The history of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine in perspective

Abstract

The artificial generation of tissues, organs, or even more complex living organisms was throughout the history of mankind a matter of myth and dream. During the last decades this vision became feasible and has been recently introduced in clinical medicine. Tissue engineering and regenerative medicine are terms for the field in biomedicine that deal with the transformation of these fundamental ideas to practical approaches. Several aspects of generating new tissues and organs out of small pieces of living specimens are now scientifically solved, but at this point it is unknown how much impact these new approaches will have on clinical medicine in the future. In this respect it seems important to recapitulate from where the visions and the work came, in order to speculate or predict where tissue engineering and regenerative medicine will head. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.