Semi-synthetic implants of semi-tissue

February 3, 2011

There’s been striking progress in not-quite-tissue engineering, and the technique brings several strong practical advantages over methods that yield products more like genuine tissue.
The problem situation looks like this: Some tissue structures don’t regrow, or regrow slowly; grafts of tissue from another person often lead to rejection; grafts of tissue from a patient’s own body [...]

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Good and popular

January 20, 2011

  I’ll get back to posting more regularly, but meanwhile, here are a few of the most popular posts to date:

How to Learn About Everything
…the title above isn’t “how to learn everything”, but “how to learn about everything”. The distinction I have in mind is between knowing the inside of a topic in deep detail [...]

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For the next Nobel Prize in Medicine,
I nominate…

November 3, 2010

During a three-month test across eight hospitals, several continents, and almost 4,000 patients, a new technology reduced serious surgical complications by 36% and deaths by almost 50% — in raw numbers, over 150 cases of severe harm and nearly 30 patient deaths.
This performance was demonstrated in the spring of 2008 with the prototype [...]

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Nanomedicine by nanoparticle:
Toward killing cancer,
tweaking cell function,
and inserting Boolean logic

October 24, 2010

Compared to small molecules, nanoparticles offer more physical scope for functional engineering, and according to a report in Science, more than 50 companies are pressing forward to exploit this for cancer diagnosis and treatment. Nearly a dozen nanoparticle-based medicines are reportedly in clinical trials, and lab research suggests a road to programmable control of cellular [...]

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