Communion Of Dreams

Organ transplantation used to be purely the stuff of Science Fiction. Now it is fairly routine, though still problematic due to the need for powerful immunosuppressants in most cases in order to avoid rejection. And there is a constant need for donor organs, which has also led to a couple of other staples of Science Fiction: cloning and organ farms.

[Mild Spoiler in next paragraph.]

I use both cloning and organ farming as a plot element in Communion of Dreams, which is revealed with the discovery of Chu Ling’s real history. Scientists have been working on cloning replacement organs, and there have been fairly solid reports of real organ farming (harvested from executed prisoners) to come out of China (one of the reasons that I used China as Chu Ling’s home). But cloning organs hasn’t been solved yet, and even if you have vast sources of donor organs, transplantation is still problematic due to tissue rejection.

Thankfully, scientists tend to be more innovative than writers, and have sought other solutions to the problem of replacement organs. One case I heard about last night on NPR’s All Things Considered uses an actual solution containing an active ingredient in shampoo:

Researchers Grow a Beating Heart

A custom-built replacement organ sounds like science fiction, but researchers working in Minnesota have figured out a way to construct a beating rat heart in the lab.

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Taylor and her colleagues knew that when nature builds a heart, the cells attach to a kind of scaffold, or frame, made of things like proteins. “It’s basically what’s underneath all of the cells, the tough part that the cells make to hold each other together,” she says.

The researchers decided to see if they could take a dead heart and remove all of its cells, leaving this scaffold behind. The scientists thought they could then use the scaffold to construct a new heart out of healthy cells.

How did they remove all the original cells? With soap:

He tried enzymes, but they dissolved the heart. Other chemicals made the heart swell and change shape. Then one day, Ott grabbed a chemical known as SDS. “It’s a regular component of shampoo,” he says. “It’s a soap.”

At first nothing seemed to happen. Then, patches on the heart began to turn white. The red part, the meaty part, was disappearing.

“You can see the detergent working and making the heart literally translucent so it turns into a jellyfish sort of appearance,” says Ott, who explains that it looks just like a jellyfish shaped like a heart, with all the organ’s intricate 3-D structures.

Read the whole thing, and there is video there as well showing the process. Simply fascinating.

This is the thing that I love about science – a willingness to try crazy ideas, to experiment, to learn and then apply that learning to new problems in ways which could not have been foreseen at the start. And it is the thing I envy about science, because had I proposed such a procedure/technique in my book, it would have been considered absurd and dismissed by most readers.

Bravo to the scientists and researchers.

Jim Downey