The quest to engineer entire organs in a lab

One of the holy grails in the field of regenerative medicine is the ability to engineer whole organs in all their complexity, not just pieces of them. Laura Niklason is one of those pushing this boundary. During a visit, I followed one of her postdocs into a refrigerated closet in her Yale University laboratories. He reached out to a shelf and took down a jar. Unlike the amorphous piece of heart muscle Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic had showed me, there was no mistaking what was floating inside this c