Justus For All

the Daily Mail

British scientists have grown the world’s first artificial liver from stem cells in a breakthrough that will one day provide entire organs for transplant.The technique that created the ‘mini-liver’, currently the size of a one pence piece, will be developed to create a full-size functioning liver.

Described as a ‘Eureka moment’ by the Newcastle University researchers, the tissue was created from blood taken from babies’ umbilical cords just a few minutes after birth.

As it stands, the mini organ can be used to test new drugs, preventing disasters such as the recent ‘Elephant Man’ drug trial. Using lab-grown liver tissue would also reduce the number of animal experiments.

Within five years, pieces of artificial tissue could be used to repair livers damaged by injury, disease, alcohol abuse and paracetamol overdose.

And then, in just 15 years’ time, entire liver transplants could take place using organs grown in a lab.

This is pretty amazing, and is probably just the tip of what we will see in a few years.

This also prompted some thoughts from me on inflation, or more precisely what inflation can’t measure.  I would expect that in 20 years a liver replacement, while a signifigant expense will be fairly common and considered ‘affordable’ (along with a bunch of other organs.)  Currently, the ‘price’ for replacement organs that exactly match your own tissue is infinite, they cannot be had.  That is something that inflation measures won’t be able to gauge well, and haven’t gauged well in the past.

Another example, right now with a few key strokes and a search engine I can gain access to a sizable percentage of the sum of human knowlenge (not to mention porn) right here where I sit.  That current value of that is about $40 bucks a month.  20 years ago, it would have been impossible to achieve, and poor proxy’s were hugely expensive.  That sort of thing is impossible to measure, so we don’t measure it, but it effects our lives dramatically, and for the better.