Tremaine was an otter who would do anything to be comfortable. He used fluffy cottonwood seeds to line his hole in the rocky river wall. When the river roared too loudly, he tucked wet leaves in his ... [+]
Originally published in An Earlier Life (Ovenbird Books, 2016)
It looks like a ghost heart. And it feels a little like Jello.—Doris Taylor, bioengineerI.On the radio show Speaking of Faith, researcher Doris Taylor is telling us how to build a new heart. They take a cadaver heart, she says, wash away all the dead cells with shampoo until only a "ghost heart" remains. This ghost heart will provide the scaffold for stem cells that will create the new heart on their own.I look at pictures of the ghost heart on the website: it looks a little bit like halibut: white-fleshed, resilient, translucent. It's almost all water, with just enough structure to hold it in