looks like, like, what parts are we pretty close
to being able to sew together here for our Frankenstein? Yeah. Yeah,
we're going to provide we're potentially going to provide a
scaffolding of knowledge here that you may grow your own.

(02:57):
But but I think it's it's cool to sort of
take it piece by piece. And because this is how
science works, right, scale by scale we build out the
entire picture, and it's important to Let's let's get two
things out of the way before we dive into the vat. Uh.
There's the first is that you know some of you
are probably asking why would we need to grow organs
in a vat? Why why would we even do that

(03:18):
unless you're a mad scientist. Well, biomaterials are historically used
to replace diseased or damaged tissues. So you know, if
somebody's got a bad ticker or kidney or lung or whatever,
wouldn't be great if you could just swap in another
one that you grew in tank, rather than getting a
donation from somebody else, Which leads me to, uh, the
how organ transplantation works aspect of this as well. Now

(03:42):
we don't have time in this episode to cover it,
but if you haven't listened to our penis transplant episode,
we cover pretty much the whole process, not just penises,
but for all organ transplants. At the beginning of that episode,
you know how how you go about finding a donor
the immuno suppressive of medicine that's required all of that

(04:02):
bone marrow transplants. So we're not going to really do
a deep dive on that today, but keep in mind
a lot of the same principles apply here. Yeah, indeed,
and just to drive them, two of the just key
sobering facts here is that a there's a worldwide shortage
of donor organs out there, and every day, just in
the United States, twenty two people die while waiting for

(04:23):
organ transplants and escorting to federal statistics. And this is
a great time as well. If you're feeling that that
information hit you, UH, make sure that you're a registered
organ donor. And if you have any um, you know,
issues surrounding that, I encourage you to sort of work
your way through them. And also I believe in depending
on where you are, you can put certain you can

(04:45):
put certain limits on your own organ donation. So if
you do have like a weird thing about your your heart,
you know that I wanted to remain inside of a
coptic jar in your pyramid, I believe you can. You
can specify that. Yeah, and and I'll red or ate
this from the penis transplant episode. Some organs are not
automatically covered on your regular old organ donor transplant card

(05:08):
H so you need to specify, for instance, that they
can take your penis or they can I don't know
what the other ones would be. Penis was the one
that we really feel. And I want to stress if
you're worried about what's gonna happen to your penis after
you die, um, virtually if you do nothing, if nothing
happens to if it's not donated, nothing good is going
to happen to your penis? Trust me? Um, so why

(05:30):
not donated so it can do some good? Uh, So
let's just cover this. There's a general kind of approach
that has multiple angles for growing human organs, although we
do sometimes grow animal organs to test out the process
in a vat in a culture. Right there, they're actually

(05:54):
you know, a few different approaches. This is a really
exciting area of science. And if you if you follow
the literature like we do, uh, there's always some new
technique that's that's you know, being experimented with or just
sort of rolled out as a theoretical possibility. It's gotten
to the point where, like I'd say, there's weekly there's
a headline about somebody using a three D printer to
buy print some kind of bio material, to the point

(06:16):
where like it doesn't even maybe to us because we
look at it so often, but it doesn't feel shocking anymore.
The first time I was like, WHOA, you can print
skin on a three D print. There, that's cool, And
now it's kind of like yeah, of course, yeah. And
some of them are basically that like ink jetting cell
types into organized structures. Essentially three D printing with stem

(06:36):
cells in some cases. Other times you're talking about the
use of scaffolding, which we'll get into, or letting cell
spontaneously self organized into proto organs. Uh. You know again
within a vat of some kind or some sort of
a culture. Um. Yeah, the floating I believe it's called
the floating culture is what we're going to get into later.
That when you have to grow something three dimensionally. Yeah,

(06:59):
And this is all interesting because we're we're playing with
life here. We're manipulating self building, self organizing systems in
order to build or grow specific structures and tissues for
specific bodies. So it's not like you're just building something
out of the bricks. It's like you're building something out
of bricks and the bricks had their own agenda already. Yeah. Absolutely,
these are not your father's legos. These these well they

(07:21):
might be, but yeah, they do they like we like
we've talked about before, whenever you're kind of rearranging cells
on human level and trying to get them to attach
to other cells. There's all kinds of different things that
they're doing. Uh. And that synthetic biomaterials one that we
talked about that as well too in terms of how

(07:42):
the how you can sort of program them to have
different powers. Right. Yeah, Now we're gonna talk about stem
cells a little bit in this, so I just want
to go ahead and throw out just a quick reminder
what stem cells are for everyone. And this is just
information that comes right from how stuff works How stem
cells work article. Check that if you want a deeper die.
But stem cells essentially the building block of human body.

(08:04):
Stem cells are capable of dividing for long periods of time,
they're unspecialized, and they can develop into specialized cells. So
stem cells inside an embryo will eventually give rise to
every cell, tissue, and organ in the fetus's body. But
unlike a regular cell, which can only replicate to create
more of its own kind of cell, a stem cell
is pluripotent. When it divides, it can make any one

(08:27):
of the two twenty different cells in the human body.
But we don't just have embryonic stem cells, which of
course come from the embryo or the fetus or the
umbilical cord blood. We also have adult stem cells, which
are These are an already developed tissues, such as those
of the heart, the brain, the kidney, and they usually
give rise to cells within their resident organs. And then

(08:47):
we also have induced pluriphoton stem cells, and these are
stem cells that are their adult. Uh, they're differentiated cells
that are then experimentally reprogrammed into a stem cell like state.
And this is in portant to distinguish the difference between
the embryonic stem cells and the adult stem cells because
I feel like, you know, this was probably over ten

(09:07):
years ago that the big controversial debate about using stem
cells and science was going around in political circles. But
I believe that most people think embryonic stem cells when
they just hear stem cells, they're not thinking about that
that there's the possibility for other types of stem cells
to be used in this. Yeah, the politics kind of
loaded the term a bit, so it's good to to

