Lifeboat Foundation

Inside Doris Taylor’s lab at the Texas Heart Institute are ethereal white pig hearts, stripped of their cells and now a blank slate of an organ.

Removing cells from an organ is fairly simple for scientists like Taylor. Rebuilding the organ by injecting stem cells is the tricky part.

But that’s exactly what Taylor hopes to do: grow a human heart by injecting human stem cells into a “decellularized” organ.