Doors Taylor is a pioneer on a scientific frontier of regeneration, innovating a process

to bring the organs and tissues of dead animals back to life.

This might one day revolutionize transplantation of human hearts, livers, and more.

And it's made possible by stem cells, which Doors Taylor explains as a new and dramatic

discovery about the human body that's been obscured by politicized debates over a narrow

slice of her field.

She says we might have avoided those debates altogether if we had found different vocabulary

to discuss stem cells in public at the outset, distinguishing between fetal and embryonic

cells, explaining the origins of the cells used in research, and illuminating the larger

story of stem cells.

stem cells as Doors Taylor knows them are a powerful reality we're all living with, day

to day, hour to hour.

Understanding them better, she says, may change our approach to aging, cancer, and simply

making our bodies work better for us at 8 or 80.

From American public media, I'm Krista Tippett, today on being stem cells, untold stories.

In January 2008, Doors Taylor's work at the University of Minnesota's Center for Cardiovascular

Repair was the stuff of global headlines, such as researchers grow a beating heart.

Simply explained, Doors Taylor and her colleagues took the heart from the cadaver of a rat and

injected stem cells into it.

It came to life and made history.

Doors Taylor's work almost seems the stuff of science fiction, and it approaches the religious

terrain of resurrection, but it's not so different, she says, from other great scientific

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