(09:29):
to be specific. So let's talk about the main process
that's used for growing flesh. I guess is the best
way to say it, because there it's not always an organ,
you know, it could be any kind of flesh depending
on what you're what you're scrape in and what you're
kind of protein gel you're soaking it in. But the

(09:51):
process is generally generally called de cellular ization and essentially
what you're doing here's your making replacement parts out of
the raw materials from a patient or from undifferentiated stem cells.
So you take cells from that organ, you put them
into lab dishes, and you bade them in a fluid

(10:13):
that prompts them to multiply. Now, I don't want to
dive super deep into the biochemistry of all of this
because I think it would confuse us, and it would
confuse most of our listeners unless we're already a biochemist, right,
But um, you know, it sounded to me like the
type of fluid depended on what type of thing you're

(10:33):
trying to grow, too, uh, And this process takes a while.
For instance, if you want to grow a human bladder,
that takes about six weeks scripts them cells off, you
get in the right mixture, you to let it wait,
takes about six weeks to go. But what you need
before you can actually have an artificial organ is a
temporary structure. And this is what we're talking about when
we say scaffolding. Basically, this mimics the basic internal architecture

(10:58):
of cartilage, and it also protects the growing cells from
any kind of mechanical stress. Upon them. So this scaffold
is what we pour the cells onto. That's pretty nuts. Yeah.
It always reminds me of the Terminator movies, the exo
skeleton and then you're growing the flesh on it, or
specifically the toys that came out where it was like

(11:20):
an exo skeleton toy and you had to put like
on it. Oh, you put Plato on it. I was
agreed if you could like peel its skin off and
then put it back on again or something like that,
like my flesh suit. Um. Yeah, absolutely. I wonder if
James Cameron and his crew did their homework on scaffolding
back then, although the eighties I don't think scaffolding was
really at its height yet. You know this this my

(11:42):
understanding and we'll find out as we go along, really
kind of starting the seventies. Um, but maybe he was
aware of it. So if you use what are called
condroblast cells in the scaffold, it allows the cells that
you attached to grow and to divide and to even
regrow the cartilage. Then you coat this with other cells

(12:03):
that are important to the organ. So for instance, if
you're trying to grow bladder, you would code it with
eurotheel cells. Uh, this would allow it to sort of
you know, have the moisteness and allow urine to pass through. Right. Uh.
Weirdest of all, you can actually design the scaffold to
dissolve itself once all the cells are finished rebuilding. Right,
So cells grow up around this scaffold, they create their

(12:25):
own system of cartilage, and then the scaffold dissolves and boom,
you've got an artificially grown organ. One of my favorite
descriptions of the process here comes from the founder of
Harvard Apparatus Regenerative Technology or heart and I think now
it's actually called biostage, but the founder was made by
the name of David Green and in um and is

(12:46):
quoted in a technology review is stems. Stem cells are
taken from a patient's bone marrow, and then they are
rained down over the top of the scaffold, much like
a chicken in a rotisserie. Yeah, I'm in mad saying
that this is like stem self fondue, like dip and drip. Well.

(13:07):
The method was first pioneered by a guy named Larry
Hench and this was in the late nineteen sixties. Basically,
he and his team were seeing a lot of amputees
coming back from the Vietnam War, and they wanted to
try to do something. So they discovered and used a
material that's called hydro zala petite, and this is a
mineral that actually occurs in the human body and bonds

(13:29):
really well with bone. So they found that when they
experimented with it in the form of what they called
a bioactive glass, it had excellent properties for this application
of artificial organs. Bone cells could actually live on it
and then subsequently create healthy new bone. So it seems
like it it would work perfectly. Right. You grow the

(13:49):
cells for the muscle, the meat, I guess as we
would call it, and then the bone itself will regrow
in the cartilage as well. So that's the sort of
origin of this starting off. And that's sixties. That's that's
time enough to terminator. Yeah, all right, James Cameron probably
was down with a scaffolding science by then. Do you
think the eight hundred had any organs? It definitely had skinned,

(14:11):
good question blood. Yeah, it had at least something that
looked like eyeballs over its robotic I couldn't eat. I
can't remember. Could a tight hundred eat or did it
just like I'm also like, give it to me that. Wow,
I didn't know you had that Arnold Schwartz. We all
have an Arnold. Um. I keep getting my Terminator timelines

(14:35):
confused with all the new movies and the Sarah Connor chronicles,
which makes me I don't know if those are considered
cannon anymore. But they don't think even they know those. Yeah,
I don't think they do either. But those robots were
doing all kinds of weird things that yeah, well we'll
have to throw that one out the listeners. I think
they did like a kind of scaffolding type thing though
in those like they sort of tried to explain how

(14:56):
it works. I remember they would like in the show. Yeah,
never watched the TV show, but I heard people and
put their bodies in like a bathtub and melt down,
melt them down so they could then subsequently kind of
like this process like regrow the flesh on top of them,
so they basically took their place. So organ scaffolding um,

(15:17):
in the real sense that we're talking about here, also
entails a great deal of bio mimetic material possibilities. Uh.
And this is an area where I've I've kind of
dealt with the topics some over the years. Uh. For
how stuff works, a scientist continue to take inspiration from
such diverse wonder materials of the natural world as spider
silk and also the squid sucker in protein responsible for

(15:39):
their ringed sucker teeth on a squid centacle. Both of
these materials are ideal is they're strong, they're malleable, and
they're organic. Yeah. That's the really difficult thing here, is
like we can grow skin all the livelong day, but
being able to grow materials that are both strong and
flexible the same way our actual organs are is tough. Yeah.
Scientists in Germany have proposed using spider silk as a biocompatible,

(16:02):
biodegradable adhesive matrix for skin repair specifically, and this involves
using dragline silk, which is like the premium silk because
I'm maybe even minus the spiders have different types of
webbing that threadcount. Yeah essentially, Yeah, I mean spider silk.
I think we have an old episode in the in
the archives about it. Go back and listen to it

