People need to see understand what extremes exist within the medical community. In the UK where the government bureaucrats run medicine (and because of that fact they have squashed all incentive for research and new ideas) they are planning on raiding the bodies of dead people for spare parts:

[PM] Gordon Brown has thrown his weight behind a move to allow hospitals to take organs from dead patients without explicit consent.

Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, the Prime Minister says that such a facility would save thousands of lives and that he hopes such a system can start this year.

The proposals would mean consent for organ donation after death would be automatically presumed, unless individuals had opted out of the national register or family members objected.

But patients’ groups said that they were “totally opposed” to Mr Brown’s plan, saying that it would take away patients’ rights over their own bodies.

We have our version of grave robber here in the US of course, they are the proponents of embryonic stem cell research. Stem cells are precursor cells for every organ, tissue, system or limb in the human body. It is the plan of many to take the life of young humans in order to gain these cells for spare parts.

But there is another force at work in this country as well. And it is the incentive of private health care which competes for new therapies and cures in order to gain the attention of a public which is control of its health care choices. And that private sector health care has show stunning progress. Scientists in America have shown how adult stem cells can be taken from a patient and grow a new heart for them!

SCIENTISTS have created a beating heart in the laboratory in a breakthrough that could allow doctors one day to make a range of organs for transplant almost from scratch.

The procedure involved stripping all the existing cells from a dead heart so that only the protein “skeleton” that created its shape was left.

Then the skeleton was seeded with live “progenitor” cells, which multiplied and grew back over it, eventually linking together into a new organ. Such cells are involved in the formative stages of specialised types of tissue such as those found in the heart.

The research, by scientists at the University of Minnesota, has so far been done only with rats and pigs and is highly experimental. It is unlikely to be applied to humans for years.

However, Professor Doris Taylor, director of the university’s centre for cardiovascular repair, believes it could be a significant step towards creating custom-built hearts, blood vessels and other organs for people with serious illness.

The big advantage of such an approach is that organs so built would use stem cells taken from the patient so the body’s immune system would not reject them.

Replacement parts grown from your own cells. No factories growing and killing young human embryos, no raiding bodies on the way to the morgue. See the difference innovative scientists have bureaucrats? Is anyone surprised?