ANDRZEJ KRAUZE
The rhythmic waves of jellyfish moving through water mesmerized Kit Parker almost as much as they transfixed his young daughter. Their weekend trip to the New England Aquarium in Boston turned out to be more than just a welcome break for the Harvard University bioengineer. For months, he had been struggling to mimic a similar motion in his lab: that of a heart pumping blood. But a crucial step in converting rodent cells in a petri dish to a beating heart eluded him.
“I’d grown really frustrated—there was some intermediate step, and we weren’t sure what it was,” says Parker. “And I’m looking at the jellyfish and thinking—all that muscle exists just to move fluid. So we took our models apart and rebuilt them as ...
