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Biotech Science

Engineers Implant Vascularized 3D Muscles 42

Posted by timothy from the one-step-toward-vat-meat dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A big hurdle to creating "replacement parts" for the human body is the lack of an internal, nourishing blood system in engineered tissues. Using a stem cell "cocktail," researchers say they've now overcome that, and successfully implanted engineered muscles in lab animals. Next stop, genuine implantable pecs?"
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Engineers Implant Vascularized 3D Muscles More

Engineers Implant Vascularized 3D Muscles

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  • Waiting isn't too hard... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mister_llah ( 891540 ) on Monday June 20, 2005 @02:09PM (#12865112) Homepage Journal
    Well, it'll be nice to be able to graft some muscles on and all that, but I'll do what I do with software releases... I will wait until awhile after the technology is released, so that all the misfortunes occur to the impatiently eager... and then when the technology will not have a chance of leaving me a parapalegic or something, then I'll go for it...

    === ... but this is fun stuff, especially considering the article on cloned brain cells... perhaps this means we are nearing cloned stem cells? ... and then the moral ambiguity of stem cell research is only in cloning issues, one step closer to pleasing everybody!

    Yee haw!
    • http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9804/27/parkinsons.cloni ng/ [cnn.com] ... [the cloned cells were bovine, but hey, its a start] ...

      ===

      If the future is going to be a scary place, at least I'll have the muscles to beat it up...
      • From your link:
        Researchers at the University of Colorado transplanted cloned bovine brain cells into the brains of rats.

        What are we going to do tonight Brain?
        Same thing we do every night Pinky, stand around eating grass and gazing vacantly into space.

        I for one welcome our new bovine-genius rodent overlords.

        Just imagine a beowoulf cluster of bovine-brained rodents!

        Natalie Portman! Parkinson-petrified and lactating!

        But do these rodent brains run Gncow-Linux?

        In Soviet Russia rats implant bovine brain c
  • Can't wait until I can order a Schwarzenegger upgrade module. :)

  • Downsides... (Score:5, Funny)

    by RootsLINUX ( 854452 ) <rootslinux@gmail.cDEBIANom minus distro> on Monday June 20, 2005 @02:11PM (#12865138) Homepage
    Now I'm even *less* motivated to exercise than before, which I thought was impossible. Maybe I could get really strong leg muscles implanted (like those of a cheetah) and then I wouldn't need to be stuck in traffic for 30-60 minutes a day. I'd just run to work at 60+ MPH!!! Abusing technology is what American's do best after all.... >_>

    • Considering the relative efficiency of cars vs humans, abusing resources is right. You will need a lot more energy from food than you car burns. That is at a normal aerobic run pace, the Cheeta can to 60 mph, but only for a short anaerobic sprint, which is an order of magnitude less efficient yet.

      Now if you were going to bike to work you might have a chance, so long as you were willing to stick to aerobic speeds. I'm not a doctor, but I suspect that to increase aerobic speeds you need to work on the c

      • Re:Downsides... (Score:2, Interesting)

        by drightler ( 233032 )
        Humans are way more energy efficient than cars. Assuming a human could run at 60mph, and assuming gasoline could be comsumed rather than food:

        1 gallon of gasoline contains 33000 kCal (calories).
        A human burns 0.653 kCal (calories) per mile per pound of body weight.
        Assume a 200 pound man.

        200 * .653 * 60 = 7836 kCal (calories). This is about 23.75% of a gallon. About 252.68 miles/gallon.
        • Of course I'm sure the efficiecy comes from humans weighing signifcantly less than the average car.

        • Did you account for digestion inefficiencies? As your numbers for aerobic or anaerobic running?

          As you already noted, a car is significantly more mass. In fact VW's 1 liter car has similar efficiencies, despite being a car plus the man.

    • Re:Downsides... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by dmaduram ( 790744 )

      Just as a fyi, if you're interested in swapping muscles with a different species, you'd probably be better off using the rat IIb fast-twitch myosin muscle filament, instead of the cheetah.

      There was a great article about gene therapy & interspecies muscle filament switching a few years ago in Scientific American, and they noted that switching muscles with another species could be problematic under duress, because the resultant strain on the quadriceps could physically rip out the hamstring, patella ten

      • Cool reference! Will go read it.

        that switching muscles with another species could be problematic under duress, because the resultant strain on the quadriceps could physically rip out the hamstring [etc]

        You would obviously have to reengineer tendons and placement of muscle connections, too.

        We might change most animals and plant life the coming few few hundred years. (And not only pets looking like manga people.)

        Maybe the animals in Vance's Dying Earth (and other books) was realistic?!

        Consid

    • "Now I'm even *less* motivated to exercise than before, which I thought was impossible.... I'd just run to work at 60+ MPH!!!"

      So.. how are you going to do that and avoid the exercise part?
    • As opposed to say, abusing apostrophes.