(16:23):
if you want more. But it is uh, yeah, this
fascinating strong, malleable substance and uh, and and the spider
is is like a musician creating these different different notes
of web. But this particular a bit of research. They
they were talking about weaving matrices on steel frames and

(16:44):
seeding them with the fire blasts, which provides the structural
background for all the connective tissue. And if you want
something even crazier, and this is this is the one
that I read about back in two thousand ten. We
were just talking about this off air. This is blockers,
this is it's two thousand tents, so it's actually a
little bit old at this point. It was a Rice
University scheme to inject cells with a metallic gel, and

(17:08):
the researchers then would have would have succeeded in the
suspending cultured cells in a three dimensional magnetic field, and
this would serve as a magnetic scaffolding and organs would
be grown around that in the right shape without any
foreign materials at all. Wow, which is that's pretty crazy,
said sadly. That doesn't seem to be a lot of

(17:29):
new information on this. I don't know if they're still
working on it or if it's an idea that is
kind of shelved. But I'm also trying to imagine how
the metallic substances, uh, dissolve in the same way that
like the organic scaffoldings that we're using to you know,
like or would you just have it? Would you be

(17:49):
like Wolverine and you just have like metal built into
your I don't know, flesh somehow, just in flex here
and there. What's It's interesting you mentioned Wolverine because I
feel like the second X Man movie, there's a scene
where Mystique injects like a prison guard with a metallic gel,
so that Magneto Canes has that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.

(18:10):
He sucks the like metal dust out of this guy's body. Right,
you can make little like or that's my favorite scene
in that movie. Oh yeah, that makes the little orbs
and he's grinning while he's shooting the orbs around smashing everything.
Ian McKellen, if only we could artificially grow Ian McKellan now.
In order to pull off this the scheme, though, with
the magnetic at least suspended organ scaffolding, they need to

(18:32):
be able to program a detailed magnetic field that would
float the stem cells and in the exact spots needed
to grow the full organ. So hopefully, you know, here
we'll hear more about that one in the future, because
I think it's a pretty crazy cool idea. Yeah, But anyway,
they're numerous studies out there, the quest for new and
improved ways of scaffolding out in Oregon, everything from synthetic

(18:53):
collagen to biommetic materials, self assembling scaffolds, et cetera. So, however,
you scaffold out the artificial organ that you're working on.
Once you've done that, the organ needs to be nurtured
in an incubator that mimics our body's conditions so that
the cells can grow together some more. You're looking basically
to recreate the temperature and humidity of the human body. Now,

(19:16):
remember when we talked to um Mary Roach, right, we
talked on the penile transplant episode. We talked about why
the the nose is particularly good for doing penis transplants, right,
because the nose has the same sort of properties of
moisteness that you need for that spongy tissue and a penis.
So this is the same kind of thing. Basically, like,
you want to get these cells to react and deal

(19:40):
with their environment the way that they're going to need
to inside the human body, then you implant it into
the patient the scaffold gradually dissolves. The biggest problem for
this method is maintaining a blood supply to the artificial
tissue once it's implanted in the human body. There are
also a cup other weird methods that haven't similar to

(20:04):
the like this metallic scaffold link thing I haven't really
quite taken off yet. Um. But the first one, you know,
we mentioned at the top is the three D printing, right, So, yeah,
you can three D print uh flesh right now. I
don't know that you can three D print organs in
the same way that we do when we grow them
in cultures like this, right because it's because as we've

(20:24):
kind of laid out here, it's like, on one hand,
you have cells and then you have tissue. And it's
one thing you have the tissue, but then you have
the tissue, uh and and or various tissues forming into
an organ. That's a more complicated endeavor. So there's this
company called Organovo. I wonder how long they spent like
trying to come up with that one, or is it
organ organ Ovo? Maybe very nice? That one that makes

(20:46):
more sense out of there, based out of San Diego,
and they distribute body part printers, and these basically go
to the labs that are already working on these artificial organs.
It basically works just like an incent printer. It sides
droplets of cells and scaffold materials onto a platform that
gradually builds the tissue in three dimensions. So the labs

(21:07):
all around the world use this. They mainly build skin, muscle,
and blood vessels out of it. One lab has actually
refined it to be able to make a mouse sized
heart in forty minutes. And I want to use this
as an opportunity to let you the audience know that
we're about to get into some mouse brutality big time.
Like this is a field where without mice and rats,

(21:31):
we wouldn't have been able to go far. And I'm
going to have nightmares about these swarms of rats that
are going to be coming at me with artificially grown
human organs attached to them in various positions. There's one
other thing I mentioned Wolverine earlier, right, because the whole
metal thing. The ultimate goal here is that you wouldn't
grow the organs in a vat, but rather that you

(21:53):
would diagnose that there's something wrong with the organs ahead
of time and that you would then inject health these
cells and growth inducing molecules into these injured organs and
prompt them to regenerate on their own, so repairing the
organ as opposed to replacing it exactly. And we would
be wolverines. We would just our skin would regrow if
we had a bad laceration or a burn, or you know,

(22:16):
our lungs would rego grow if we had a smoking problem, whatever,
whatever you need, just inject some of those cells. That's
the future oriented goal of this. We are not there yet,
but that that's what they're looking at now. Um, you know,
the best places we've discussed. We talked about the essential
step and getting that synthetic organ inside a human body,

(22:38):
growing in and just the right conditions, etcetera. So obviously
the best place to grow human organ is probably inside
a human. Failing that, what about a non human animal.
So we've utilized as xeno transplantation in the past, say,
you know, from a pig or a bad boon. You know,
we've all we've all read about those various transplants and

(22:58):
they come with their share of concerns and complications as well.
I'm envisioning like you just take like a blue whale,
and you just fill it up with human organs, like
it's just a giant blue whale organ growing farm. I
do love that idea. It reminds me of one of
my favorite Invader Zim episodes where he's going around the
school as Zim as a as an alien disguised as

