Metal heart artificial uterus... Humans are increasingly using substitutes.

in the classic fairy tale film "The Wizard of Oz" that because there is no heart, can not love others" "iron man" is still fresh in the memorySmall "tin man" is a pity, but modern science and technology can indeed give people an "artificial heart." A British patient with a metal heart has died at the age of 68 after seven years of peaceToday's life sciences are so magical that humans can not only create organs such as heart, liver and kidney to sustain life, and even the birthplace of life - the uterus can also be man-made!" The metal heart "turned two weeks into seventhe Daily
Mirror reported on January3, if there was no "dead heart", perhaps the family of British heart patient Peter Horton would have endured the pain of life and death seven years ago2000
Peter was diagnosed with a fatal heart condition with only two weeks left to liveTo save him, doctors at John RadcliffeHospital in Oxford, England,transplanted a titanium device into his heart, "Javik2
000 heart." It is actually a titanium pump that helps the patient's heart pump more bloodDoctors implanted the artificial "metal heart" into Peter's left ventricleThe "metal heart" is powered by an external battery pack, which is connected by a wire protruding out of Peter's chest and connected to a rechargeable battery that hangs around Peter's waistPeter was the first in the world to receive an experimental patient with a "Jawak 2
000 heart" transplant, and the doctor's intention was to make the transition to the "metal heart" before waiting for the right donor heart Unsurprisingly, Peter has lived for seven-and-a-half years, becoming the longest-serving person in the world to live by a "metal heart" Not only did this artificial "titanium pump" save Peter's life, but he also allowed him to travel with his wife Diane, and he even took part in a 150km charity walk Peter's old age was peaceful and happy, he once said, after the installation of the "metal heart", life returned to normal, the only regret is not to go swimming in the water, for fear of electric shock Peter was the first person in the world to have a metal heart implanted Since the world's first heart transplant January 2, 1967
2, there have been about 170,000 heart transplants worldwide However, because traditional transplants require waiting for the dispensing organs, coupled with the vulnerability to rejection and infection, many heart patients still die, such as those receiving the first heart transplant, who survived only 18 days This artificial metal heart does not have to consider the , rejection and other issues, the patient's physical condition is not demanding, for many patients with heart failure to bring hope of continuing life Finding a home for fertilized eggs in vitro
the British scientific journal New Scientist reported in November that Japanese scientists successfully fertilized female mice with a special "uterine chip" and began implanting them into the body The artificial uterus gives people the greatest expectation is "in vitro reproduction", so that the embryo completely in vitro uterine environment growth But because of legal and technical constraints, scientists' research is far from that There are two types of artificial wombs being developed by the scientific community: one is to create an artificial uterus in vitro in the biological sense, in which the inner wall , amniotic fluid, etc are the same as the mother womb, and the other is the "petri" form of the uterus, that is, the petri dish into amniotic fluid, with a fully automated control system to achieve the nutritional supply of embryos and waste discharge As early as the 1990s, Professor Hiroshi Fujii of the Institute of Industrial Sciences at the University of Tokyo in Japan focused his research on the "artificial womb" Because Japanese law prohibits such tests, Fujii and his team have taken a different approach to the idea of using miniature "artificial wombs" to grow fertilized eggs Their study is also significant because fertilized eggs are still less alive in microdrop environments under traditional in vitro fertilization But the research was not smooth, and they went through numerous failures Fujii and the research team after a detailed discussion, finally learned the lessons of failure The original uterus in the long-term evolution has reached a fairly perfect point, human seishaving liquid , growth hormone and other chemicals to create a simulated environment, there will always be their own defects, and in the long-term embryo is very fragile The only way out is to create a biological uterus, where the embryo must be encased in a layer of endometrial so that the basic nutrients it needs can be provided by endometrial cells After many attempts by Fujii and his team, the endometrial tissue was created inside a small "chip"-shaped structure, and the fertilized eggs finally found a warm home outside the human body " The uterine chip "automated breeding of embryos
at first Fujii thought he was only one step away from success, and he conducted a mouse fertilized egg culture test with a try." As a result, fertilized eggs die in most of the breeding process, and the development of cysts can not meet the requirements of implanting the mother's uterus Fujii, who had just seen hope, went back to a dead end In difficult times, Fujii suddenly thought of his "chip lab (
Lab on a chip) Biologically, a "chip lab" or "micro-full analysis system" is a technique for integrating the basic operating units involved in the fields of biology and chemistry on a chip of several square centimeters to complete different biological or chemical reaction processes "Chip" on the biological , chemical reactions can be fully automated operation, so that the "production process" will be automated , intelligent Fujii's first thing to do is to make the "chip" energy nutrition system intelligent That's when Fujii learned that the research of a foreign colleague might help solve his predicament: Matt Weller, a professor at the University of Illinois The final miniature artificial womb, with Weller, who is familiar with automated control, looks like a chip on the outer shape It is a long square, 2 mm wide and 0.5 mm high, and the middle circular groove is where the fertilized egg is beded, with the endometrial inside The rest of the chip is tiled with double-layer editing, with three channels in the four corners being used to put sperm, eggs and nutrients In terms of automation control alone
, can be described as a perfect system Then they began to experiment with animals The team implanted chip-cultured embryos into the mother mouse , 44 percent of the results were developed to healthy fetal , while traditional IVF embryos developed to healthy 40 percent of fetal success The animal experiment was a complete success! Can a baby come out in a assembly line factory? Fujii and Weller then worked , several times to fine-tune the chip's control system , "uterine chip" to the advantages of traditional IVF further expanded They also carried out similar experiments on goats, rabbits and other animals, and achieved the desired results Most importantly, after they tested the animals several times to confirm that the technique had no side effects, Fujii and his team successfully implanted the uterine chip into the body and the embryo is now well developed In July, Fujii made a splash when he presented his latest research at the annual meeting of the European Association for Human Reproduction and Embryology in Lyon, France For the scientific community, the success of the human trial is the first successful human embryo in an artificial womb, a miniature womb that is self-evident in the significance of artificial uterine research Scientists have been fantasizing about an artificial womb instead of the mother's womb, allowing the embryo to "live" in it throughout her pregnancy In the history of human civilization, scholars and sci-fi writers have put forward similar bold ideas One of the most famous is the famous British writer Ados Huxley in 1932, the "beautiful new world." The book envisions a future utopian society in which everyone is raised from embryo to bottle, a finished product of factory production For humans in the real world, Huxley's "line-of-life production baby " is undoubtedly the most attractive Every year, thousands of women in the world are unable to become mothers because of uterine malformations or removals, and more women want to save the pain of "October pregnancy", "artificial womb" will give them hope (
Chichi)