  • If they can get nerves to grow too, then perhaps they can grow things like a tail for a person - a tail that will actually move, wiggle around, twitch, etc...

    Or imagine putting extra rings of muscles in certain orifices, or in certain appendages to give more movement?

    "Body mod" could take on a whole lot of new meanings!

    --LWM
    • The brain is organized in a certain way that I am not sure (as I am uneducated in that particular area) that it would work quite as one might hope.

      Much like we need physical therapy to learn to use our muscles after an accident... I'd imagine that you'd need to go through tail therapy to be able to work in the control for those new muscles, if it is possible at all.

      [Hard to say, I do know a bit about the language centers of the mind, and there is a set range of time that they need to be developed in or th
      • Did you see the article [slashdot.org]about the monkey's learning to move the robotic arm? If we can teach monkeys to use a third arm, why not teach people to wiggle their wangs (or tails if you want to be PG13) at will? Same idea!

        Yeah, it'd take some effort, but it's certainly doable, and I expect it will be done.

        --LWM
    • Like being able to scratch your balls your wang?
    • These ideas are just the beginning...

      How about, not just mods, but variable, adjustable ones?

      Heading for the tropics? Forget sunscreen, turn your skin black, really.

      Going to do ocean research, in the ocean? Grow yourself a sleek torpdeo shaped body with fins.

      Time to head back to the lab? Grow your body into an eight armed lab 'bot.

      Want to go hiking and backpacking this Summer? Start growing our feet into hooves and an extra pair of legs. Become a centaur for the Summer.

      Having kids and need to watch ev

    • God damn fucking furries...

      BTW, the vagina and ass already have lots of muscles, and hitting the G-spot is pretty easy, just have her push her hips up and go in from a low angle. Sex has been around for a long time.

      Unlike fucking furries.

  • Hail your new leader (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I for one welcome our new bio-engineered overlords.
  • I'm sure it will take a while, but when it is a commercially viable procedure, this stuff will probably cost insane amounts of money.

    This leads to an obvious problem: If the rich and powerful are also physically stronger than us, how are we gonna overthrow them?
    Seriously, muscles harnessed for long toil under the blazing sun won't be able to compete with these cyborg implants!

    We must act now, before the muscles are implanted, and before the damn upper class becomes impervious to our insurrection. To ar
  • body parts which is all the rage with bio-this, clone-that marketing hype you guys seem to drool over so easily.

    Surgeons most difficult obstacle to success isn't the surgery task but the _re_vascularization of the affected area. Skin grafts, tissue implants and such depend upon a *healthy* supply of bloodflow to nourish the new tissues as a result of surgical intervention.

    The choice now is cut&paste, well scalpel and sew but one area has to sacrifice its vascularity for another area which has lost it
  • This happens in 5 years...

    Arnold Schwartzanegger: but I'm the real actor, er, I mean the real senator!

    some dude: Ivy league kids tell me that 5 times a day, and they're all exactly the same musculature up to the milimeter. So wait in line like everybody else, mr. terminator!

    P.S.: The exercice programs are dying! )I guess the overlord thing is taken).

  • Growable meat (Score:2, Interesting)

    by AmicoToni ( 123984 )
    Growing muscle tissue on demand actually means growing meat. Which can be edible meat.

    Is the science-fiction scenario of growing meat without farming closer? It sure would represent a whole new source of high-quality, "ethically correct" proteins.

    But would you eat such a thing?

    • Hear, hear.

      I've been quite surprised at the influx of "odd" observations over the past few years; I certainly wasn't expecting local pancake structures.

      You raise a pretty good point, though, on the structure of disks, large and small, in the first place.

      Plasma physicists jump up and down that the in-vogue theories treat large-scale magnetic fields and currents as non-existent, as though charge must cancel out on the large scale, therefore it has no effect. Sometimes, they make a good point - some of t

      • Wow, talk about replying to the wrong post... Admittedly, at first I thought, "Maybe the 'local pancake structure' reference is some kind of complex food-related pun I'm just not getting..."

        And by the way, Hell Yes I would eat vat-grown steaks. In a pinch I will occasionally eat the weird shit McDonald's sells. A little vat veal couldn't be any worse.
        • I seriously doubt that vat-grown steak can cause your liver to fail like the mystery meats over at McDonald's...anyday of the week in my book :)

    • Sumna biach, I'm uninstalling Autoform as soon as I get the chance :)

      I remember a story called "Angel Station" where they had "vat meat". I was pretty enamoured of the concept at the time, really. Hell, I eat and enjoy hot dogs - by-products and all.

      Seriously, though, the search to clone organs has been on for quite some time, and 'vat-grown meat' is very likely to happen at some point in time in the future. It won't happen on its own; some strange enlightened vegan or ex-Microsoft philanthropist will

  • woo hoo! :starts planning to create Molly:

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