I saw the Body Works exhibition by Gunter von Creepy at the London O2 a couple of months ago, and was suitably fascinated and freaked out in equal measures. It was very impressive, although the ghoulish nature of the exhibition really does make the skin crawl. The exhibition was memorable for two things, the first rather obviously the bodies, the second was the indiscreet release of gas by my wife in the gift shop. Nicole, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry to remind you of that fart, but I do find it rather amusing.

Anyway, the reason I’m writing about this is the article I read in a recent New Scientist about growing hybrid hearts. In a nutshell, an excised heart is “decellularised” by digesting it with detergent to leave a collagen matrix, which is then seeded with stem cells. The end result is a fully functional heart ready for transplantation. The main benefit is the ex vivo heart can come from one species, e.g. a pig, and the new heart, grown in collago, if you will, grown from stem cells acquired from a different species, e.g. human.

Theoretically speaking, could you strip an elephant heart and seed the matrix with mouse stem cells? I think we should be told.

Curiously, in the same edition of NS was an article from Natalia Alexandrov of NASA written for the 3Rs committee, outlining the development of a “virtual twin” which could model an individual, thus eliminating the need for animal models and concurrently tailoring a therapy to suit an individual rather than a blanket treatment designed to treat entire populations. Could the combination of the two techniques lead to some bizarre future where there is more than one Ewan McGregor or Scarlett Johansson?