(23:19):
a child. This is Yeah, in one of the darker episodes,
he's going around harvesting organs from the children and implanting
them in his own body until he's just a bloated
balloon of Pilford organs and all the children are sick. Yeah.
I couldn't help but have dark thoughts as as I
was doing this research. This is fertile ground for some

(23:41):
horror material. Yeah. And but but more to the point,
fertile ground for growing organs. Why not just grow a
human ready organ inside of say a pig. Well, there's
research into the Researchers at the University of California Davis
have done just that, created embryos that have both human
and pig cells. They've used human stem cells from an
adult skin in her hair, use them in a pig embryo,

(24:02):
and then injected it into the uterus of a pig. Now,
in these experiments, after twenty eight days, the they terminate
the pig's pregnancies and then they analyze the cell remnants.
But essentially the the idea here is pretty awesome because
you just you knock out the section and an animal's
DNA that concerns a particular organ, and then you replace
it with human adult stem cells. Embryos don't have an

(24:23):
immune system, so they can't reject the foreign cells. No
cells begin growing the desired organ. So it's a long
way from being a viable option for organ replacement, but
it you know, it makes a lot of sense, right
if you're ethical, depending depending on your moral uh yeah, standing, yeah, yeah,

(24:44):
ethical issues aside, you are growing needed transplant organs within
a domesticated animal and then harvesting them for use. It
also makes your question at the top of the episode
a little more problematic. It does. If I'm eating an
organ from a pig, is it actually humanized pig or
those human organs? Yeah? Uh? And speaking of ethical quandaries,

(25:08):
I suppose this is probably a good time to remind
the audience, uh that I'm the vegetarian on stuff to
blow your mind. Uh, And we are about to talk
about exactly that not being a vegetarian, but growing synthetic
meat to eat the same way that we grow very
similar way to how we grow artificial organs. And I

(25:30):
wanted to throw this in here as well, because my
natural thought goes to, well, if we can grow these
human organs, should we eat them? You know, are you
a cannibal if you eat human bladder that's been grown
in of that? Hm, I don't know. Yeah, I mean
it makes eating medical waste all the more problematic, so

(25:53):
totally and uh and also like you know, who knows
how it tastes, but if you want to know, maybe
you want to know what human flesh taste slight, but
you don't want to, you know, go that far down
the extreme path. It provides a safe outlet for the
hannibal electric of the world. Exactly, yeah, exactly. I was
thinking of Hannibal and all those perfect feasts he put together. Well,
so the synthetic meat thing works a little differently. But

(26:14):
here's a quick overview. You take some muscle cells from
a living animal and you use it to culture lumps
of tissue ostensibly to be eaten. Uh. They're said to
look a little bit more like calamari than beef. So
I used to work in a kitchen, a seafood kitchen
and cut calamari all the time, thinking like white kind

(26:35):
of plastic e strips rather than you know, what we
think of is like ground beef. Yeah, it's pretty bland stuff. Yeah,
that's what it sounds like. But the plan that they're
talking about to make it taste better is to mix
in artificial blood and fat so it actually tastes like meat.
Uh So that then subsequently like where do you get
the artificial blood? Where do you give the fat? You know?

(26:56):
But but anyway, um in twenty in two thousand one,
bioengineers at New York's Touro College did this with a goldfish.
They immersed the goldfishes cells in a nutrient rich fetal
bovine serum. The muscle cells then divided and reproduced like normal,
producing chunks of fish flesh. But none of these researchers

(27:19):
would eat it after even after the lead researcher flavored
it and fried it in oil, he said, come on,
somebody eat it. Nobody would. Where are Here's the thing.
I'm a vegetarian. I think i'd eat that. I mean
in the name of science. I would give it a try. Yeah,
why not. Uh, Well, inven somebody did have the guts
to go ahead and do this at the University of Missouri. Uh,

(27:41):
they had a specialist produced a sample of synthetic muscle
and then he ate that at a conference. Now he
has started his own company called Modern Meadows to sell
grown meat to consumers. Uh. It's not on the market yet,
but they are talking about using a three D printer
to build fake meat, and a team of researchers in

(28:01):
the Netherlands is working on something similar. In two thousand seven,
they said that they could manufacture fake meat. And I'm
not talking about like soy meat like you're buying the
grocery store corn or something like that is more biologically
cellularly it is meat. Yeah. Uh. They think that they
can manufacture it for five thousand dollars a ton, And

(28:23):
I heard that and I thought, wow, that's a lot
of money. But it's actually economically competitive with the costs
of actual meat nowadays, especially when you take into account
just the environmental footprint of raising account. Absolutely. Yeah, that's
part of the big argument. I mean this, a lot
of this research isn't being done because of like a
vegetarian style ethical argument. It's being done for exactly what

(28:44):
you're talking about, which is the impact that the meat
industry has on our environment. Uh so these are really
they're just chunks of meat. But here's the thing, like,
let's say you want your steak, right, Well, steaks a
little bit more complex. It's got fibers, is blood vessels,
there's fat involved, right, So you can't just grow a
steak right now. Um. And then the question really is

(29:07):
is if you put this out there and marketed it,
would people actually eat that grown meat? I think they would.
You know. I thought about this a lot in the past,
not only concerning fake meat and synthetic meat, but also
the use of of insect protein in food because of
course some people, um, you know, have a problem with that.

