Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Physiology & Medicine => Topic started by: Pseudoscience-is-malarkey on 08/08/2021 12:30:27
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What is it about the liver that is so complicated that it cannot be replicated with human technology? Will we replicate the human brain before the human liver?
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Not much point, as it turns out. The liver can recover from substantial damage if you excise the dead bits, and it is fairly easy to transplant bits of a donor liver to regrow a functional organ. It even turns out that adding a bit of donor liver improves the outcome of heart or heart-lung transplants - it's a magic organ!
Artificial hearts are not particularly successful and are generally considered a temporary fix until a natural donor heart becomes available.
Artificial kidneys really come in two distinct forms: a wholly mechanical dialysis system, or a hybrid system of mechanical kit and living kidney cells. Again, like the artificial heart, mostly considered a bridge to an organic transplant or a clumsy last-ditch substitute for the real thing.
Fact is that we have only been developing flexible and biocompatible engineering materials for around 100 years, whereas nature has been at it with an unlimited budget and no ethical constraints for about 4,000,000,000 years.