#1 The idea of rebuilding and building a human body from scratch seems a little far fetched if you ask me;
it takes me back to school days when we were reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and more disturbingly reminds me of ‘The Human Centipede' I don't know whether that says more about me though.
However, they are taking this concept pretty seriously at a University in Pennsylvania; which sort of reminds me of Rocky Horror show which is as weird as the notion of human body growth, from scratch like a cake.
"We can grow the whole human in nine months," says Dr Stephen Badylak from the university, in the video below from Science Channel. "All we really need to do is figure out how to grow a part of that human."
#2 But the weirdness doesn’t stop here, no no… it continues in the form of a four legged snorting animal known by the name… pig.
Having seen the film pig; the concept of a pig being human like doesn't seem so far fetched and yes I am aware that its just a film, but so is Frankenstein!
When slaughtering a pig, their bladder's are a waste material so they're cheap and readily available; which doesn't sound all that comforting to me. But the scraping away of the layers of the tissue leaves you the extracellular matrix, which is the basic structure in all animals, including humans.
'The extracellular matrix is the glue that holds cells together in every tissue and organ of your body,' explains Badylak. "And it gives instructions to the cells, and the cells, in turn, give instructions to the matrix."
Reassuringly the tissue of the inside of a pigs bladder IS cleaned and dried before being turned and formed into strips and powder to be then used as a medicine for an injured person.
'Instead of the body thinking ‘Injury? Alright, let's form a scar,' the body says ‘Alright, injury? Let's rebuild',' explains Badylak. "And the matrix helps to jumpstart it in the ‘Let's rebuild' pathway.
And if you are still convinced this is bullshit, its actually happened and worked on a man with a severed finger after constructing a model airplane in 2005. Lee got sent a vial of the medicine which he proceeded to rub on the missing finger. His finger completely regrew and even had a whole fingernail attached to it. I mean, I couldn't quite believe it either, and the concept was just beyond gross so I definitely didn't want to watch it. But I kinda had to just to believe it.
