A Guide to Making Up Diseases (as Explained by a Biologist)

So listen up y’all, nothing drives me crazier as both a writer and a scientist than seeing alien diseases that make no fuckin’ sense in a human body. 

If you’re talking about alien diseases in a non-human character, you can ignore all this.

But as far as alien diseases in humans go, please remember:

DISEASE SYMPTOMS ARE AN IMMUNE RESPONSE.

Fever? A response to help your immune cells function faster and more efficiently to destroy invaders.

Sore/scratchy throat? An immune response. Diseases that latch onto the epithelium of the throat (the common cold, the flu) replicate there, and your body is like “uh no fuckin’ thanks” and starts to slough off those cells in order to stop the replication of new virus in its tracks. So when it feels like your throat is dying? guess what it literally is. And the white spots you see with more severe bacterial infections are pus accumulation, which is basically dead white blood cells, and the pus is a nice and disgusting way of getting that shit outta here.

(No one really knows why soreness and malaise happens, but some scientists guess that it’s a byproduct of immune response, and others suspect that it’s your body’s way of telling you to take it easy)

headache? usually sinus pressure (or dehydration, which isn’t an immune response but causes headaches by reducing blood volume and causing a general ruckus in your body, can be an unfortunate side effect of a fever) caused by mucous which is an immune response to flush that nasty viral shit outta your face.

Rashes? an inflammatory response. Your lymphocytes see a thing they don’t like and they’re like “hEY NOW” and release a bunch of chemicals that tell the cells that are supposed to kill it to come do that. Those chemicals cause inflammation, which causes redness, heat, and swelling. They itch because histamine is a bitch.

fatigue? your body is doing a lot–give it a break!

here is a fact:

during the Spanish 1918 Plague, a very strange age group succumbed to the illness. The very young and very old were fine, but people who were seemingly healthy and in the prime of life (young adults) did not survive. This is because that virus triggered an immune response called a cytokine storm, which basically killed everything in sight and caused horrific symptoms like tissue death, vasodilation and bleeding–basically a MASSIVE inflammatory response that lead to organ damage and death. Those with the strongest immune systems took the worst beating by their own immune responses, while those with weaker immune systems were fine.

So when you’re thinking of an alien disease, think through the immune response.

Where does this virus attack? Look up viruses that also attack there and understand what the immune system would do about it. 

Understand symptoms that usually travel together–joint pain and fever, for example.

So please, please: no purple and green spotted diseases. No diseases that cause glamorous fainting spells and nothing else. No mystical eye-color/hair-color changing diseases. If you want these things to happen, use magic or some shit or alien physiology, but when it’s humans, it doesn’t make any fuckin’ sense. 

This has been a rant and I apologize for that. 

As a microbiologist, I think the main advice here is to take into account real diseases and conditions before you make up a fictional disease or condition.

Some bacteria have physical effects on the body that cause symptoms (EHEC varitype of E. coli ruptures cells at the site of infection, which is usually the large intestine, hence, you have bloody stools from it). If your alien or “made-up” bacteria or virus causes a certain symptom, find a real bacteria or virus that causes the same symptom. They need to behave in a similar fashion and have similar physical traits. Bacteria and viruses do not evolve functions because they’re cool. They evolve them because they’re useful.

There are also dietary issues, medications and chronic diseases that cause physical changes–copper toxicity can cause an orange ring around the iris, an eyelash lengthening “medicine” causes darkening and/or color change of the iris, hemochromatosis (sometimes known as “Bronze Diabetes”) causes darkening of the skin etc. If you want to use this sort of thing, again, find something real that causes it and work through things logically. 

Play your cards right, do your research and you will have hordes of readers in the scientific and/or biological community cheering, screaming and crying because they love your work.

@biologyweeps, this feels up your speculative alley - anything to add?

Ohhh.

I’d like to add that the same goes for parasitic infections, more or less. If you want a certain trait for a diseases, cross reference with existing parasites to see what’s happening, and also make sure you check what happens if you put a parasite in a host it’s not meant for. We can sensibly assume that alien parasites that encounter a human would be ‘wtf’ and potentially cause complications that would never happen in the native species. Maybe in the native species it causes a cold like reaction at worst, but in a human the parasites may attempt to nest in a totally different tissue. Maybe that causes widespread tissue damage by the parasite itself as it tries to borrow in? Again, check existing cases to see what horrific things could happen.

