Sweet, Soft Matter: Candy Cotton for the Regeneration of Blood Vessels

I love interdisciplinary journals, but I had not stumbled across Soft Matter, where physics meets chemistry meets biology for fundamental soft matter research, until today when the following story caught my eye:

(Via Red Orbit)

"Scientists are turning to cotton candy as a novel tool to help grow replacement tissues for people. It seems the long-time favorite treat may provide an ideal way to generate a network of blood vessels within lab-grown skin, bone, muscle or fat for breast reconstruction, researchers say.

Dr. Jason Spector of New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York and Leon Bellan of Cornell University conducted the research on the new technique.

It works by first pouring a thick liquid chemical over the cotton candy, and waiting for the liquid to solidify into a chunk. The chunk is then put in to warm water to dissolve the cotton candy, leaving small channels where the strands of cotton candy used to be. Eventually, what is left is a piece of material containing a network of fine channels.

These channels are then lined with cells to create artificial blood vessels. The solid chunk can be seeded with immature cells of the type of tissue scientists wish to make.

Since the block is biodegradable, as it disappears it is slowly replaced by growing tissue. Ultimately what remains is a piece of tissue permeated with tiny blood vessels."

Assuming this technique will be refined, it would have incredible implications for organ transplantation, regenerative medicine, artificial wombs, as well as other medical uses.

What can I can say but "Sweet!"?

A Little Bit Closer to Jurassic Park

I fully admit that I am typically the first skeptic in line when people make proclamations like "oh, we're getting close to Jurassic Park!" After all, as fantastical as the book (and movie) was, it was fantasy, and it got as much, if not more wrong, than right. So needless to say, it was with a bit of chagrin that my first reaction to reading that scientists believe that they can regenerate a woolly mammoth for around USD $10 million was, indeed, along the lines of "oh wow Jurassic Park!" In fact, my thought process, in pretty rapid succession, went something like this:

1. Ooooooh neat!


2. $10 million isn't really that much...


3. Huh, yeah, it'd definitely raise ethical issues to do this to a Neanderthal, but why wouldn't it be ethically questionable for a mammoth?


4. $10 million isn't that much at all, especially when you consider the kind of money the top philanthropists throw at science projects.


5. Oh man, it's gonna be Jurassic Park, isn't it? Some rich philanthropist is going to go buy an island and...

Right. I do acknowledge not only being a geek, but being rather medicated to the gills on cold medicine right now, too. At least, that's gonna be my excuse!

With less levity and more seriousness, this is an interesting break, both in where the found and how they sequenced the DNA, but also for the very idea of replicating extinct species. What does it mean to be extinct, then? Does this alleviate our environmental concerns? "Oops, just wiped out the last Bengal tiger, let's go grow a new couple!" How close of a genetic match do you need to make before the animal being born now is the same animal that was last born hundreds, if not thousands, of years before?

And more in my own areas of interest: do we really have the right to bring something back from the dead? Can we assume that it died for a reason, and we might really be mucking with things to undo that? If we regenerated a mammoth today, would it have the right foods to eat? How would its immune system handle common viruses? Would the climate be right? Where would it live? Are they herd animals, or can they be solitary?

The temptation to play God is always great, especially when science allows us to do - and undo - so much. But I wonder if, this time, it might take going too far to see just where that line is.
-Kelly Hills

As a total aside, I nominate naming the first one Snuffleupagus.