Category Archives: Transhuman News

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After decades of work, a team of doctors say they've successfully engineered vaginas that have been implanted and grown in women. The vaginas were grown in a lab from the female patients' own cells and later transferred to their bodies, where they formed into normal vaginas. The breakthrough bears some huge implications, too.

It sounds confusing at first, but the process was fairly simple. Anthony Atala from the Wake Forest School of Medicine led the research using a technique developed in the 1990s. The patients were all women born without functioning vaginas due to a rare but severe condition known as Mayer-Rokitansky-Kster-Hauser Syndrome. While they all had vulvas, the external part of the female sex organs, they didn't have a vaginal cavity, meaning they couldn't menstruate or have sex. There were also, obviously, psychological effects.

Using a technique first developed on rabbitswhere, funnily enough, the first solid organ grown was a penisAtala's team took samples from the women's vulvas and grew them on a degradable scaffold made of collagen in a lab. Once they'd reached the right level of maturity, the doctors inserted the engineered vagina into a cavity they'd formed in the patients' abdomens. The scaffold was attached to the uterus and a stent was used to hold it in place for the first six weeks. After just six months, the vagina was fully developed. Depending on the patient, Atala waited between four and eight years before publishing his findings to ensure there were no complications. There weren't.

"After the operation they were able to function normally. They had normal levels of desire, arousal, satisfaction and orgasm," Atala told the press. When asked whether the women could give birth, he sounded optimistic. "They haven't tried," he said, "but they can ovulate, so there is no reason to suspect that they cannot."

While this specific procedure stands to improve the lives of many women, the implications of growing an organ inside a patients' body is huge. Gizmodo interviewed Atala a few years ago, and he spoke of a future where all body parts could be grown in a lab and transplanted into a patient. It makes you wonder, if this is what immortality looks like. "I don't know how long it will take, but I do foresee a future when organs will be available off-the-shelf, ready to 'plug in' and replace injured or diseased organs," Atala said at the time. With today's news, we're that much closer to this future. [The Lancet via New Scientist]

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Doctors Can Now Grow Engineered Vaginas in Women

MIAMI They come to put their dead relatives and friends on a T-shirt.

A young woman clutches a photo of her murdered 16-year-old brother. He grins at the camera, his right hand clutching a gun. Three young men line up to pay homage to one of their friends, a "street soldier," with his Facebook profile picture.

Here at Studio X, inside the U.S.A. Flea Market, miles away from South Beach in a gritty pocket of Liberty City, is where black Miami's killed are memorialized. Pictures of the deceased are stamped onto plaques and necklace charms, but a majority of customers come to put a picture on a T-shirt.

For the bereaved who robe themselves in these memorial shirts, the act is a public expression of their loss. It is a ritual they turn to in their time of grief. It is a testimony of a life prematurely taken by violence in neighborhoods where these killings don't always make the news cycle.

The Studio X booth, with its purpose emblazoned on a sign out front - "Home of the R.I.P. T-shirts" - is often the first stop before funeral arrangements. And long after the funeral is over, the grief-stricken return. They come on their lost loved one's birthday and on the anniversary of the killing for more T-shirts to proclaim their sadness. Here, love is a memorial worn close to the heart and out in the street.

Ayleen Lopez, the soft-spoken graphic designer on duty, gently directs customers to a menu of images beneath plexiglass to use as a background for the photo of their loved ones.

"People do it because it's their way of remembering someone they loved," she said. "Not everyone understands it. In Miami, in the 'hood, this is how you show this person means something to me."

Menu item CR-14 depicts a cross topped with a crown of thorns. CR-17 is a pair of hands clasped in prayer. G-13 is Miami's skyline bordered by what looks like two AK-47 assault rifles on top and, along the bottom, a row of bullets.

Studio X is one of the better-known memorial shirt-printing enterprises locally, but similar businesses dot strip malls and flea markets throughout South Florida. They are part of the urban background of inner cities across the country.

"It should be once in a blue moon, but every week it's another body," said Leonard Brown, who designed memorial shirts for 12 years at StudioX.

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Grief-stricken memorialize loved ones on 'R.I.P. T-shirts'