It is often said that the most disruptive and world-shaping ideas don’t come from a bolt of insight but are, instead, the response to a rejection.
The emerging field of tissue engineering followed such a path. Thirty years ago, Y.C. Fung, a professor at University of California at San Diego who started the school’s bioengineering program, proposed to start a center that would more closely align the study of organs, typically done by physiologists and physicians, with that of cells – the domain of cell biologists.