And what happens is this can be implanted into a human heart without open heart surgery.

And the fact that pig heart valves have lots of these on them is the reason that you can't transplant a pig heart valve into a person easily.

This is actually a heart valve, which we engineered.

And you can go inside the heart itself and repair the valves from the inside.

He can go inside, push inside of the heart, and really feel how the valves are moving.

This is actually a heart valve that we've engineered, and you can see here, we have the structure of the heart valve and we've seeded that with cells, and then we exercise it.

Six weeks, these folds are now beginning with the papilla on the inside of the heart actually being able to pull down each one of those valves in your heart until you get a mature heart and then basically the development of the entire human body.

So this is actually a Dutch company, so I called them up, and I asked, Can I borrow a heart valve from you?

So, the most beautiful thing I found at least what I think is the most beautiful in the book, is this heart valve.

The low tech bit is that it's literally a pig's heart valve mounted in the high tech bit, which is a memory metal casing.

And the way you engineer this heart valve is the same strategy.

And once it's in the right spot, they remove the outer shell, and the heart valve, well, it gets this shape and at that moment it starts beating, instantly.

So one of the pioneers, for example, is Dr. Anthony Atala, and he has been working on layering cells to create body parts bladders, valves, kidneys.

But not as the guy on the table the guy doing open heart surgery.

And this, I think, is really the future for heart surgeons.

Great and then I didn't hear from them for weeks, so I called, and I asked, What's going on with the heart valve?

This was the only modality that can see the inner lining of the heart.

We don't need sophisticated heart transplants around the world.

At 97 he still does 20 open heart surgeries every month.

But I said we can't get rid of it, because all the people who tried to transplant heart valves found out you can't get rid of that immunity.

You could now start doing surgery everywhere, on the gut, on the liver, on the heart, on the brain.

Operations for extra systematic circulation diseases and innate cardiac defect

This is a heart stent developed by Zhong You at Oxford University.

On the cardiac side, pacemakers are getting smaller and much easier to place so you don't need to train an interventional cardiologist to place them.

So you see the leaflets opening and closing of this heart valve that's currently being used experimentally to try to get it to further studies.

I had so many surgeries to put my neck back together, to repair my heart a few times.

Well, the heart stent came from that little blow up box that you might have learned in elementary school.

Yanko Yanev underwent an operation to remove his spleen.

We take the scaffold, we seed it with cells, and you can now see here, the valve leaflets opening and closing.

It must be sticky to hold it in your hand!

So this is a bypass operation, just like what Al Gore had, with a difference.

This is the same procedure, but now done minimally invasively, with only three holes in the body where they're taking the heart and simply injecting stem cells through a laparoscopic procedure.

Even trips to the dentist require that you take antibiotics, in case you get an internal infection on the valve.

We're going to do some open heart surgery. I was the only Brit, on a team of about nine American cardiac surgeons, cardiac nurse, intensive care nurse.

He suffered severe damage to his spleen as a result, and had to be operated on.

in the following year.

Surgery laparoscopy, open surgery (laparotomy) in which tuboplasty is performed, removal of adhesions, fulguration of endometriosis foci, myomectomy, etc.

I mean it's probably the wet dream for a heart surgeon to be able to go inside of the patient's heart before you actually do surgery, and do that with high quality resolution data.

What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week?

John Pepper there was the cardiac surgeon who did the actual work on me, but everyone else there had to contribute one way or another.

During the thirteen and a half hour surgery, I flatlined twice, 40 quarts of blood were infused into my body.

Heart disease, stroke, diabetes, spinal cord injury, muscular dystrophy, retinal eye diseases are any of these conditions relevant, personally, to you?

In this case, at the end of the bypass operation, you're going to see the stem cells from the patient that were removed at the beginning of the procedure being injected directly into the heart of the patient.

We use current pacemaker defibrillator technology that's used for the heart.

The surgery on offer was pretty gruesome anesthetize you, open your chest, put you on an artificial heart and lung machine, drop your body temperature to about 18 centigrade, stop your heart, cut the aorta out, replace it with a plastic valve and a plastic aorta, and, most importantly, commit you to a lifetime of anticoagulation therapy, normally warfarin.