Maybe. But as usual, he also wants to make it about himself.
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Got a bad liver? How about we grow one or more “mini livers” inside your body?
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00975-z
The company’s strategy delivers the donor cells through a tube in the throat, injecting them into a lymph node near the liver. Lymph nodes, which also filter waste in the body and are an important part of the immune system, are ideal for growing mini livers, Hufford says, because they receive a large supply of blood and there are hundreds of them throughout the body, so if a few are used to generate mini livers, plenty of others can continue to function as lymph nodes.
…
Hufford says there’s reason to think that the organs won’t grow indefinitely in the lymph nodes. The mini organs rely on chemical distress signals from the failing liver to grow; once the new organs have stabilized blood filtering, they will stop growing because that distress signal will disappear, he says. But it’s not yet clear precisely how large the mini-livers will become in humans, he adds.
The company aims to enrol 12 people into the phase II trial by mid-2025 and publish results the following year, Hufford says. The trial, which was approved by US regulators in 2020, will not only measure participant safety, survival time and quality of life post-treatment, but will also help to establish the ideal number of mini livers to stabilize someone’s health. The clinicians running the trial will inject liver cells in up to five of a person’s lymph nodes to determine whether the extra organs can boost the procedure’s success rate.
…
LyGenesis has ambitions beyond mini livers, too. The company is now testing similar approaches to grow kidney and pancreas cells in the lymph nodes of animals, Hufford says.
If the liver trial is successful, Gouon-Evans says, it would be worth investigating whether a person’s own stem cells could be used to generate the cells that seed the lymph nodes. This technique could create personalized cells that capture the diversity of cells in the liver and don’t require immunosuppressive drugs, she says.
Man, I hope liver-zombies don’t happen.
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Lmao “mini-livers” were a key plot point in Grey’s anatomy a few years ago (their invention got Meredith Grey a prestigious award iirc).
This seemed to make so little sense I just assumed the writers had stopped trying to keep even the science credible, but it turns out this was based on real science ? Amazing. (Even better if they got the idea before the science came out. Doubtful but I will choose to believe that).
Great day for the Grey heads (noone here I’m sure) !
Dick Slayman is a pretty choice name. Glad to hear he is back in action.
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Its all bullshit. Thinking about a new particle right now.
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I didn’t particularly want to watch this because I knew it would depress me. The thing is, the reason it’s soul-crushing is it isn’t all bullshit.
FWIW, it’s all bullshit everywhere, not just academia. The whole world is built on a giant platform of bullshit.
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not too long until christian nationalists are going to start chanting to defund nasa.
They’ll be more than offset by Elon followers who are enraged by FAA estimates of death due to falling Starlink sats.
Particle physics is so dumb
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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/14/health/brain-injuries-consciousness-awareness.html
Potentially tens of thousands of people with brain injuries who are completely unresponsive are aware enough to hear someone say, “hey we’re gonna track your brain activity for a study. spend the next several minutes imagining you’re playing tennis” and have their brain scans show the same thing that comes up when they scan healthy people with the same directions
Horrific if true. Start pumping in some podcasts to these coma wards immediately, until we figure out what the hell is going on
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I believe it. Hell we got data that people can have consciousness while we do CPR when they’re dying.
Isn’t that just locked in syndrome? Which has been known for a long time. My understanding was that these days they always check for brain wave changes when pricked and talked to.
Can’t read the article to see what is different here.
The patients in this study were diagnosed as nonresponsive or in a persistent vegetative state, for 8 months. 1 in 4 were able to match brain patterns with the control group
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On a podcast last week, Nate said Enrico Fermi and others at Los Alamos worried the Trinity test might destroy life on Earth and other planets. No way that’s true. I’m going to fret but there are limits.
I think they did think about it, but their math did not suggest it would happen. It was kinda like how some people thought we might create a black hole when they turned on that big ass particle accelerator.
They (Edward Teller, anyway) thought there was a possibility of starting a chain reaction in the atmosphere that would destroy life on Earth. But afaik nobody thought it could affect other planets. I’ve read histories of the project and biographies of most of the bigshot physicists and I don’t know of anyone saying anything like that even as a joke. It seems absurd. Like, if you’re on Mars, worst case you’d see two suns in the sky for a while but that’s about it.
But maybe I’m wrong. Sean Carroll, who definitely should know, didn’t bother to correct him. If anyone knows of a source backing up Nate’s statement I’d be very interested in seeing it. I’ve googled and found nothing.
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