Fabricating human tissues: How physics can help

By understanding and applying the physics of cellular self-assembly, scientists aim to predict tissue behaviors and accelerate the regeneration of human tissues and organs.

Ashkan Shafiee is a researcher in clinical physics in the department of radiation oncology, Wake Forest School of Medicine, and Elham Ghadiri is an assistant professor of chemistry, both at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Robert Langer is an Institute Professor at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Physics Today 75, 12, 38 (2022); https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.5138

On 23 December 1954, the first successful organ transplantation was accomplished by a team of scientists and clinicians, including Joseph Murray, who was awarded the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for that breakthrough procedure.¹ It was performed at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. The surgery, captured in the photograph on the opposite page, involved transferring a kidney from Ronald Herrick to his identical twin, Richard. Having both donor and recipient genetically identical reduced the risk of adverse immune reactions and eliminated the chance of organ rejection.