In late 2005, cardiac researcher Doris Taylor revived the dead. She rinsed rat hearts with detergent until the cells washed away and all that remained was a skeleton of tissue translucent as wax paper—a ghost heart, as Taylor calls it. She injected the scaffold with fresh heart cells from newborn rats. Then she waited.
What she witnessed four days later, once the cells had a chance to make themselves at home, was astonishing. "We could see these little areas that were beginning to beat," says Taylor, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Cardiovascular Repair. "By eight days, we could see the whole heart beating. The first time that happened, it was like ‘yes!' "
