The cells are kind of homesick the dish doesn't feel like their home.

We observe the cells in a plate, and they're just on the surface.

These are stem cells that we create from specific sources, and we can drive them to become heart cells, and they start beating in culture.

There's all these elegant work in the tissue culture dishes, that if you give this cancer drug, you can do this effect to the cell, but the doses in those dishes are nowhere near the doses that happen in the body.

We then grow the cells outside the body, take the scaffold, coat the scaffold with the cells the patient's own cells, two different cell types.

This is cultures, identical cultures, of cervical cancer cells.

You have tissue culture cells. There are a ton of viruses.

In the lab, we micro pattern channels in the biomaterials on which we grow the cells, and this allows us to flow the cell culture media, the cells' food, through the scaffolds where we're growing the cells a lot like what you might expect from a capillary bed in the heart.

We then tease the cells apart, we grow the cells outside the body.

And that is, in fact, what these particular cell cultures are chronically infected with.

We could not get enough of your cells to grow outside of your body.

In a petri dish, bacteria grow. Say they double every generation, and five generations before the end the petri dish is 15 16ths empty, and then the next generation's 3 4ths empty, and the next generation half empty. Within one generation after the petri dish still being half empty, it is full. There's no more food and the bacteria have collapsed.

We copy this in the lab by outfitting cell culture systems with electrodes.

He can actually grow beating tissue in a dish.

And for this purpose, traditional cell culture techniques just really aren't enough.

And, of course if you can build mice molars in Petri dishes, you can grow human molars in Petri dishes.

And so what if you could grow a battery in a Petri dish?

An analogue would be the growth of bacteria in a petri dish.

Liver cells, nerve cells, pancreatic cells we still can't grow them even today.

We plate them into dishes that we sometimes call petri dishes.

He chills the dish, it changes its properties and he peels it right out of the dish.

What we see are, first of all, a very active culture, a lot of divisions, and then very clear nuclei once the cells have separated.

Petri dish universe in 3D that demonstrates evolving artificial life

One of the assignments for a year was to work with in vitro meat.

You know that already you can grow meat in vitro.

And we feed them sterilely of course with what we call cell culture media which is like their food and we grow them in incubators.

This is SymbioticA, and they've been working they were the first ones to do this in vitro meat and now they've also done an in vitro coat, a leather coat.

This is a stem cell that we've developed here in Oxford, from an embryonic stem cell.

And so what we did is, we take tissue culture cells and infect them with various viruses, and we take the stuff and fluorescently label the nucleic acid, the genetic material that comes out of these tissue culture cells mostly viral stuff and stick it on the array to see where it sticks.

We grow the cells outside the body in large quantities.

So, I added these protocells together to the system, and protocell A and protocell B fused together to form a hybrid protocell AB.

For this fish, it's actually whole cells with nuclei and membranes.

This is a normal cell. This is a cancer cell.

The observation that stem cells, as master cells, could give rise to a whole variety of different cell types heart cells, liver cells, pancreatic islet cells captured the attention of the media and the imagination of the public.

We then take the cells, the vascular cells, blood vessel cells, we perfuse the vascular tree with the patient's own cells.

There's a class of cells, a fairly small cell, an inhibitory cell, that quiets its neighbors.

You can see here a little bit of heart muscle beating in a dish.

And let me tell you what it's like to grow these cells in the lab.

We're made of cells and stuff between cells.

Many scientists can now grow many different types of cells.

What we did is, we took tissue culture cells and infected them with adenovirus, and you can see this little yellow barcode next to adenovirus.

In effect, the cancer cell was forgetting it was cancer and becoming a normal cell.

To understand how the bacteria affected the immune system, the researchers grew L. reuteri in liquid and then transferred small amounts of the liquid without bacteria to immature immune cells isolated from mice.

Fat derived stem cells are adult stem cells.

Cells?