(29:29):
And I always wonder why when you especially when you're
looking not at steak, but say, uh, chicken nuggets at
a fast food restaurant, or fish sticks or some of
the very processed forms of meat out there, Like, what
is the difference? This is so removed from the creature
that that it was, then you know, why why not
just make it from some cheaper, more you know, easily

(29:52):
acquired protein that is just as good for us. Why
not use synthetic that grown meat and the nuggets if
the neggat nuggets are essentially made from this weird, grotesque
chicken slurry anyway, Yeah, I mean, I don't want to
go too down. We don't have the research in front
of us, and I don't want to go to down
the vegetarian rabbit hole on this one. But yeah, I
think most people recognize that, like a lot of fast

(30:14):
food isn't as much meat as we'd like to think, right,
There's a lot of chemical components in there that are
holding it together. Yeah, it's a very processed meat based
protein food. So if we're if we're okay with that,
if we can all say chicken nuggets are okay as
a process that we'd cut out any ethical concerns, then

(30:34):
let's take that process and apply it to uh, you know,
synthetic biology. Yeah. Yeah, Well, we certainly have come a
long way with human beings, and so we're going to
spend the rest of the episode going through the human
body organ by organ as to what we have built
so far. But let's take a quick break and then

(30:57):
when we come back, we're gonna start off with human
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(32:02):
type in stuff that stamps dot com inter stuff and
start mailing things. All right, we're back. So, as we
began to make our way through the human body here
through some of the various tissues and parts that were
able to grow, I think it is helpful to a
sort of thing that Frankenstein scenario building a person from

(32:24):
spare parts, but also maybe that terminator scenario as well,
like how much how much of our terminator could we
put together today? Yeah? Yeah, Well, let's start with the skin.
We could do that skin is very difficult because it
has seven different types of cells that are all arranged
in a complicated structure, and doctors have been trying to

(32:45):
do this since the seventies, mainly so they could help
burn victims. Now, Kearra tennisites our cells. They're one of
those seven cells in our skin that we're giving these
doctors the most trouble. They basically make their way to
the surface before we shed them off. But while they're
making their way to the surface, they emit a chemical
signal that activates skin growth, so they are crucial to

(33:08):
the skin regeneration process. James F. Burke and Ionis Janis
came up with the means that acted like like like
a skin covering. Basically while they were encouraging Kara Tenna
sites to do the thing that they do. They created
a layer of skin using collagen from cows and sharks,
together with a sugar molecule that served as their scaffolding.

(33:32):
So they're using the scaffolding method even with skin for
new growing cells. Once this new dermist had fully formed,
the temporary model underneath dissolved and the new cells grew
into its place. So basically the decelluarization process we were
talking about earlier. Now, even with this membrane, where do
you get the skin grafts from, right, if you move

(33:55):
it from another part of a patient's body, well, that
can be painful, as you might imagine, right, Although we
do that plenty of times, it's still it's it's not
a comfortable process. They also tried using cadaver skin. So
we talked about this in the penis transplant episode using
cadaver's penises, but in this case they tried taking the
skin off of dead people and applying it to living people.

(34:18):
That is right out of a horror story as well
to me, So we we're building a flesh column already. Basically. Yeah.
Unfortunately it didn't work very well. The immune system completely
rejected it. And because burn patients are already susceptible to infection,
they didn't want to use the usual immunosuppressive cocktail that
they throw into these people so that they can accept

(34:39):
the new organs. So this was their solution, grow new
skin from the patient's zone cells. They fed these cells nutrients,
then they let them take weeks to grow into a
sheet of skin that they then applied on top of
the burn area. This is sometimes treated with antibacterial pro

(35:00):
teens that reduce the risk of infection during the transplantation.
Now all this sounds awesome, right, but uh, growing skin
in a lab is real slow and it's super expensive.
But I've got two fun facts for you today, Loreale.
You know the cosmetics company, they actually hold the patent

(35:20):
for lab grown skin that is derived from skin that's
discarded during someone's plastic surgery. So that biomedical waste we
were talking about earlier can be used in place of
animals for testing reactions to cosmetics. So the pieces of
flesh removed from say Hollywood actor's face can then be

(35:45):
used to grow new skin, either for that actor or
presumably for someone else. Right, yeah, and then you you know,
rather than spraying hair spray into the eyes of like
a ferret or a raccoon or something like that, you
spray it on this thing. See how it reacts. Inner fact,
new skin can also come from the foreskin of a
circumcised infant. With just a little bit of skin like

(36:09):
maybe like the size of a postage stamp, you can
grow four acres of skin tissue in a lab. Now,
newborn cells don't rouse a host immune system, so this
is ideal. Right, It's sort of like the similar to
the embryonic stem cell research, right. Uh, they don't really
have any particular kind of cell things so that they

(36:30):
don't uh make the immune system unhappy and attack it.
So this may actually be better for grafting. So can
you imagine them like like okay, like either every time
somebody gets plastic surgery or every time a kid gets circumcised,
instead of just like throwing it in the trash or whatever,
they're like, you know, putting it in a biomedical bag

(36:50):
and shipping it to some lab somewhere so they can
use it to subsequently grow lots of skin. It's like
cutting out biscuits and a sheet of dough. You don't
just throw away extra dough. You call it back up
and you make one more biscuit out of it, bingo.
So so essentially here we we can see the skin
of our Frankenstein monster. We can see the skin of
the terminator. I mean, hey, maybe the eight hundred is

(37:12):
just nothing but foreskin exactly, foreskin or discarded plastic surgery waste. Yeah,
so he might might be a little lumpy, but yeah,
we can do it. We've we've got plenty of skin
to grow around four acres. I think we can put
four acres on our Frankenstein terminator. So up next, Obviously,

(37:34):
we want our terminator to be able to look people
in eyes when it buys corn, dogs and guns exactly,
and we also want our Frankenstein monster to be able
to see what it's doing. What can we do about eyes? Well,
the first thing we can do is make sure that
a terminator can cry. Uh, so we can build it
tear ducks. This is highly important. It was we discussed
in our the Creepy Post episode where we talk about

(37:55):
the loss of eyelids. Yeah. Absolutely. At the Tokyo University
of Science, they actually bioengineered the glands that produced tears
in saliva. Now, they didn't do it for a terminator.
They did it to help people who have chronically dry
eyes and mouths, so they could reinstall those glands and
help them out. UH. Even further, this seems to be
like an area of study that's prominent in Japan. There's

