Doris Taylor doesn't take it as an insult when people call her Dr Frankenstein. "It was actually one of the bigger compliments I've gotten," she says - an affirmation that her research is pushing the boundaries of the possible. Given the nature of her work as director of regenerative medicine research at the Texas Heart Institute in Houston, Taylor has to admit that the comparison is apt. She regularly harvests organs such as hearts and lungs from the newly dead, re-engineers them starting from the cells and attempts to bring them back to life in the hope that they might beat or breathe again in the living. Taylor is in the vanguard of researchers looking to engineer entire new organs, to enable transplants without the risk of rejection by the recipient's immune system. The strategy is simple enough in principle. First remove all the cells from a dead organ - it does not even have to be from a human - then take the protein scaffold left behind and repopulate it with stem cells immunologically matched to the patient in need. Voila! The crippling shortage of transplantable organs around the world is solved.
展开▼
