At any given time, the US transplant waiting list is about 100,000 people long. Even with a record 41,356 transplants last year in the US, 6,897 people died while waiting. Many thousands more never made the list at all….The most obvious place to get a lot of organs was from animals, but [in the past] “xenotransplantation”—moving organs between species—didn’t seem to have good prospects….In the US, some scientists called for a moratorium in the face of public panic over whether a pig virus could jump to humans and cause a pandemic.
To create lungs, [Martine] Rothblatt is betting on a different approach, establishing an “organ manufacturing” company that is trying to make lungs with 3D printers…. Some scientists say bioprinting remains a research project and question whether the lifeless polymers, no matter how detailed, should be compared to a real organ. “It’s a long way to go from that to a lung,” says Jennifer Lewis, who works with bioprinting at Harvard University.
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