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Rudimentary Liver Grown In a Dish

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday June 20, 2012 @05:21AM from the tastes-like-chicken dept.

ananyo writes "Japanese scientists have coaxed stem cells into forming a 5-millimeter-long, three-dimensional tissue that the researchers labelled a liver bud — an early stage of liver development. The bud lacks bile ducts but has blood vessels, and when transplanted into a mouse, was able to metabolize some drugs that human livers metabolize but mouse livers normally cannot. The work is 'the first report demonstrating the creation of a human functional organ with vascular networks from pluripotent stem cells,' the team claims."

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Re:Burn in Hell! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-20 05:45 · Score: 0, Troll

You obviously didn't RTFA. This isn't the controversial embryo-destroying pluripotent stem cells, these are cells re-engineered into pluripotent stem cells.
Re:I'll drink to that! by 0123456 · 2012-06-20 06:41 · Score: -1, Troll

We're not all the USA. All other countries have socialised healthcare where this sort of thing will be "free"

Ha-ha. You think socialist healthcare will give old farts operations costing tens of thousands of dollars for free.
One of the main reasons why the NHS (for example) is cheaper than US healthcare is that it routinely refuses treatment for old farts. If I remember correctly, something like 50% of lifetime healthcare spending for the average American happens in the last couple of months of their life, when socialist healthcare would just let them die earlier.