While we’re on it, also check how your disease is communicated. One of the things that annoy me so much with zombie movies is that ‘biting’ is supposed to be a very effective way to spread it. It’s not. Anything that requires such intimate contact is actually kind of hard to communicate. Airborne things? Now there we are at potential ‘oh shit’ territory. So if you want your disease to sweep the country/planet/ship, pick something that’s easily communicable. 

Also consider the incubation period. How long until someone shows symptoms? Are they already infectious to other people before showing symptoms or still after they stopped? As mentioned above, illness symptoms are in most part immune responses and the immune system needs time to get up and run. Give it that time.

And while we’re at it… there are symptoms that aren’t immune responses. For example the cramps that accompany tetanus are caused by a toxin the bacterium produces that damages/destroys nerve cells. Viruses can cause tissue damage when they insert in cells, replicate in there and destroy the cell on exit. Think of how HIV can wreak havoc on the human immune system by killing of a specific kind of cell. Depending on where your viruses likes to replicate it can massively impact the look of it. Something that destroys liver cells will look different (and if survived may come with different long term damage) than something that prefers skin or muscle cells. If it’s alien also consider how it might behave differently in its original host. 

Fantastic post, I can relate to OP 100%. More points:

Nothing makes me groan harder than a made-up plague which gives anyone X diseases within seconds to MINUTES. I’m looking at you, most zombie movies. And if your alien/synthetic/sci-fi pathogen is at all like a virus (read: no metabolism of its own, just genetic material of some kind which it uses to reprogram host cells), then the rate at which it mupltiplies is limited to what normal human cells can do. Now, viruses can multiply pretty damn fast. But give you symptoms within MINUTES? Nope.

So long as we’re on the subject of epidemiology, and speed:

 "Oh no, patient died less than a day after being infected! We’re all doomed!“ Wrong. While that SOUNDS scary, a plague that kills that quickly would not actually be that dangerous, and would be unlikely to have evolved to begin with. A disease needs to pass itself on to at least one other person, on average, before it kills its host, or it’s doomed to extinction. Any virus that kills its host before it has a decent chance of being passed on will basically quarantine itself. (Of course, you CAN do this if you handwave its origins as being made in a lab or whatever, just know it won’t realistically pose a truly terrifying threat on a population level.)

Mmore ideas for a realistically scary made-up plague:

- Long incubation period (say, a couple of weeks), making quarantine much more difficult, disruptive to everyday life, and unlikely to succeed. - Infectious period != symptomatic period, i.e. someone can spread the disease before they appear sick. (Note: if this condition is met, then dying very rapidly after *manifesting symptoms* becomes plausible again, more plausible than dying quickly after being infected.)

- The possibility or relative prevalence of healthy carriers - think Typhoid Mary. I.e. rare people who skip the symptoms part entirely but are still infectious.

- The disease is transmitted through an animal that is hard to keep out, the definition of “hard to keep out” would depend on the setting here. Poor water sanitation means waterborne bacteria and microscopic parasites would be a huge danger. Insect or arachnid (e.g. tick) bites could be a danger in almost any setting..

- As an alternative to above point: the bacterial/viral/parasite/whatever can form spores that are fucking EVERYWHERE. (Read: the reason for both tetanus and botulinum poisoning.)

- The pathogen is both dangerous and impossible to fully exterminate through vaccination because it has a huge population of reservoir hosts. (Reservoir hosts are entire SPECIES that can carry and propagate the disease without being affected much by it.) Same way the Black Plague is still out there because a shitton of rodent species passively carry it.

And many more things if you do some research for inspiration! Pathogens are scary, fascinating things, and I really wish we had more realistic fictional representation of them than “virus which causes zombie behaviour in 3 seconds flat” (looking at you, 28 Days Later) and “virus which can MIND-CONTROL people who view the main carrier through a COMPUTER SCREEN” (wtf???) (looking at you, Jessica Jones).

Here's an article on it from MIT news, if anyone would like to read further!

@torchflies

Hey did you know that you can’t escape fatphobia even after death? The article talks about how these donated bodies are used for first year anatomy students to study the body, and how the 'perfect' body for that should be 170-180 pounds.

“The storage is one issue, but when you are obese, there’s a lot of tissue everywhere. The students don’t get as good a learning opportunity.”

"That program limits donors to between 170 pounds and 180 pounds, though an exceptionally tall donor might be allowed at 190.

“It’s the maximum our equipment will handle,” Powers said.

Sounds like they just need newer and better equipment?

"Obese bodies are more difficult, time-consuming and unpleasant to study, said Wade, who also heads his state’s anatomy board."

