Excerpt
MILES O'BRIEN (Newshour): I am not sure when or why I thought it was a good idea to go for a bike ride on a 100-degree Texas afternoon with a 26-year-old Marine corporal. There I was eating Isaias Hernandez's dirt. No surprise, right? Well, take a look at his right thigh.
CPL. ISAIAS HERNANDEZ, U.S. Marine Corps: It looked like a chicken, like if you would take a bite out of it down to the bone.
MILES O'BRIEN: It happened in Iraq in 2004. He was badly injured in an artillery attack on his convoy.
CPL. ISAIAS HERNANDEZ: They patched it up because they said the other thank option would be amputation because they couldn't just leave my leg on with a hole in it.
DR. STEPHEN BADYLAK, McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine: You need people who think quantitatively and qualitatively working together on problems like this.
MILES O'BRIEN: What he did was reach out to this man. Dr. Steve Badylak is deputy director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, where they are in the vanguard of a fast-moving field called tissue engineering. The goal? Grow tissue or even whole organs to repair damaged or diseased human bodies.
Here, they are using pig bladders to help grow human muscle -- that's right, pig bladders. It turns out, they are a good source of a fundamental biological building block known as the extracellular matrix.
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