(38:17):
an article from Scientific American in two thousand twelve called
grow your Own Eye UH, and it's about further studies
in Japan that have shown that they can use stem
cells to actually grow a retina. UH. The same team
has also grown cortical tissue and part of a pituitary gland.
But they basically hope that their success with the retinal
tissue methods will help treat eye disorders like macular degeneration

(38:42):
in the future. Now, the method they use very similar
to what we talked about earlier. They put embryonic stem
cells in a culture dish, they expose them to chemicals
that influence eye formation, and then they wait and eventually
it forms into the shape of the optic cup of
an embryonic eye, and they use this is where they
use the floating culture I talked about, which is a

(39:03):
three dimensional culture that allows the cells to grow into
the complex topology of an eye rather than just like
a flat sheet. This structure also helps communicate between the
cells like they actually communicate better between one another, which
facilitates growth, which makes sense because we're three dimensional beings, right,

(39:24):
We're not. We're not flat two D creatures. So yeah,
so we've got eyes now on our robot slash Frankenstein.
So he's got eyes and skin, all right, So our
Frankenstein's monster might be able to see, might not, but
at the very at least our terminator might have eye
flesh covering a robot eye. Yeah, and it can cry,
but it's gonna probably need to hear, right if it

(39:45):
needs to, like hunt down it's a John Connor for instance,
Hearing is pretty important, right, or at least needs to
look like it has ears and needs to have at
least the physical structures of ears so they don't have
to wear a hat all the time, and that we've
been able to do for a while actually, um, but
by harvesting car artilage from a patient's ribs. We've actually
been able to reconstruct ears in the past. Physicians at

(40:06):
Cornell have actually used a three D printer to print
an ear with living cells from cows and collagen from
rat tails. So the let's sorry, let me slow that
down and repeat it again. The living cells come from
the cows, the collagen comes from the rat tails. Uh.
And then this infamous ear. You may have seen this
a year or two ago, the ear that was transplanted

(40:29):
onto a mouse's back to basically there is a picture
going around of this mouse running around with a human
ear on its back. Uh. They transplanted it on there
so they could ensure that the ear would retain its
shape before they actually put it on a human being. Now.
And another example of this that I love comes from
performance artist stell arc Okay with him so in two

(40:50):
thousand seven he had a cell cultivated ear surgically attached
to his left arm. Really and it's all part of it,
like I believe, ongoing. I I think he still has
the ear. Correct me if I'm wrong, listeners, But it's
all part of this ongoing a sort of body modification
performance are thing. So he started doing, yeah, like a

(41:11):
transhumanist style thing. That's interesting. Um, well, I wonder if
he did this method or if he did the old
school method, which is basically taking cow and cheap cells
and forming those into an ear around a flexible wire frame.
So you basically take like a pipe cleaners and grows
cells around it, turn it into an ear and attach it. So, okay,

(41:34):
we got ears, we got eyes, we got skin. Next
up windpipe. Now, believe it or not, this was the
first engineered organ that was implanted in a human being,
and it happened in two thousand and eight. Uh. They
grew the whimpipe from the patient's own stem cells and
this was the first step toward using the scaffolding technology

(41:54):
that we've been talking about this whole episode. Yeah, that
company that I mentioned earlier, Harvard Apparatus for Narrative Technology,
which is now his Biostage. They conducted several of these
each by growing the patient's own stem cells on a
lab made scaffold. And they've since re engineered the technique
into what they call their self frame technology, and this

(42:15):
is aimed to quote better stimulate the regenerative properties of
the organ, and they planned to move beyond the trachea
and the bronchos and tackle other organs as well, But yeah,
the trachea, the windpipe has an important place, and our
our ongoing development of synthetic organs. Yeah, I mean, we
are our terminator here. He's gonna need to at least

(42:38):
pretend to breathe somehow, and if he's got like a
voice box, you'll need to provide wind to go through
it somehow so they can do his Arnold schwartzen Aker top.
I think his tracky is going to be really top shelf,
to the point where if anyone questions his humanity, he
can say, of course I am human, look at my
Maybe that's why he has the accent. Why well, why yeah?

(42:58):
Why would they build a robot android terminator send it
back in time? But it has a really thick accent.
I always because I thought about this as a child,
and I always assumed it's a global war, right, And
maybe the computers just didn't really understand the diversity of humans,
and they were like, we must capture a human specimen

(43:20):
um manipulate, you know, capture its voice, capture its appearance.
And they got essentially Arnold Schwarzenegger, and they said, there
it is. That's what human sound like, that's what they
look like. That's why that's why he's so their specimen
is so ripped and so Austrian. Yeah, that makes sense.
And then along the line they became a little bit
more refined. They weren't really as muscular down the road

(43:41):
where they the other ones. And the woman from Terminator three,
they're a sleeker. Uh what's her name from the TV
show the Sericona Chronicles, just like a ballerina. Uh, and um,
I have to have not seen the latest one, the
Genesis one with Calisi and uh, who's the terminator? Yeah? Yeah,

(44:05):
so maybe they explained in that one. If somebody's out
there going, oh, you guys gotta see Terminator Genesis four
star movie, let us know. I saw it on an airplane.
You saw it. Yeah, it's a great airplane movie. I
him watching Terminator Genesis on an airplane. Okay, Um, so
next comes up. Our terminator needs arms and legs if

(44:26):
it's going to run around and grab people and you know,
jump and do all the things that it does right. Well,
in Massachusetts General Hospital actually grew entire rat arms in
a Petrie dish. You can actually watch this video on
YouTube and it is it's nuts. They use the same
decelluarization technique we've been talking about, where the living rat

(44:49):
donate cells to regrow organ tissue. And you watch it
in a in this video in um what do they do?
They speed they speed up the frame rate and it
can tains bones, cartilage, blood, vessels, tendons, ligaments, and nerves.
So they're hoping this will make way for transplants for amputees.

