“They cre­ated the tis­sue by coat­ing a three-​​dimensional poly­mer scaf­fold with a gene deliv­ery vehi­cle that encodes a tran­scrip­tion fac­tor known as Runx2. They gen­er­ated a high con­cen­tra­tion of Runx2 at one end of the scaf­fold and decreased that amount until they ended up with no tran­scrip­tion fac­tor on the other end, result­ing in a pre­cisely con­trolled spa­tial gra­di­ent of Runx2. After that, they seeded skin fibrob­lasts uni­formly onto the scaf­fold. The skin cells on the parts of the scaf­fold con­tain­ing a high con­cen­tra­tion of Runx2 turned into bone, while the skin cells on the scaf­fold end with no Runx2 turned into soft tis­sue. The result is an arti­fi­cial bone that grad­u­ally turns into soft tis­sue, such as ten­dons or ligaments.”

“This con­ser­v­a­tive myopia dates back to Pres­i­dent Rea­gan, who gut­ted Jimmy Carter’s multibillion-​​dollar research and devel­op­ment bud­get for renew­ables, and ended the tax cred­its for wind and solar. The sad result is our coun­try is now a bit player in what will prob­a­bly be one of the biggest job-​​creating indus­tries of the cen­tury, an indus­try we launched. We had 90 per­cent of global-​​installed wind capac­ity in the 1980s. Today we have one major wind man­u­fac­turer, Gen­eral Elec­tric, with about one-​​sixth of the market.

Clean energy shouldn’t be a par­ti­san issue. But it is. And that means those who who want this coun­try to be a leader in clean energy — those who want to avoid cat­a­strophic global warm­ing and avoid the worst of peak oil — need to start becom­ing sin­gle issue voters.”