Chemical Cocktail Can Keep a Heart Viable 10 Days, Outside the Body 97
nj_peeps writes "Harvard professor Hemant Thatte has developed a cocktail of 21 chemical compounds that he calls Somah, derived from the Sanskrit for 'ambrosia of rejuvenation.' Using Somah, Thatte and his team have accomplished some amazing feats with pig hearts. They can keep the organ viable for transplant up to 10 days after harvest — far longer than the four-hour limit seen in hospitals today. Not only that, but using low temperatures and Somah, they were able to take a pig heart that was removed post mortem and get it to beat 24 hours later in the lab."
Re:Good morning... (Score:5, Funny)
SO! (Score:4, Funny)
How does this affect bacon?
Because that's what's really important.
Bacon.
THEY SAVED HITLER'S BRAIN! (Score:5, Funny)
As Stephen King once claimed, "I seem monstrous to some, but I have the heart of a child.
I keep it in a jar, on my desk..."
Re:Another overblown statements in TFS today... (Score:3, Funny)
"As a benchmark, we should strive towards the ability to reconstruct hot chicks only from part of their arm! ;)"
I'm with you. They have two arms, so you could potentially end up with two hot chicks!
Bad news for Chev Chelios (Score:1, Funny)
They've got me strawberry tart!
What about chicken hearts? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Finally! (Score:3, Funny)
If it's liquid, it's drinkable. Now, the consequences of drinking it are another matter...
Bejing Cocktail (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Here's what's in it (Score:4, Funny)
Gosh, so sorry. Please please forgive me. It's just that whenever I don't have to assign the resonance frequencies of 5200 atoms in a molecule that wants to crash out if you look at it wrong I consider the molecule somewhat simple. 1200 MW to me is something you can leave on the shelf. If you notice the parent asked about proteins and so I too went in to see if there was some kinase, antibody, polymeric polyprotein, siRNA etc. that was the "secret". Obviously not. This mix is pretty complicated but it's basically a buffered media; far less complicated than that being used to grow mammalian cell culture on the lab bench next to mine. I hope this ends up doing a lot of good. I love simple things. I wish that the answer to cancer was something as completely trivial as dichloroacetate. And it is noticing that constituent in this solution and remembering the /. story yesterday I thought I might bring it to everyone's attention. So please forgive me. I promise that with the Karma for which I've long labored I will henceforth act responsibly. Meanwhile I'm kind of busy so if you could dive into the literature and find out for me if the presence of dichloroacetate is causing the heart tissue in question to switch from glycolysis to oxidative phosphorylation I would be very interested. Cheers.
Re:Here's what's in it (Score:4, Funny)
So... how many people are going to be hospitalized with poisoning symptoms after mixing large quantities of this in the hopes of drinking the elixir of immortality?