Rats Breathe Air From Lungs Grown In the Lab

cremeglace writes "'For the first time, an animal has drawn a breath with lungs cultivated in the lab.' Although preliminary, the results might eventually lead to replacement lungs for patients. Researchers at Yale University have successfully applied a technique called decellularization that involves using detergent to remove all of the cells from an organ, leaving a scaffold consisting of the fibrous material between cells."

As in TFS,

[mujadaddy]

"WITH" not "FROM"

Re:Brains

[ShadowRangerRIT]

Brains in anything but the lowest order animals are far too complex for us to:

1. Keep alive without access to a circulatory system for the time needed to perform the transfer
2. Reconnect properly at the other end. They're riddled with blood vessels, and you need to make sure the connection to the rest of the body's nervous system is restored. Blood vessels are (relatively) easy, but hooking up each individual neuron properly? Not possible, and if they aren't hooked up immediately, the host body's heart would stop, along with hundreds of other more or less vital processes.

Beyond that, it would be completely pointless. Learned behaviors, depending on the type, are known from experimentation (and the occasional "lucky" bit of brain damage) to reside in specific lobes of the brain (e.g. most trained reflexes are controlled by the cerebellum). We'd learn nothing except that the scientists involved are immoral. Particularly since a lot of the training would be for the original body; trying to control a dissimilar body would make it nigh impossible to display the effects of any training due to the difficulty in just figuring out how to breathe, move, etc.

Re:Pah.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whole head transplants have been done: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_J._White

Having seen the footage of the chimpanzee once, it makes Frankenstein seem like Willy Wonka. The footage is actually so traumatising that it was classified and has only rarely been released.

Re:Next Step

[RsG]

IIRC, it's more about their blood.

Not just that, but also the level of myoglobin in their muscle tissue. Sperm whales have incredible oxygen storage capabilities, and actually collapse their lungs when diving deep.

Re:Brains

[NeutronCowboy]

Pediatrist at Emory wants to disagree:http://www.pediatrics.emory.edu/ccm/lectures/files/Brain%20Death.ppt [emory.edu]
Warning: PPT. Heart rate is controlled by various parts of the nervous system, including certain parts of the brain, but it is still most dependent on the autonomic nervous system. What stops the heart quickest is lack of oxygen through lack of respiration, which is what gets stopped once the brain stem gets removed.

Re:Brains

[Kratisto]

Actually, the pace of the heart is set by the SA node [wikipedia.org]. The brainstem and other factors can make the heart beat faster or slower in response to stress, but the heart paces itself.

Not quite there yet

[confused one]

The researchers allowed the animals to breathe with the lungs for up to 2 hours before euthanizing them because of blood clots.

They're not quite there yet...

Re:Enter and Win!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's partly because their olfactory systems are so damaged that they simply don't understand how bad it smells to others.

As an ex-smoker, let me be the first to say you've hit the nail on the head. Smokers simply don't realize just how vile they actually smell, and the deep down visceral gut wrenching reaction that non-smokers receive from smelling stale cigarette smoke. The smoke that is just coming off the cigarette isn't actually all that bad... it's what lingers around after that is the really disgusting thing. And when I say gut wrenching... I mean it. My job puts me around various types of dead and decaying animal bodies often enough that I can get an estimate of about how long something's been dead and how big the animal is and what the temperature of the area the body has been lying in just by the smell. I've forgotten to wash my hands before going to lunch right after handling a bloated, purple, maggot infested corpse. But the smell surrounding someone who is saving half a cigarette for later physically makes me literally gag. And by literally, I don't mean that in the idiotic common usage where "literally" means "figuratively."

And it wasn't that long ago that I was the one causing the smell... and didn't see what was so bad about it.

Re:Next Step

[L4t3r4lu5]

For those who are having trouble with this concept, they're talking about the mammalian diving reflex. You'll get much better results searching for that than trying combinations of "lungs fill with fluid." In fact, once you've looked through all of the articles of punctured lungs, kidney failure, and congestive heart failure, you'll wonder why they'd think this is a benefit at all.

They're not

[justinlee37]

The researchers are not trying to save rats. They're trying to save human lives. Unfortunately, it isn't wise to use experimental medical procedures on humans as sometimes the treatment being tested ends up doing more harm than good.

I can't tell if you're just trying to be funny or if you really don't understand this.