Above, a PBS NewsHour report by science correspondent Miles O’Brien which I helped shoot, on the subject of tissue engineering. The goal in this field: Grow tissue or even whole organs to repair damaged or diseased human bodies.
The report focuses in part on Isaias Hernandez, a 26-year old Marine whose leg was badly injured in an artillery attack on his convoy, in Iraq. “It looked like a chicken, like if you would take a bite out of it down to the bone,” he tells Miles.
Dr. Steve Badylak of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh harvested material from a pig bladder to grow replacement muscle in the young Marine’s leg.