Ah yes, we've arrived at the real reason..

Quick question, if fat bodies are not accepted as potential cadavers for medical students to study on then what are the consequences for that?

Fat people are dismissed medically and are told to lose weight before even getting a chance to be examined. While alive. Then are rejected for further study after death. How many people died and will die because medical professionals are missing potential problems that could be diagnosed?

So far, medical schools are still able to get enough lean bodies for students to use, experts said. Some programs use corpses from for-profit tissue brokers, which are loosely regulated and supply an unknown number of bodies each year.

You are telling me that instead of updating your equipment to use bodies that have been willingly donated by their former occupants, y'all are buying mystery corpses that may very well have been Burke-and-Hared into this? That's definitely ethical. I feel very safe right now.

one of the best academic paper titles

for those who don't speak academia: "according to our MRI machine, dead fish can recognise human emotions. this suggests we probably should look at the results of our MRI machine a bit more carefully"

I hope everyone realises how incredibly important this dead fish study is. This was SO fucking important.

I still don’t understand

So basically, in the psych and social science fields, researchers would (I don't know if they still do this, I've been out of science for awhile) sling around MRIs like microbiolosts sling around metagenomic analyses. MRIs can measure a lot but people would use them to measure 'activity' in the brain which is like... it's basically the machine doing a fuckload of statistics on brain images of your blood vessels while you do or think about stuff. So you throw a dude in the machine and take a scan, then give him a piece of chocolate cake and throw him back in and the pleasure centres light up. Bam! Eating chocolate makes you happy, proven with MRI! Simple!

These tests get used for all kinds of stuff, and they get used by a lot of people who don't actually know what they're doing, how to interpret the data, or whether there's any real link between what they're measuring and what they're claiming. It's why you see shit going around like "men think of women as objects because when they look at a woman, the same part of their brain is active as when they look at a tool!" and "if you play Mozart for your baby for twenty minutes then their imagination improves, we imaged the brain to prove it!" and "we found where God is in the brain! Christians have more brain activity in this region than atheists!"

There are numerous problems with this kind of science, but the most pressing issue is the validity of the scans themselves. As I said, there's a fair bit of stats to turn an MRI image into 'brain activity', and then you do even more stats on that to get your results. Bennett et. al.'s work ran one of these sorts of experiments, with one difference -- they used a dead salmon instead of living human subjects. And they got positive results. The same sort of experiment, the same methodology, the same results that people were bandying about as positive results. According to the methodology in common use, dead salmon can distinguish human facial expressions. Meaning one of two things:

I cannot overstate just how many papers were completely fucking destroyed by this experiment. Entire careers of particularly lazy scientists were built on these sorts of experiments. A decent chunk of modern experimental neuropsychology was resting on it. Which shows that science is like everything else -- the best advances are motivated by spite.

When I was in the hospital, they gave me a big bracelet that said ALLERGY, but like. I’m allergic to bees. Were they going to prescribe me bees in there.

So there’s a medication called hyaluronidase. It’s used to make other medications absorb better, because it makes the cell wall more permeable.

One common usage is to make local anesthetic more effective during surgery, for instance. It’s used in a number of injected medications.

Bee stings contain an enzyme very similar to this medication, so sometimes, people with bee allergies have an allergic reaction to hyaluronidase.

This is called cross-reactivity, where your body mistakes something for the thing it’s actually allergic to, and has an allergic reaction anyway. For instance, sometimes people with latex allergies also are allergic to bananas and other fruits. They don’t actually contain latex, but there are some similar proteins.

Apparently, hyraluronidase used in humans is derived from one of four sources: sheep testicles, cow testicles, cow testicles again, and GMO hamster ovaries.

tl;dr: They won’t inject you with bees, but they might inject you with purified cow testicle juice, and your body might say ‘eh, cow balls are BASICALLY bees’ and try to kill you anyway.

The world is full of such beauty and wonder. Thank you for that sentence.

Reblogging again because I put this info in the original post but forgot to put it in this simplified one. So, again in simpler words:

The US is asking for "public comment" on this. That's the US's way of saying "We want to do this. Do you want us to do this? Why or why not?"

You can go here to tell the US gov that you want this new rule.

At the link, click the blue button that says "Comment." It's right under the big, bold title, on the left. You can comment until February 6, 2024.

doctor voice hello yes im here returning your call about scheduling! ^_^ so the next appointment we have is tomorrow at 4am. after that the earliest we can get you in is december 2025... either of those sound good to you?

