Ok so I had a dream and it was a little crazy but here it is.

I though these scientist had developed a way to grow long linear muscles that were capable of contracting when an electrical stimulus was applied. This was done by applying what amounted to "blended" monkey muscle tissue to a scaffold of organic polymers submerged in a nutrient solution mimicking a living organism. The polymer scaffolding served a secondary purpose witch was to reinforce the unit, so even if it had been stretched past the failure point of he muscle the polymer being stronger than any know muscle tissue of equivalent thickness would not fail.

So I suppose my question is this is it possible and would it be practical to construct muscle in such a manor?


Thanks!:D

It seems plausable, but there may be complications from the lack of blood flow.

The solution that the muscles were incubated in would supply all nutrients that would be available in normal blood. Ph would be adjusted to fit with in normal body range as would osmolality.

Oxygen would be delivered to the muscles via an artificial blood substitute I was thinking a perfluorocarbon compound like oxygent (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygent). My main concern is weather or not the cells would arrange themselves in such a manor that they would form blood vessels, capillaries and nerve pathways.

long linear muscles
I don't know much about this, but isn't muscle strength determined by the cross-sectional area of the muscle fiber? I don't think the length of the muscle would actually have any impact on its strength, or that long linear muscles would be at all effective. I guess my question is: why would you do this? We have pretty established methods of mimicking muscle movements with greatly increased strength (pneumatic "muscles" are the one that comes to mind), so why go biological? Especially given the vast complexity of mimicking the chemical environment of the body.