Aborted baby organs to be used to grow transplants for medical patients

(NaturalNews) Babies murdered while still inside their mothers' wombs, a medical procedure known in "politically correct" terminology as abortion, are being investigated as a possible source of vital organ harvesting for patients in need. Researchers from Duke University in North Carolina, who started their own biotechnology company based in Redwood City, California, are already implanting and incubating human fetal organs from aborted babies into animals, growing them to full size for eventual use in conventional medicine.

The controversial research involves dissecting vital organs like kidneys from aborted babies and implanting them into rats, for instance, which serve as growing apparatuses for bringing the organs to adult size. After several months of supplying these undersized organs with blood via engineered blood vessels, which are carefully regulated for proper pressure and flow, the organs are harvested once they reach a pre-determined size and volume.

"Our long-term goal is to grow human organs in animals, to end the human donor shortage," stated Eugene Gu, a medical student at Duke and founder and CEO of Ganogen, Inc., the biotech corporation pioneering this latest exhibition of depraved quasi-science.

Animals to become organ-producing machines for synthetic human organs

Set to be published in the American Journal of Transplantation, a study on the process shows that it is entirely possible to cultivate living organs inside the bodies of animals. Whether these synthetically derived organs will be accepted by the bodies of actual human donors is still unknown, but researchers believe that the concept is promising for achieving their goals.

After obtaining human fetal kidneys from Stem Express, a California-based company that supplies researchers with various tissues harvested from both dead babies and adults, Gu and his colleagues implanted them into rats deliberately bred without immune systems. If the rats had had immune systems, their bodies likely would have rejected the foreign organs.

In order to regulate blood pressure in the same way as a human body, the team applied tiny stitches three to four times smaller than the width of a human hair around the rats' blood vessels. This prevented the organs from hemorrhaging, as the average blood pressure of rats is roughly three times higher than it is in human babies.

Researchers also installed special arterial flow regulators into the rats that decreased the flow of blood, again mimicking how blood would flow in a real human baby. After about a month of cultivation, the team replaced some of the animals' own kidneys with those from the aborted fetuses and watched to see how long they all survived.

The rats that had received the transplanted kidneys survived for an average of four months, with one surviving as long as 10 months. On the other hand, the rats that had not received the transplant, the control mice, only survived for a few days.

"This technology is applicable not just to the kidney, but to every kind of [blood-supplied] organ in the body," added Gu.

Will mad science eventually use implant technology to develop human-animal hybrids?

Earlier research has attempted to grow immature human kidneys in the abdomens of mice, but this latest study represents the first time that whole organs have been successfully sown inside animals. If the process proves to be successful on a larger scale, it forebodes a future in which aborted human babies become a commercial commodity for companies to capitalize on artificial organ development.

If taken to its extreme, the process may also one day make it possible to breed hybrid human-animals with unnatural mixtures of human and animal body parts -- whatever suits the agenda of future scientific endeavors. In this bizarre sect of scientific pursuit, there really seems to be no limit to what's considered ethical or moral.

Sources:

http://www.livescience.com

http://www.cbsnews.com

http://www.medicaldaily.com