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I’ve heard of pet rats — but ‘pet’ rat hearts? Well, not really pets

When I was a kid back in the Dark Ages, "science" meant inventing rocket ships and planning space trips to the moon, maybe someday to Mars. "Life science" or biology usually meant studying and developing new medicine (we were the generation who gave everyone polio vaccine) and other useful stuff like that.

Science fiction/fantasy and "horror" stories or films involved things like creating living things.

We sort of had it backwards in many ways, I guess -- here's an incredible science/health story about some researchers who "created" (sort of) a beating rat heart. Astounding. They actually scrapped out all the cells in a dead rat's heart, leaving the structures in place, injected cells from newborn rats' hearts, and the dead heart sort of "re-created" itself.

I don't understand how all this came about, but I'm refraining from any wisecracks on this one. It seems to be the research could lead to major breakthroughs in treating damaged or diseased hearts -- and who knows what other organs??

Hooray for science, I say.

Ah, well, what do I know? I'm just a guy who reads the papers.
[tags]heart research, creating a rat heart, scientific research, just a guy who reads the papers[/tags]