(45:10):
So for right now are our terminator would just have
little rat legs and arms. But down we're getting close. Yeah,
the prognosis I think is far better for the terminator
as opposed to the Frankenstein monster, because because the mechanical
exoskeleton will provide the movement and you can as long
as you get the appearance of those gigantic arnold muscles,

(45:32):
and then we've got yea and that we could probably
do brains. How's this thing going to think? Well, if
it's terminator has probably got a computer brain, right, but
what about Frankenstein. Well, in scientists in Vienna at the
Institute of Molecular Biotechnology actually created a miniature brain in
their lab. Now this was the size of an embryo

(45:53):
brain at nine weeks old, so it's pretty small, but
it had active neurons in the same organizational structure or
as our brains. And they used stem cells to grow this.
So we've got a tency, tiny little brain inside our flesh. Gollumn. Now,
what if we want our flesh column to be a woman?
Right like the female terminators that we've seen that we

(46:17):
have seen female terminators, And as far as Frankenstein goes,
we know Frankstein's monsters. We know from the novel uh
and some of the film adaptations that he's going to
ask for a mate. We need to be prepared to
create that mate. Uh. So we're gonna need this breasts. Well,
we can grow breasts. At the Heimholtz Center for Health
and Environmental Research in Germany, researchers have grown again miniature

(46:41):
mammary glands in order to study the development of breast cancer.
Same same thing. They took healthy tissue from a woman
undergoing breast reduction surgery, so as somebody who's already getting
rid of these cells, they turned that into a gel
that allowed the cells to divide and spread the same
way that memory glands do. You during huberty and they

(47:02):
grew outwards. I mean it's the tissue, right, They're not
actually growing abreast. It's not like it has a nipple
on the end of it, right, But it is the
same kind of tissues, so they can do tests on it.
So it's theoretically we could use this and attach it
to our our terminator golum. Yeah, and you know I should.
I'm also I should mention that of course with humans

(47:22):
particularly you know humans, human males can lactate. Yeah, you know,
if the conditions are right. So we actually have a
great brain stuff episode on why do men have nipples,
both on the audio podcast that I host and on
the video series. Yeah, I mean it's a fascinating topic.
I think there's an older stuff to blow your mind
that goes into it as well. But but yeah, essentially

(47:42):
then the male uh uh equipment is just as functional
as the female equipment. It just takes a little more
to kick start it. Unless you're a fruit bat. Fruit bat,
male fruit bats can actually lactate and do lactates for
normal uh. You know, child rearing technologies are so much
far further out of us, I know in many ways.
You know, sometimes the the Arnold terminators take on a

(48:05):
a nurturing role in the mid So it would be good.
I I don't know if Skynett thought of this, but
it would be good if, if, if the determinator could
activate its manory glance. Hey wait a minute, maybe that's
why his pecks are so big. He's just got like
juicy pecks. Yeah. Maybe Skynet was like, all right, can
you lactate though? That's what humans do? And they're like,

(48:26):
all right, make sure it's in there. Wow. Man, we
are uncovering so much about James Cameron's legacy today here
on the show. Okay, next up, bladders. So we talked
already bladders are possible. The Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative
Medicine in Winston Salem, North Carolina, they've grown everything from muscles, blood, vessels,
and skin to a complete urinary bladder and they've implanted

(48:49):
these and more than two dozen children and young adults.
And I was like, wow, that's why. Uh, And it
turns out it's because they were all born with defective bladders.
These are the first lab generated human organs implanted in humans. Now,
this seems to contradict the windpipe thing from earlier. I
think the wind pipe was actually the first one. But

(49:12):
these bladders are more along the lines of like an
actual organ, whereas the wind pipe is like a structure structure. Yeah. Um,
so their hope is that this will become the standard
procedure for dealing with people with bladder defects. But so
now our flush column. He's got a bladder, and uh,
while we're at it, why don't we give him some kidneys? Uh?

(49:33):
So kidneys. Remember mass general, they were growing all kinds
of stuff. They've also grown kidneys using the decelluarization process. Uh.
And guess what they did with that kidney. They attached
it to a rat. They they even produced urine once
they were attached to the rats. So there you go.
So you've got your bladder and your kidneys. So this, uh,
this thing can at least mimic the effect of urination. Yeah.

(49:58):
Essential for our Frankenstone's mons, but also for the terminator
if its skin is you know, it's never really explained
how that skin stays alive, how it stays, how it
produces blood, but presumably it might need to drink water
in order to stay hydrated and look like something other
than a mummy. Yeah, you would think and if the
skin and the muscle tissue that we've grown to put

(50:19):
on this thing has blood vessels, we're going to need
something to pump blood through those vessels. Right, Well, we
can grow artificial hearts. At the University of Pittsburgh, scientists
used skin cells from humans to create heart cells and
then they developed those into heart muscle, and once you
supplied them with blood, these little mini hearts actually contracted spontaneously.

(50:44):
This made me think of the strain, which we've covered
on the show before. But you know, like the guy
keeps his wife's heart in a bottle and he learns
and he like drops like one drop of blood into it,
and it and it starts contracting. This is what I
wasn't mentioning. This creepy heart, little tail tale heart thrown
in there as well. Um, and guess what they did.
They grew this human heart on a mouse's heart. Now

(51:06):
I can't imagine what that looked like or what the
procedure was, but it worked, and we could theoretically advance
this technique to replace heart tissue when somebody has a
heart attack. Uh. And the reason why this is important,
like a lot of you are probably out there thinking, well,
wait a minut. I've seen artificial hearts has been around
for decades, right, they are, but standard artificial hearts are

(51:27):
only used when a patient is about to die because
they don't last very long. So this kind of artificially
grown heart tissue would be much better for our purposes.
And finally, what brought us to this whole episode to
begin with artificial genitals? Well, on one hand, our Frankenstein's
monster needs genitals. Um, if it is going to be

(51:50):
an approximate convincement. Yeah, and I assume the terminator has genitals.
We never see them, but it is implied that they
are there. Yeah, I just yeah, there's a lot of
nude Arnold Schwarzenegger, but you never really see any any frontness. Huh.
It's usually shot in such a way. I don't know.
Maybe he's like a Kendall down there, but PACK doubt it. Uh.

