Interesting they chose to go with a conference presentation and university press office release first, rather than publishing a paper first. Actually, it might be a good idea - they've got no real mechanistic discovery to speak of, which would probably cause the reviewers to force the authors to do another couple years of pointless control experiments and probably an RNA seq or something even. But by going basically straight to pop science territory, they'll have nature and cell fighting over which journal gets to have the paper as their cover article.

...Very interesting play. I think I'll have to keep that in mind.

3d printing, boring. Dissociated cells being embedded, boring. Vasculogenesis, super boring. They're nowhere near the first to show that, I don't see why they're so excited. Secreted factors from implanted cells? Been done in iPS-derived pancreas cells like 10 years ago.

My research is boring too, but at least there's a tiny bit of scientific novelty. x.-.x

But by going basically straight to pop science territory, they'll have nature and cell fighting over which journal gets to have the paper as their cover article.Bwahahaha! I thought something seemed off about this, but I couldn't put a finger on it.

And I've heard of that special kind of science hell, and how it's eaten the careers of promising young scientists who ran out of funding while trying to graduate because their peer review committee wanted like ten more years and ten times more money in new tests, completely changing the scope and goal of the experiment in the process.

As for whether it's boring or not, consider that DARPA wants a crash program to do the same thing for dudes within ten years. Doing more or less the same thing for females with a much smaller project is a triumph of getting shit done ahead of schedule and under budget.

Yeahhhh.

Then again, speaking on broader terms, lack of real scientific novelty aside, this sort of research really isn't done enough. Peer reviewed literature tends to suppress things that aren't scientifically novel unless you go into engineering journals, and that doesn't really sit well with biology-trained people. So you wind up with a gap between ready-to-apply scientific knowledge, and having a reasonably validated application that is strong enough to be startup-company material. Big pharma addresses this a little bit - they tend to have some basic research groups (mechanistic) in addition to large chemical screens for initial discovery, and of course they've got the interest to push discoveries that seem promising down the pipeline into clinical trials. But if your ready-to-apply scientific knowledge isn't just a pharmacological agent, say it's a biomedical device? Awkward gap to fill, as I perceive it.

*Above statements are qualified with the limitation I'm still a grad student that doesn't know anything, and I can be wrong in both spirit and substance of any and all of the above opinions and pseudofacts.

That intuitively fits my feelings on the matter, but I'm in a less-informed position than you are.

I think the solution is to start treating biology as an engineering discipline, and creating journals to suit it.

And medical devices? There's a reason that groups like Limbitless are springing up to fill underserved markets. And there are clearly underserved markets, so...