organ meat

People have been doing some cool stuff with bioprinting tech for some time now.  Veins and skin have already been produced in print-on-demand form.  The exciting news of the day however is that apparently working lungs have been grown in a (I'm not making this up) bioreactor!



I caught the story on IO9 which refers to the artificial organs as "vat grown" and was immediately swept back into one of my favourite novels.

He didn't see it coming. The last he saw of India was the pink stucco façade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel.



Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway. The Dutch surgeon liked to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of Turner hadn't made it out of Palam International on that first flight and had to spend the night there in a shed, in a support vat.



It took the Dutchman and his team three months to put Turner together again. They cloned a square meter of skin for him, grew it on slabs of collagen and shark-cartilage polysaccharides. They bought eyes and genitals on the open market. The eyes were green.



William Gibson, "Count Zero"