This is a world, the WIRED innovation fellow pointed out, that we are already living in. "Every cell in your body has a voltage across it, and mitochondria convert energy 10,000 times more efficiently than the sun. Bone cells break down and repair themselves all the time."
With EpiBone, Tandon is pioneering research into how we can manipulate these incredible properties of our cells."We take fat tissue, extract stem cells out of them, then engineer living tissues from your own cells to create bone grafts" she explains. "It takes about three weeks as of now, and we can grow them at just about any size or shape that we want. Because it's made from the patient's own cells there's no chance of rejection." Currently in animal studies, Epibone hopes to be conducting first pilot tests in humans in 2016. "We used to be in this insane paradigm, thinking that if the body's broken, leave it alone, but this paradigm is changing," she said. "In the last century, we started to view the body as an assemblage, a sum of parts that can be replaced with donor organs, for example. But now we've started drilling down deeper. Rather than viewing the body as asset or parts we're viewing it as a collection of cells, as a vast renewable resource."
This new way of thinking doesn't just belong to the field of medicine. It's stimulated a rich cultural movement, as bio-artists experiment with the creative potential contained at the cellular level. Tandon pointed to British fashion designer Suzanne Lee who grows textiles from bacteria, and Stanford researcher Ingmar Riedel-Kruse who films the action of cellular organisms and incorporates them into video games. On a larger scale she quoted the architect and co-Founder of Terreform ONE, Mitchell Joachim who asks, "Why are we building homes, when we should be growing them?" "Isn't it exciting," she concluded, "to think that if the first industrial revolution was about machines, the second was about information, that the third revolution could be about life itself."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
