Last night (Oct. 6, 2014) I changed it up and presented Week 6 of Bioelectronics, Medical Imaging and Our Bodies (at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada) instead of the previously planned week 5 topic on reverse engineering the brain and neuromorphic engineering, I wanted to encourage students to view a documentary available on Knowledge Network, How to Build a Beating Heart before it disappears from the Knowledge website on Oct. 14, 2014 and our week 6 class on ‘building organs’ wasn’t scheduled until the Monday (Oct. 20, 2014) after Thanksgiving weekend Oct. 11 – 13, 2014.
Last night’s class was on this topic:
Week 6 5: Growing Human Organs
While human organs are being grown or 3D-printed for transplant purposes, they are also being grown on chips for toxicology testing and, in a stunning turn of events, an August 2014 New York Times article described U.S. researchers who grew a “brain in a dish.”‘
Note 1: The ‘brain in a dish’ will be covered in what should have been the week 5 topic so you won’t find it in either the slide deck or the notes for last night’s class.
Note 2: I have kept week 6 in the file names for last night’s class materials (slide presentation and notes) on the assumption that at some point in the future I may go back to this material having forgotten that I switched the weeks around.
Here’s the slide deck for last night’s class:
As usual, here are my ‘notes’ for last night’s class consisting largely of brief heads designed to remind me of the content to be found by clicking the link directly after the head.
Week 6 Organ and human on a chip
Happy Reading!