“Do you think sometime in the future you could essentially make a whole new organism?” Pia asked with astonishment and not a little dismay.

“At the rate we’re going, I see that as a definite possibility, although I can’t imagine what the rationale would be.”

Pia reflexively shuddered as she realized that Frankenstein, that nineteenth-century nightmare, could very well resurrect itself to haunt the twenty-first in a frighteningly more plausible fashion. If the Rothman-Yamamoto organogenesis worked well with kidneys, hearts, and pancreases, there was no reason it couldn’t work just as well with brains.

“Where are the human organs?” Pia asked.

Yamamoto took a few steps down the kidney line and pointed into a larger Plexiglas container. “This is human, as you might expect considering the size. It’s also one of the composite preparations with a human heart to do the kidney’s internal profusion.”

Pia stared into the bath, transfixed by what she was looking at. The kidney did look human, but the heart did not. She asked Yamamoto why.

“Good question. Since oxygenation of the perfusing fluid is being done by the oxygenator on the lower shelf, we did not need a four-chambered heart as two would do. So we altered the design of the heart.”

Once again Pia was amazed. “You have that much control of the organogenesis process to alter the overall three-dimensional architecture?”

“Absolutely. As I mentioned, once we made the original organogenesis breakthroughs, our progress has been truly phenomenal and isn’t slowing down.”

The figure Pia had seen earlier finished what he was doing, stood upright, and came toward the group. As he neared, and despite the surgical mask, Pia was further surprised. She could tell it was Rothman. Wearing some kind of goggles with thick, tinted lenses, he made for an eerie figure, like the prototypical mad scientist in his lair. Pia knew that what Dr. Yamamoto had said outside was true—this truly was groundbreaking work. In the stem cell race to move from the promising hypothetical to the clinical, Rothman and Yamamoto had advanced much further than any other team in the world.

Rothman moved the goggles to the top of his head as he came to a stop. He looked at Yamamoto. “Have they been given a short introduction?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

Rothman nodded. He knew he was going to have to show off his work to any number of interested biotech venture capitalists over the coming years, even though it wasn’t something he enjoyed or found easy. Yamamoto had helped him prepare a script that he’d practiced again and again with his wife. The students were to be a kind of dress rehearsal.

“Welcome to Columbia University Organogenesis Laboratory,” Rothman said. Yamamoto coughed gently into his hand. Rothman had trouble deviating even slightly from the prepared text.

“It is common knowledge that there are currently more than one hundred thousand people on waiting lists for organ transplants in this country, and these are people with end-stage disease. The list grows at a rate of about five hundred a month. Currently the same number of people, five hundred or so, die every month. On top of this grim statistic there are thousands upon thousands of additional patients who could benefit from an organ transplant even though they are not yet in a life-threatening situation. Obviously in the current environment the supply of viable organs from either a live donor or a recently deceased individual has not come close to keeping up with demand. Even for those patients lucky enough to receive an organ, the match is often far from optimal, meaning they are relegated to a life of immunosuppression with dire health consequences. What we are doing here, in a cost-conscious fashion, is to create organs which will simultaneously solve the supply problem and the immunological issue. This goal has not yet been reached, but we are making significant progress. At this stage we are looking for outside funding to ramp up production at multiple centers across the country.