(52:10):
In two thousand and eight that we've mentioned these guys already,
the Wake Institute for Regenerative Medicine, they were able to
grow artificial penises for twelve rabbits. Now you're probably saying,
wait a minute, what rabbits. Well, eight of these rabbits
were actually able to ejaculate with these artificially grown penises,

(52:32):
four of them were able to produce offspring with them. Now,
the team this is the same team that announced the
bioengineered bladder that we talked about earlier, but they followed
this up by giving four women bioengineered vaginas. And actually
the artificially grown penis is trickier the penis as we
talked about in our penis transplant episode. It is structurally complex,

(52:56):
it has a dense mass of cells, and you've got
that spongy tissue that unique to it, so it's really
difficult to replicate. So they basically used the scaffolding technique
that we talked about earlier. They took a donor's penis,
soaked it into detergent and enzymes, and washed away all
of the donor's cells. What they're left with is the

(53:16):
collagen scaffold of the penis. They recede it with the
patient's own cells that are grown in a culture, both
muscle cells and endo field cells. And even though they've
engineered half a dozen of these penises, they're not ready
to do any transplants just yet. So based on our
penis transplant episode, we're still stuck with the methodology that

(53:37):
we talked about there. They need to assess the safety
and effectiveness of this first. They literally have a machine
that they use to squish, stretch, and twist these artificially
grown penises to make sure that they stand up to
everyday life. So it's kind of like the machine it
ikea that like pommels a chair constantly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Uh.

(53:58):
They test erections in these things by pumping fluid through them.
In the short term, they're looking at growing small penis
parts to help replace partially damaged organs, usually from degradation
at old age. Now let's talk about those vaginas to write.
You know, we don't just have to give this terminator
a penis. We could give it a vagina. Hey, maybe

(54:20):
we give it both? Maybe both? Right? Um? Well, yeah,
For those four patients that I talked about earlier, they
were assessed for this, uh, and they had vaginal aplasia,
and so a similar technique was used to the one
above described for the bladders, the one that I mentioned earlier,
the same Wake Forest Institute structure, basically scaffolding. In two

(54:42):
thousand five, they implanted the first of vagina. Eight years later,
all four of the recipients have the normal structure and
function in these artificial vaginas. These patients were young at
the time that they were implanted there, thirteen to eighteen
years old. The scientists involved took volvar biopsies and then
they cultured and expanded those cells outwards, same same process

(55:05):
basically that we've been talking about here. There's been no
long term post operative complications. And the areas that they've
tested these in include desire arousal lubrication for orgasms, satisfaction,
and whether or not they were able to have painless intercourse,
all of which succeeded from the research. Yeah, so there

(55:28):
we have it. I mean, that's that's the end of
our organs list, as far as we could find in
the research. So we got a brain, ears, and eye
or two eyes, tear ducts, a windpipe, skin, little tiny
limbs or if we if we built out the exoskeleton,
it can have normal limbs with the skin stretched over it.
It's got a bladder and some kidneys, it's got some genitals,

(55:50):
so we're missing a lot of stuff. We don't have
lungs yet, you know, and everything else. So the prognosis
is better for the terminators for our frame, but you
could like build a semi convincing exterior fake human. I
think so. Um, you know, I can't help but think

(56:11):
back to the episode that Joe and I did on
the Science of doone. Yeah, it was a two partner
and one of them we talked a little bit about
the skin dancer. I don't know if you're familiar with this,
that one. They're essentially shape shifters, like engineered shape shifter
organisms that work for the benefit. These aren't in the
movies then, I don't think there's one that shows up

(56:31):
in the Sci Fi channel. Um, but there were a
couple of different sources where people said, all right, how
would you make a humanoid? How would you engineer a
human to change its shape, to change its sex even
And one of the two theories involved like engineering essentially
what appears to be a vagina, but the vagina can

(56:54):
open and then male genitalia descent through it, so it
would be all about just the appearance rather than a functionality. Yeah,
but some of this research that we would just discussed
here he's getting Oh yeah, we can get very very
similar to that. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, those of you
out there who are listening and made it this far

(57:14):
through our our construction of our flesh. Goleumn Uh. I
want to hear from you. Did we miss some organs
because this was everything that we could find. Are there
other organs out there that have been artificially grown that
we didn't hear about? That we should add to the list.
Let us know. Uh? And I want to know from
you too, would you eat artificially grown meat? Uh? And

(57:34):
in particular, would you eat artificially grown human meat? Would
you eat flesh from a T eight hundreds exo skeleton? Yeah? Yeah?
Would you eat that? Seer it up that? I wonder
why they haven't done that in the movie. It seems like, yeah,
that trap somewhere they just like, yeah, whips off some
forearm bacon and fries it up. Yeah. I believe, Like

(57:57):
again my comic Nerd coming out, I'm pretty sure or
Wolverine's done that in the comments before well, that that
raises so many quests cut off his own flesh, cooked
it and eating it while it regrows so that he
can sustain himself. That I feel like there's some basic
problems in area, but they we'll have to discuss those
another time. The auto cannibalism, um of Wolverine. Well, where

(58:20):
can they write it to us to let us know
about their thoughts on all of these depraved ways to
eat things? Well, of course you can always go to
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is the mothership,
and that's where you'll find links out to various social
media accounts that we're on. So just Facebook and Twitter
where bow the mind and both of those you also
find us on Tumbler and Instagram. Um, and also stuff

(58:42):
to way Mine dot com just has all the podcast episodes,
all the videos, blog posts, you name it, and hopefully
uh hopefully, um, certainly it is going to be redesigned
soon you know, will look all the snap here. And
if you want to write to us about artificial organs
the old fashioned way, you can hit us up at
below the Mind at houstof works dot com for more

(59:11):
on this and thousands of other topics. Isn't how Stuff
Works dot com The big