It’s 1998 and science is taking big strides. The first cloned mammal,Dolly the Sheep, has just had her first lamb; the first robotically assisted heart surgery has been completed; Furbys have hit the shelves. In a bold announcement, biomedical engineer Professor Michael Sefton declared that within 10 years, scientists would have grown an entire heart, fit for transplant. “We’re shooting big,” he said. “Our vision is that we’ll be able to pop out a damaged heart and replace it as easily as you would replace a carburetor in a car.”
Fifteen years on, however, we’ve had some liver cells, eye cells, even a lab-grown burger, but no whole human organs. We could be forgiven for asking: where’s our heart?
Read the full, original story here: Stem cells: what happened to the radical breakthroughs?
