T E K B O X

France

This is a ghost heart. What they’ve done is taken a pig heart and stripped it down to, basically, a cell framework that they can use to BUILD A NEW HEART UPON. You could inject stem cells into this framework so that a newly formed personalized heart can be transplanted into a donor with a significantly reduced chance of rejection. FUCKING AMAZING. It’s not been done with human tissue yet, but the promise this given to people who need hearts - or kidneys or livers or whatever - is beautiful. Science is beautiful.

And it’s IMPERATIVE to mention that a woman, Doris Taylor, at the Texas Heart Institute developed this. And she started with a rat heart and worked up to he bigger, more complex (and more human) pig heart. What a total bad ass.