Doug Garr

About the author: Doug Garr is a business writer, reporter, author, biographer, and corporate communications specialist.

Advances in a field known as tissue engineering could make replacement bladders and blood vessels a reality in the near future, while grown-in-the-lab hearts, lungs, and livers are a longer-term goal. Tissue engineering combines biotechnology procedures, computer technology, the use of microscopic polymers, and other techniques to literally grow organs in the laboratory. The hope is that organs might one day be grown from a patient's own cells, thus reducing or eliminating the chance that a patient's body will reject the transplant.

It's a decade from now, and an elderly man gets the grim news that his heart is rapidly decaying and that the left ventricle—the chamber that squeezes blood...