MICHAELEEN DOUCLEFF and ROB STEIN
"Liver buds" grow in petri dishes. The rudimentary organs are about 5 mm wide, or half the height of a classic Lego block.
Not quite yet: A human liver contains bile ducts connecting to the gall bladder. The proto-livers made in the lab are missing these tubes.
Japanese scientists have cracked open a freaky new chapter in the sci-fi-meets-stem-cells era. A group in Yokohama reported it has grown a primitive liver in a petri dish using a person's skin cells.
The organ isn't complete. It's missing a few parts. And it will be years —maybe decades — before the technique reaches clinics.
Still, this rudimentary liver is the first complex, functioning organ to be grown in the lab from human, skin-derived stem cells. When the scientists transplanted the organ into a mouse, it worked a lot like a regular human liver.
"It's a huge step forward," George Daley, from the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, tells NPR's Rob Stein.
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http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/07/04/198110553/scientists-grow-simple-human-liver-in-a-petri-dish