Tissue Engineering- Standard 2!

To read the article follow this link:
http://www.pbs.org/saf/1107/features/body.htm

Recently I read an article about the research into tissue engineering. The article talked about the team Joseph Vacanti and Bob Langer and their recent advances into the replacement of tissues and organs. They are looking forward to the day when replacement tissues will be available to people who need them. today there is a tissue engineered skins that is used on burn victims and people with severe skin sores. The research teams continue to make advancements in this goal.
It is very important to get everything exactly right when scientists are trying to cultivate tissues. You have to closely mimick the environment in which cells naturally grow. This is not easy and this was the first step for scientists as they started on engineering tissues.
Many contributions have been made to this field. Langer contributed with his work in biodegradable materials that can serve as scaffolding on cells that can be seeded. This scaffolding gives the cell better access to nutrients and waste removal. Langer and Vacanti hope that in the future bits of scaffolding that are seeded with young cells can be implanted into ailing organs. Then the body's own biochemistry would tell the young cells to grown into a patch of healthy tissues.
There are other contributions being made in this field. Dr. Gail Naughton patened a machine that is called a bioreacter. The bioreacter stimulates conditions that happen in a healthy body. It also put physical stresses on cells as they grow. This makes a stronger, more natural tissue. This container has been evolving since 1989. This is when it became more well known that cells needed a more steril environment to grow then a petri dish. In the bioreacter cells get in a constant, unidirectional flow of fluid that brings nutrients in and wastes out. This is exactly what happens in the body. Most recently, Naughton has cultivated cartilage, blood vessels, and heart valves. Naught on says that valves grown in the bioreacter have double the mechanical strength then those grown in a petri dish. The valves also secrete more important structural proteins like collagen and elastin.
NASA researchers developed their own version of the bioreacter that mimics the weightlessness you get in space in earth bound labs. They were first trying to find out how weightlessness affects astronauts bodies. Their bioreacter has a rotating cylinder that keeps the growing cells in perpetual free fall. Dr. Naught on says that liver tissues actually form much more naturally in this state of microgravity.
Developing entire organs is still far off in the future, though this is the main goal in the tissue engineering world right now. Around 74,000 Americans were waiting for an organ transplant in December of 2010. This is one thing these scientists are trying to fix. Naughton and her team have been working on a patch. This patch will essentially stimulate vessel growth in and around a diseased heart. Naughton believes that the patch could get rid of the need to grow hearts in labs.
These scientists say that tissue engineering "may be one of the most straightforward and most natural technologies around today." The scientists know that this may sound "Frankenstienish" but they believe it could help. These scientists don't use embryonic stem cells, they are not needed. Most just use cells from cadavers. They could use them but they don't want to get into "ethically clouded issues."

I have mixed feelings about tissue engineering. There are advantages that I feel could really help people if they figure out how to engineer entire organs. But I also feel it is kind of like playing God. It seems to me like it is another name for cloning. I can see both sides of this process.