Made in Ohio: intestinal tissue

My father showed me this incredible research about a month ago and I’ve been a slacker on sharing the news. It really is incredible...

James Wells, a developmental biologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital (Cincinnati, Ohio), has successfully grown stem cells into organ tissue — specifically, intestinal tissue. (left)

“This is really a major advance in the field because it provides an experimental system for studying the development of the human intestine,” says Steven Cohn, a gastroenterologist at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville. “This will allow one to study human organ development in the test tube in a way that we haven't been able to do before.”

As you can imagine, this could mean amazing things for research in Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. More here: nature.com

(Thanks Dad!)

The war on arithmetic.

I’m obviously a massive Thomas Friedman fan — and particularly loved his Op-Ed piece on health care reform (particularly) this week: “The War on Logic”