ABSTRACT
In October 1995, the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World program aired footage of a nude mouse with a human ear growing on its back; that image subsequently began circulating across a variety of worldwide media (Figure 23.1). The now infamously named “ear-mouse” had been developed at Massachusetts General Hospital as two brothers, Joseph and Charles Vacanti, began research into a burgeoning field intertwining biology and engineering. Just two years prior, Joseph Vacanti had published, along with Robert Langer, a ground-breaking Science article, “Tissue Engineering,” that would radicalize the ways in which bodily forms and structures could be grown and repaired outside of the body. Most importantly, it introduced a process in which cultured cells are seeded onto polymer scaffolds in order to grow into new tissues and eventually new organs.1 Indeed this was the very process that produced the human ear on the back of the immunodeficient mouse. For Vacanti and Langer, tissue engineering represented a major shift, not only in the development and reconstruction, but also, significantly, in the perception of living forms, signaling the elastic variability and adaptability of life itself.
