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At a laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Ali Khademhosseini and a Harvard Medical School team are at the forefront of research in generating new organs.

This might sound like a B-grade horror movie, but the science of engineering bladders, corneas, bronchial tubes and blood vessels has come a long way in the past decade.

We called Dr. Khademhosseini to tell us about the almost inconceivable work being done in his lab. We asked him to explain the process researchers use to generate tissue.

Scientific American: How to Grow New Organs

(Photo by April Gazmen via Flickr/Creative Commons)

Every morning in a small community kitchen in a village in Tanzania, women transform local farmers’ milk into probiotic yogurt. In a country where 1.3 million adults are HIV positive, that yogurt, rich in bacteria, has the possibility of improving the quality of life for people infected with HIV.

The project, called Western Heads East, is based out of the University of Western Ontario and Lawson Institute in Canada. For more on this, we’re turning to Gregor Reid. He’s a microbiologist from the Lawson Institute, and he joins us from his office in London, Ontario.

Nature Medicine: A Cultured Response to HIV (PDF)

(Photo by Western Heads East via Flickr/Creative Commons)

In a budget season marked by squabbling between the House and the Senate, lawmakers have agreed on one source of revenue.

They are counting on using $110 million from a medical malpractice fund.

But that money may be tied up in court.

NHPR’s Elaine Grant has more.

Researchers have discovered what they believe to be a cluster of patients with ALS or what’s popularly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. They live around Mascoma Lake in Enfield.

Scientists from Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center want to find out if ALS could be linked to cyanobacteria, a blue-green algae found in lakes across New Hampshire.

The study has only just begun and those links may be quite difficult to establish. But as New Hampshire Public Radio’s Amy Quinton reports, the publicity surrounding the Mascoma Lake study is having unintended consequences.