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Want to Look Inside a Brain? With Transparent Organs, You Can

Want to Look Inside a Brain? With Transparent Organs, You Can

4 years ago
Anonymous $9CO2RSACsf

https://www.wired.com/story/transparent-organs/

Your organs are a lot of things—a powerful computer (in the case of your brain), detoxers (your liver and kidneys), breathing devices (your lungs). But there’s one thing they’re decidedly not: transparent.

That’s unless you’re Kevin Bacon in The Invisible Man, or if your organs end up in the lab of Ali Ertürk, director of Helmholtz Munich’s Institute for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine. Writing in the journal Cell, Ertürk and his colleagues detail how they’ve treated human organs to make them see-through. Next, by adding special dyes to the now-transparent organs, they can map kidneys, eyes, and brains on a cellular level, which could one day help scientists 3D-print versions of them.