The TED talk I am choosing to watch and discuss upon this week is different from most. This is on the topic of tissue engineering. Which I know absolutely nothing about. Nina Tandon speaks on growing artificial hearts and bones. I have never been too interested in Science, so there are many questions that I instantly had before I even watched this talk.
Some being:
What exactly IS tissue engineering? What does it do?
Is it something that we are advanced enough scientifically to successfully do or are we still developing the skill of tissue engineering?
What are the benefits and consequences of tissue engineering?
Then, I looked up the basics of tissue engineering. Which is the use of a combination of cells, engineering and materials methods, and suitable biochemical and physio-chemical factors to improve or replace biological functions.
After watching this video, I became pretty aware of what tissue engineering fully is. Tandon says that the outcome of tissue engineering is to grow a fully-functional heart or a bone to put into the body. This is some very ground breaking research that can really save lives. I still had a few questions after watching this TED talk that were left unanswered, do we have the knowledge to successfully creat hearts, bones, etcetra with tissue engineering? I looked up the answer to that question, and it is (mostly) yes. We are, thankfully, advanced enough scientifically to make such amazing experiments to an extent (for example for skin cells). But we cannot yet regenerate complete organs, we are getting very close though. Tissue engineering offers dramatic improvement for hundreds of thousands of patients annually. The benefits for tissue engineering is that it can potentially help a person conquer a disease or illness, prolongs life and the over-all quality of life, and regenerates burned skin. The negatives is that there is a risk of hidden disease in the base issue and that some people have ethical issues with engineering tissue. Do you think that tissue engineering is positive to be studying and preforming?
