Wake Forest Researchers Swap Skin Grafts For Cell Spraying 123
TigerWolf2 writes with this excerpt from a Reuters story carried by Yahoo: "Inspired by a standard office inkjet printer, US researchers have rigged up a device that can spray skin cells directly onto burn victims, quickly protecting and healing their wounds as an alternative to skin grafts. ... Tests on mice showed the spray system, called bioprinting, could heal wounds quickly and safely, the researchers reported at the Translational Regenerative Medicine Forum."
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Act now and we'll throw in for free... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:interesting concept (Score:4, Interesting)
My little sister actually had a summer internship with the Wake Forest Center for Regenerative Medicine. One of the things she would do is basically give puncture wounds to mice. After this experience, she apparently didn't want to be a researcher anymore.
Re:interesting concept (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:interesting concept (Score:3, Interesting)
I once had a fascinating talk with a girl who worked at one of those labs and was given the job of killing the mice before they're analyzed.
Apparently in that lab it was the job they gave to all the newbies when they first arrived.
Re:interesting concept (Score:4, Interesting)
Besides, what Woods should really be recognized for is not the spray-on delivery, but instead the advances in culturing techniques. This was the real breakthrough, IMO.
Of note, Woods got a lot of criticism for using her methods without it going through clinical trials. They're still not out of clinical trials, AFAIK...
At the risk of triggering Godwin's Law ... (Score:3, Interesting)
They are required to test them on animals before humans, it's part of the job. It's not a part of the job they like, but it's necessary so they do it.
At the risk of triggering Godwin's Law I feel I must point out that Animal Rights applied to a medical experiment context is what led the NAZIs, in about three steps, to medical experiments on concentration camp inmates.
Step 1: To avoid experiments on animals the experiments were performed on "mentally defective" humans - i.e. inmates of mental hospitals, initially those who were believed to be so brain-damaged or mentally deficient that they were less aware than animals.
Step 2: For politically convenient reasons, propaganda campaigns spread the idea that certain classes of people were subhuman - and by extension sub-animal: Jews, Gypsies, Communists, Anarchists, Labor Unionists, Gays, ...
Step 3: Large numbers of the classes in Step 2. were, for the convenience of the war effort, incarcerated in concentration/labor camps (where their assignment was mainly to be out of the way, and dying was a "good" way to accomplish this). At this point, being used in medical experiments was a way to complete that assignment and contribute to "humanity" in the process...
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is a very scary read. It shows that the NAZI movement started out with pretty much the full set of New Age Counterculture "virtues" (mysticism, animal rights, vegitarianism, body-beautiful health fads, back-to-nature, non-hierarchical consensus decision making, ...) and how these ideas coevolved into what now are considered such monsters that even looking at what they were like is considered anathema.
(Another example: Consensus decision-making evolves into totalitarianism in the presence of the normal fraction of psychopaths. First diversity and dissent paralyze group action. Then social pressures for conformity are developed to break the deadlock. These grow to be nearly irresistible. Then an individual or small group withholds consent except when the rest of the population does what they want. Finally the population follows their new "leaders" automatically, since that's what will finally happen anyhow.)