The longest I've waited for an appointment was just over 18 months. And I've done it more than once.

Okay, as a nurse with an advanced cardiac life support certification for adults and a neonatal resuscitation certification, I feel like this is a question I can answer.

First, understand that the blood moved by cpr is much less than that moved by a normal heartbeat. Our goal with cpr is to maintain brain and critical organ perfusion until ROSC (return of spontaneous circulation) is achieved. The number of beats per minute recommended is based on what we know about about basically the maximum speed of cpr that can a) be achieved by an average person, b) be sustained by an average person, and c) (this is the most important) allow full chest recoil. Chest recoil is the chest getting back to full thickness after you release pressure on it. This is extremely important because that allows the heart to fill back up with blood so you can push it out with your next compression. Faster cpr doesn't move blood efficiently because there's not enough blood returning into the heart to push back out. We also compress in adults to a depth of 2-2.4 inches (5-6 cm) in an adult to ensure that we're emptying the heart sufficiently. This depth is smaller in children because they have a proportionately smaller chest cavity. The key is we want to compress to a depth around 1/3 the total depth of the chest.

Second thing to understand is that the movement of oxygen is via a gas gradient. Oxygen wants to move from where there's the most oxygen to the last oxygen until all fluids present have the exact same amount of oxygen. So we need to get oxygen into the blood. In one rescuer cpr this is achieved via compressions only because when you compress the chest you compress the lungs as well, which means that chest recoil also moves air into the lungs and this air allows for gas exchange which removes some CO2 and adds some oxygen. Chest recoil isn't as good at this as ventilation, which is why if there are two rescuers we prefer to have one ventilate and one compress (ideally you'll have more than 2 rescuers because best practice is to change compressors every 2 minutes). This will move more oxygen into the lungs.

Thirdly, we're trying to maintain a minimum blood pressure (we probably won't measure this during cpr until ROSC is achieved). In order to maintain brain, heart tissue, and kidney perfusion, we need enough blood pressure to move oxygenated red blood cells into the tissues and remove spent ones. Because we don't measure this, I can't remember the exact values, but I think in nursing school they said we needed a minimum of 80/40 to prevent kidney failure in sepsis, so I assume it's somewhere around there.

Fourth, every time you pause compressions to change compressors, a gap in compressions of more than roughly one second plummets that blood pressure we're trying to maintain down to zero. Your next 3 or so compressions won't move oxygen. They'll just be working to 'pump up' blood pressure to where we're properly moving oxygen again.

So now that we know what cpr does, let's talk Witcher physiology versus human physiology a little bit.

Now, in the shows, fan films, and games, witchers have roughly the same chest circumference as a human. This implies that the organs in the chest are roughly the same size as those of a human. So that means we should be keeping that compression depth of 2-2.4 inches or 1/3 the total chest depth to move blood.

We should also compare human pulse rate to Witcher, right? Well, a normal pulse rate for a human is 60-100 bpm. 1/4 that is 15-25. CPR is done at an ideal rate of around 120 bpm, meaning it's clinically tachycardic for a normal human. We also need to know that normal pulse range doesn't mean every human's resting pulse lays in that range. For very fit people, like say marathon runners and cross country skiers with excellent cardiovascular health, they often have a much lower resting pulse. I once looked after a marathon runner whose resting pulse rate was 30. What's the resting rate for a Witcher again? Up to 25? Pretty close, right?

We do not taper the rate of our cpr for marathon runners. A couch surfer like me with a resting pulse of 80 gets the same 120 bpm cpr as a marathon runner who is well oxygenated at 30 bpm.

Given this, I believe that the Witcher should receive standard human cpr.

But here's where it gets weird. Marathon runners and witchers live at a lower heartrate and (probably got witchers, definitely for marathon runners) blood pressure than your average human. Their body uses perfusion or efficiently. Which means that with good quality cpr, in marathon runners we sometimes achieve consciousness before ROSC. Which is great because it tells us we're achieving perfusion of the brain. We do not want to slow down just because they became conscious. We want that perfusion.

But most people who wake up disoriented with someone bouncing on their chest and cracking their ribs become combative. So fun fact, you're going to do cpr on your Witcher at normal human speed and then convince him to fucking stop fighting you until ROSC.

Now, we also use drugs and electricity to help restart the heart in ACLS and achieve ROSC. We probably don't have electricity, so let's consider drugs and run a 'chemical code'. Two big ones are atropine and adrenaline. If we want to be really nerdy, based on the ingredients and effects in the Witcher video games, Cat should have a decent amount of atropine. Maribor forest and Blizzard both generate adrenaline points so let's assume those are artificial adrenaline at least in part.

