Building A Ghost Heart, The Effect Of Big Tech. Feb 14, 2020, Part 2

Science Friday

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🗓️ 14 February 2020

⏱️ 46 minutes

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Summary

The human heart is one of the most complicated organs in our body. The heart is, in a way, like a machine—the muscular organ pumping about 2,000 gallons of blood in an adult human every day. But can we construct a heart in the lab? Some scientists are turning to engineering to find ways to preserve that constant lub dub when a heart stops working. One team of researchers created a biohybrid heart, which combines a pig heart and mechanical parts. The team could control the beating motion of the heart to test pacemakers and other devices. Their findings were published in the journal Science Advances in January. Mechanical engineering student Clara Park, an author on that study, talks about what it takes to engineer a biohybrid heart and how this model could be used in the future to develop implantable hearts and understand heart failure. At the Texas Heart Institute, Doris Taylor is developing a regenerative method for heart construction. She pioneered the creation of “ghost hearts”—animals hearts that are stripped of their original cells and injected with stem cells to create a personalized heart. So far, Taylor has only developed the technique with animal hearts, but in the future these ghost hearts could be used as scaffolds to grow transplant hearts for patients. Taylor talks about how much we know about the heart and why it continues to fascinate us. Last month Microsoft announced it is opening an office to represent itself to the United Nations. But what’s a tech company have to do with the U.N.? Meet the “Net State.” In her book The Information Trade: How Big Tech Conquers Countries, Challenges Our Rights, and Transforms Our World, Alexis Wichowski writes about how big tech companies are becoming much more than technology providers, and what it means for world citizens when powerful government-like entities—the “Net States”—transcend physical borders and laws.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato.
0:02.7	A bit later in the hour, a look at how tech companies are behaving more like countries
0:07.7	supplying electricity, intranet, and food, services that are traditionally administered by
0:14.4	national governments. So what happens that they decide it's no longer in their best
0:18.8	interests to do so. We'll discuss.
0:21.3	But first, Valentine's Day, for those who participate, is designed as a day of romance,
0:28.7	an affair of the heart, as the song says. And so for some of you, they may, well, may mean
0:34.4	unfortunately a broken heart. I'm sorry if that's you, but for us, this is an
0:40.5	opportunity. What better time than now to explore how scientists are looking at mending human hearts,
0:46.6	and we're not talking about those bad breakups. Researchers are looking for ways to engineer
0:52.4	the heart by building mechanical hearts and creating something called ghost hearts.
0:59.1	It's aimed at making better heart parts, understanding the inner workings of the human heart.
1:04.4	And my next guest is part of a team of researchers who hasn't lost a beat, creating a hybrid heart out of a big heart and mechanical parts that
1:13.0	can simulate a beating heart outside of the body. The findings were published in the journal
1:18.4	Science Robotics. Clara Park is lead author on that study, a PhD candidate in mechanical engineering
1:25.3	at famous MIT. She joins us via Skype. Welcome to Science
1:29.4	Friday. Hi, thanks for having me. Now, just to be clear, the heart you engineered was a pig
1:35.4	heart, correct? Yes, that is correct. And there were two different systems you needed to build. Tell us
1:41.5	about how you designed it. Yeah, sure. So what we did was we had a dead pick heart and we left the inner
1:50.0	heart layer intact but remove the muscle layers which were no longer functional because
1:55.0	it's outside the body and replace it with the robotic artificial muscles to restore the motion of the beating heart.
2:02.5	So you had basically sort of the skeleton left of the pig heart then?
	...

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