Dick in a dish

The team lead by Dr. Anthony Atala at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine as been highlighted on the bayblab before for growing a functioning bladder in a dish. Well they outdid themselves this time by growing a functioning rabbit penis in a dish, and grafting it back on males which conceived with it. Think of the possibilities! The paper is not yet available on pubmed but there is an article here about the discovery:

"Dr Atala's team first created a scaffold using the penis of a rabbit, and removed all the living cells from it, leaving only cartilage. They then took a small piece of tissue from the penis of another rabbit and grew the cells in a lab dish. Dr Atala says the work has taken his team 18 years to complete. "We had to find the right growth factors, the right soup to grow the cells in," he said."

Of note to our female readers, he has also been successful in growing clitoral tissues in the past.