The cast includes a slate of local scientists with ambitious goals: to help people who have lost ears, limbs, or even need a new heart. In Dr. Joseph Vacanti’s lab at Massachusetts General Hospital, a mouse skitters around its cage with a half-size human ear growing on its back. Dr. Harald Ott, a surgeon at Mass. General, washes away cells from a human heart, leaving a cellular structure on which to construct a new one. At MIT, physicist Leon Bellan tries to build delicate blood vessels, drawing inspiration from cotton candy.
Mixed with the science are the stories of people who could use a dose of regenerative medicine, and one who has already benefited from it: soldiers who have lost limbs; a 33-year-old woman who faces the sobering fear she will die waiting for a new heart; a young man who received a replacement bladder built out of his own cells.
The gap between these patients’ immediate needs and the progress of research is, for the most part, significant. And in the end, it is this attempt to humanize the science with the stories of people who could benefit that occasionally triggers the uneasy feeling that the camera is leading us on, because such work still seems far from making a real difference in people’s lives.
For example, in a striking scene, Jessica Whited, a researcher at Harvard Medical School, amputates a salamander limb. Over days, the camera captures the tiny, budding foot that slowly grows from the salamander’s stump, eventually resulting in a perfectly shaped limb. It is miraculous and cool to watch. Whited and other scientists explain the intriguing idea that scarring, which protects people from infections, may be the source of people’s inability to regrow body parts the way salamanders do. Understanding exactly how that happens might, she hopes, hold the key to triggering such abilities in people.
