Continuing coverage: A healthy human lung lives in a bottle at UTMB. It's the rather extraordinary brainchild of Joan Nichols. She leads a 15-person team experimenting on a living lung created from human tissue. They used lungs that were from a pair of children who died of trauma and so were unsuitable for transplant. Nichols's team stripped cells from one lung, leaving behind a scaffolding of the lung's collagen and elastin. Then they reseeded it with cells salvaged from the other lung and immersed it in a nutrient solution. They'll soon use this process to engineer pig lungs that they will transplant into living pigs, a step that could bring them closer to one day helping people awaiting lung transplants while suffering from severe, incurable disorders such as cystic fibrosis or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.