When I watched the movie “Repo Men”, it certainly made me wonder just how far doctors of tomorrow have “advanced” from today, and the Hippocratic Oath does not seem to matter any more. Even today, there are private hospitals around the world that require you to drop a hefty downpayment even in the event of an emergency before you are even looked at, leaving those who have loads of money with a far higher chance of survival. Well, Professor Alexander Seifalian has been growing replacement human body parts in his lab for some time already, holding up an ear like the one you see above.

Professor Seifalian currently leads University College London’s (UCL) Department of Nanotechnology and Regenerative Medicine, which he has fondly (and jokingly) dubbed the “human body parts store”. Seifalian and his team are working on growing replacement organs and body parts made to order through the clever manipulation of a patient’s own cells. Well, I am quite sure that unless you have the healing factor like that of Wolverine’s, there is basically a need for such technology to proliferate, especially for battlefield victims as well as landmine victims, assuming that such biotechnology can be researched to such a high level that it is possible to grow an entire arm and a leg, literally.

Stem cells are a basic requirement for Professor Seifalian’s research, and that might strike a chord of protest with some people as it does border on the moral and ethical aspects for pro-lifers. Will the good outweigh the perceived ‘bad’, depending on which side of the fence you sit on? Either way, it can be seen as a triumph of modern medicinal science – growing human parts out of a petri dish, so to speak, making it miraculous to a certain extent in its own right. At least there is no longer any need for the Emergency Transporter Unit.

Filed in Medical..

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