Cloning a Trachea In the news there is a story about a man from
Eritrea going to school in Iceland recovering from surgery in
Sweden where a surgeon born in Italy recently gave him a new
trachea grown in a bioreactor from the United States composed of
synthetic scaffold designed in the United Kingdom and the man's
own stem cells! The world is certainly getting smaller and the
smaller it gets the more specialists like surgeon Paolo
Macchiarini and others can collaborate to make stories like this
possible. I'm posting this because it's a relevant update to a
blog entry I made recently on Cloning. NPR has a great podcast
on this story where they cover the more human side of the
science (see here). You might also be interested in earlier
advances in cloning organs that go back to 1999 in cloning
bladders: first, in dogs, now humans. This cloning case is
unique because until now, all trachea transplants involved using
cadaver trachea as the "core" scaffold to grow stem cells
around. So far there have been a handfu