“We took a rat apart and rebuilt it as a jellyfish.”

Kit Parker has built an artificial jellyfish out of silicone and muscle cells from a rat heart. When it’s immersed in an electric field, it pulses and swims exactly like a real jellyfish. The unusual creature is part of Parker’s efforts to understand the ways in which muscles work, so that he can better engineer heart tissue. And it has a bizarre intended purpose: Parker wants to use it to test heart drugs. I wrote about his work for Nature, so head over there for the main story. Meanwhile, here’s my full interview with Parker about the jellyfish. He’s a fantastic interviewee – you’ve got to imagine him almost shouting this stuff. Building a jellyfish using rat tissue isn’t exactly a typical everyday idea. Where did it come from? My group does cardiovascular research and I spend a lot of time thinking about building tools for early-stage drug discovery. We’re ...