Need a New Heart? PRINT It!

There is a great shortage of organs for transplanting to people who need them–in the UK, for instance, the average wait for a new heart has risen 70% over the last 3 years and patients needing a new kidney have to wait 20% longer. This organ shortage is killing 3 people a day there (and probably many more in the US), but this probablem is finally being solved: We have synthetic blood and hearts made from YOUR OWN stem cells. Now the kind of 3 D printers used in architecture may be able to "print" new organs that can be transplanted into the human body.

Due to the "religiosity" of the Bush years, we are a decade behind in this type of research, which is now taking place in other countries. The printer is already capable of producing arteries, which doctors will be able to use in bypass surgeries in 5 years. Other, more complex body parts, such as bones and hearts, should be possible within 10. Not only does this mean that the waiting time for new organs is much shorter, but the risk of organ rejection nearly eliminated too. There are other ways to create new organs as well. For instance, surgeons in Sweden have replaced the cancerous windpipe of a patient with an organ made in a lab in London, which was then coated in stem cells taken from the patient. The patient no longer has cancer and is expected to have a normal life expectancy.

In the July 8th edition of the Wall Street Journal, Gautam Naik quotes surgeon Paolo Macchiarini as saying, "He was condemned to die. We now plan to discharge him (from the hospital)." In BBC News, Michelle Roberts quotes Macchiarini as saying, "Thanks to nanotechnology, this new branch of regenerative medicine, we are now able to produce a custom-made windpipe within two days or one week. This is a synthetic windpipe. The beauty of this is you can have it immediately. There is no delay. This technique does not rely on a human donation (meaning there is no danger of it being rejected)."

This is one of the few predictions that the Master of the Key DIDN’T predict when he burst into Whitley Strieber’s hotel room in 1998. Here at Unknowncountry.com, we CARE about your health, which is why we have made Anne Strieber’s famous diet book "What I Learned From the Fat Years" so affordable: Since it’s a download, it costs much less than the diet books you’ll find at your bookstore AND it’s much better!