It's Alive

45-60 minutes is not disheartening to the researchers, or to me either. I will happily keep mine until it stops beating.

It just shows us all once again, the hand of the Creative Force in the Universe (God to me), that can engineer something as steady as the human heart, with the power to endure its own beating action for many decades, or even a century in some cases.

One day, hopefully, they'll be able to grow a new heart from the patient's own stem cells.

One of my friends has a new stem cell therapy drug for spinal cord injury patients. The initial trials went favorably with restoration dependent on elapsed time before the transcutaneous treatment with stem cell suspension (from the same patient).

FDA has now declared his formulation to be a "new" drug, and thus has ordered all domestic (U.S.) distribution to cease, until such time as Clinical trials Phase I, II, and III are completed. This requires a cost of approximately $40MM at the present time.

Anyone want to volunteer to finance that? I did not think so.

This is the reason why Big Pharma owns all the drugs entering the market, and to be honest, I suspect they are interested in profit potential far more than how many lives can be saved, restored, healed, etc. This is just one small reason why health care insurance costs so much in the USA, and why insurance is no guarantee of receiving good treatment that is efficacious. The idea seems to be to get patients on long term therapies that may or may not do them any good.

I understand that this "new" drug is still allowed to be exported overseas or otherwise out of country, depending on the laws in the receiving nation.