There are thousands of people across the globe who are born with facial abnormalities. There are also injured soldiers, people who get mauled by animals or experience a serious accident who need new body parts.
Currently, when a person needs a nose or ear the replacement body part is made of cartilage taken from the patients’ ribs. The procedure is extremely painful and the chest sometimes never heals.
Now that Japanese scientists have grown a human ear on the back of a rat, all of that will change. The new procedure only requires a small number of cells. Also, the finished ear would be a living thing that would grow with, say, a child needing the replacement part.
For the procedure on the rat, scientists took the lab-grown cartilage of a human and placed them inside plastic tubes shaped like a human ear and inserted it on the rat's back. After only two months, the tubes dissolved and left behind a two-inch ear on the rat's back.
Doctors in London have grown a nose from scratch, using the patient's arm, instead of a rat's back, to grow it.
They have also built an artificial windpipe and say that eventually it may even be possible to grow a whole face in the lab.
This is amazing news for the medical community and for people who've put off having a body part replaced.
