Tissue engineering has come a long way. The possibility of building a replacement organ this way is pretty interesting to contemplate in terms of changing peoples lives.
There is lots of developments like this that looked pretty amazing, 5 years go when i first saw it, why isn't there an easy way to keep track of things like this?
Being shackled to the need for a donor organ for tissue much thicker than a centimeter is a big drag on the progression of this field. It is a function of blood vessels, largely - being able to create scaffolds of sufficient complexity and size with the right chemical guides to allow formation of blood vessel networks is still not there yet. Hence the need for the natural scaffold of the donor organ.
"SCIENTISTS GROW FULL-SIZED, BEATING HUMAN HEARTS FROM STEM CELLS" makes it sound like they just dumped stem cells in a petri dish and got a fully-functioning, properly shaped heart. Beyond being useful for creating custom replacement organs, that would imply we had godlike powers, because you can't grow a fully functional organ in isolation like that (building that matrix is entirely non trivial, as it happens in concert with all the organs growing around it).
I do. Refurbishing means being stuck to nature's blueprint. Growing cells on an artificial matrix means having the ability to engineer useful changes.
There also the minor point of not everyone's hearts being the same size.