smaugmcgann:

likealittlechild:

spectacularuniverse:

I&rsquo;ve seen this photograph very frequently on tumblr and Facebook, always with the simple caption, &ldquo;Ghost Heart&rdquo;. What exactly&nbsp;is&nbsp;a ghost heart?
More than 3,200 people are on the waiting list for a heart transplant in the United States. Some won&rsquo;t survive the wait. Last year, 340 died before a new heart was found.The solution: Take a pig heart, soak it in an ingredient commonly found in shampoo and wash away the cells until you&rsquo;re left with a protein scaffold that is to a heart what two-by-four framing is to a house.Then inject that ghost heart, as it&rsquo;s called, with hundreds of millions of blood or bone-marrow stem cells from a person who needs a heart transplant, place it in a bioreactor - a box with artificial lungs and tubes that pump oxygen and blood into it - and wait as the ghost heart begins to mature into a new, beating human heart.Doris Taylor, director of regenerative medicine research at the Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke&rsquo;s Episcopal Hospital in Houston, has been working on this&mdash; first using rat hearts, then pig hearts and human hearts - for years.The process is called decellularization and it is a tissue engineering technique designed to strip out the cells from a donor organ, leaving nothing but connective tissue that used to hold the cells in place.&nbsp;This scaffold of connective tissue - called a &ldquo;ghost organ&rdquo; for its pale and almost translucent appearance - can then be reseeded with a patient&rsquo;s own cells, with the goal of regenerating an organ that can be transplanted into the patient without fear of tissue rejection.This ghost heart is ready to be injected with a transplant recipient&rsquo;s stem cells so a new heart - one that won&rsquo;t be rejected - can be grown.(Source)

Excuse me but we can&rsquo;t just kill pigs to save human lives. That is wrong.

Found the vegan