So depending on what you think caused your Witcher to go down, when he wakes up from your excellent human speed cpr, have him drink Blizzard, Maribor forest, or Cat and hopefully you'll achieve ROSC!

Tldr: it should be human speed.

you all simply MUST join me in celebrating the fact that a woman who was basically forced out of her faculty position at upenn 10 years ago for not being "tenure material" just won the nobel prize in medicine for her work in pioneering the concept of mRNA vaccines. incredible. stupendous, even

the schadenfreude here is unmatched, truly

if u take zoloft and/or spironolactone be careful in the hot months u will dehydrate and be prone to overheating. drink. Water

Like the bottom text next to the asterisk says, there are more medications that cause this problem than listed. Please search for any medications you take if they cause heat problems <3

Note: Brintellix -> Trintellix for those who didn’t know this brand changed trademark names.

This is a common side effect of many medications. Some SSRIs (a very popular class of antidepressant and anti-anxiety medication including Celexa/citalopram, Lexapro/escitalopram, Prozac/fluoxetine, and many others) can also deplete your electrolytes, so if you're outside and you're sweating—and especially if you're exercising—you can become very ill. (If you start a new antidepressant and suddenly feel like total shit doing the same kinds of sports or exercise you normally do, or if your performance or endurance doing any kind of exercise takes a nosedive, this can be why.) While you absolutely need to hydrate to deal with the heat intolerance, drinking just water can make the problem of low sodium or potassium caused by SSRIs WORSE. I strongly encourage you to replenish your electrolytes after any activity that causes you to heat up, whether it's exercise or just existing during the summer. You can do this by drinking a sports drink like Gatorade or a supplement like Pedialyte. Pedialyte also makes flavoring powder that you can add to water that will do the same job. If this is a persistent problem, you can talk to your doctor about long-term ways to manage this side effect. And if you still feel the effects even after you've cooled off and replenished your electrolytes, SEEK MEDICAL ATTENTION. Intravenous sodium or potassium can fix you right up, but this can ACTUALLY KILL YOU if it's severe and left untreated. You are not overreacting. Please take care of yourself

E.R. Comics, Ryan Pequin

one time my friend had surgery on her hip/knee and we went to visit her in the hospital and she was like “hey guys, check out what i have! it’s this cool button that, when I press it, it gives me more morphine!” and sure enough she had a little tube with one end attached to her IV or whatever and one end with a button on it, and every time she pushed the button it gave her morphine

and she just kept pressing it and pressing it and giggling and getting loopier and loopier, so we went to ask a nurse if that was OK or if she was just going to overdose herself

and the nurse said that the morphine button is on a self timer limit and she had already maxed it out and won’t be able to get more for a few more hours, but she can just press the button as many times as she wants and thanks to her already being on the max dose of morphine she was just placebo effect-ing herself into the fucking stratosphere

it was a great image, my friend over there high as balls like I HAVE UNLIMITED MORPHINE POWER!!!! *press press press press* and the nurse like “nah that button isn’t doing shit but she’s having fun”

Studies suggest that when patients are given the option to determine their own dose of painkillers, they give themselves much less than the doctor would have ordered, so you are in the majority.

They’ve found the cause of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Babies who die of SIDS have a significantly lower level of an enzyme, the purpose of which is to rouse the baby from sleep if necessary (such as the baby stops breathing). This is extremely huge science and medicine news. There is a biological reason. It’s not random.

Dr. Carmel Harrington, the lead researcher for the study, was one of these parents. Her son unexpectedly and suddenly died as an infant 29 years ago. In an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Harrington explained what she was told about the cause of her child’s death.

"Nobody could tell me. They just said it's a tragedy. But it was a tragedy that didn't sit well with my scientific brain.”

Since then, she’s worked to find the cause of SIDS, both for herself and for the medical community as a whole. She went on to explain why this discovery is so important for parents whose babies suffered from SIDS.

"These families can now live with the knowledge that this was not their fault," she said.

May 11th, 2022!

Love the American healthcare system where I’m getting a colonoscopy, a totally routine procedure, and have no idea how much it will cost me until I get the bill because 1) I don’t know what medications or supplies will be administered during the procedure until they shoot me up and 2) I don’t know what the cost of those medications and supplies will be because the hospital’s prices and the insurance’s plan allowance are both secret

FUN FACT

AS OF THE NEW YEAR THIS SPECIFIC PRACTICE IS NOW ILLEGAL

CERTAIN SURPRISE MEDICAL BILLS FROM OUT OF NETWORK PROVIDERS ARE ILLEGAL AS OF LIKE LITERALLY LAST WEEK. LIKE THE THING YOU LITERALLY JUST DESCRIBED. ILLEGAL.

Regarding surgery, the anaesthesiologist specifically can no longer send you a separate bill if they’re out of network if your surgeon is in network!! You only pay your in network bills!!

It’s awesome and this is the biggest news in healthcare since Obamacare!!

I’ve trained myself to look medical professionals dead in the eye and ask “And how much is this going to cost?” If you’re compus mentis enough to do that, DO IT. 75% of the time they freeze.

Healthcare PSA

Tiktok removed this, so keep it moving!

Keep this going!

My brother fractured his skull when he was uninsured and making minimum wage at a part time job. In the emergency room, after the surgeon said, "Here is how we fix your skull so you don't die," my brother told us he didn't want to have the surgery because of the money.

Fuck that.

We made him get the surgery. My parents don't have much money, either; at this point, they didn't own their house, so they basically had no collateral, but I know they would have taken on his debt if they'd had to. The day of his surgery, we spent hours in the waiting room because he was stable and a ton of emergencies came in that day, so they kept pushing his surgery back. My parents sat in the waiting room, and I went to financial services and figured out how to do this ⬆️ for my brother. He had to spend three days and nights in the hospital, he had to have orthopedic and plastic surgery, and so the bill was about $80k. I got the hospital to forgive every cent of it except for the anesthesiologist's bill, because she was an independent contractor or something and they couldn't force her to do it. So my brother fixed his broken skull for $1300, and I was just a 20 year old kid who asked questions until I got to the people who could help me.

The science world is freaking out over this 25-year-old's answer to antibiotic resistance

Continue Reading.

Yes. All the yes. Women in STEM deserve ALLLLLLLL the applause. All of it. And cake. All the cake, too. 

The science world is freaking out over this 25-year-old’s answer to antibiotic resistance: from Edward the Booble http://bit.ly/2MABk2O via IFTTT

I love this solution because it’s just… So simple. Everyone is getting deeper and deeper into pharmacology trying to find new stuff and new combos that’ll overcome bacterial resistance (while Big Pharma rakes in the profits) and this student was like “what if.. We just.. Physically rip it the fuck apart?? What’s it gonna do? Develop resistance to me cutting a bitch?”

Iconic

Medicine: How do we defeat anti-biotic resistant super bugs?

Shu Lam: What if we just beat the shit out of it?

Women! Of! Color! Amazing!! Say her name!!! I’m so proud of her!!!

I’ve seen this photograph very frequently on tumblr and Facebook, always with the simple caption, “Ghost Heart”. What exactly is a ghost heart?

More than 3,200 people are on the waiting list for a heart transplant in the United States. Some won’t survive the wait. Last year, 340 died before a new heart was found. The solution: Take a pig heart, soak it in an ingredient commonly found in shampoo and wash away the cells until you’re left with a protein scaffold that is to a heart what two-by-four framing is to a house. Then inject that ghost heart, as it’s called, with hundreds of millions of blood or bone-marrow stem cells from a person who needs a heart transplant, place it in a bioreactor - a box with artificial lungs and tubes that pump oxygen and blood into it - and wait as the ghost heart begins to mature into a new, beating human heart. Doris Taylor, director of regenerative medicine research at the Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in Houston, has been working on this– first using rat hearts, then pig hearts and human hearts - for years. The process is called decellularization and it is a tissue engineering technique designed to strip out the cells from a donor organ, leaving nothing but connective tissue that used to hold the cells in place.  This scaffold of connective tissue - called a “ghost organ” for its pale and almost translucent appearance - can then be reseeded with a patient’s own cells, with the goal of regenerating an organ that can be transplanted into the patient without fear of tissue rejection. This ghost heart is ready to be injected with a transplant recipient’s stem cells so a new heart - one that won’t be rejected - can be grown. (Source)

THIS IS SO FUCKING COOL. MAN I LOVE SCIENCE. SO MUCH.

What a time to be alive, medically speaking

They’re going to try and kill him.

He’s probably already dead

BOOOOOST THIS

YOOOOO

seriously guys boost this

I don’t care if it looks ugly on your blogs THIS COULD POSSIBLY SAVE LIVES

Nigerians are about to save the world