Science makes jellyfish out of rat cells for perfectly sensible reason

No, the scientists who announced they have made an artificial "jellyfish" using rat cells aren't mad. They had a pretty solid reason for creating their strange little Frankenstein's monster: to prove that it's possible to build artificial pumps that could one day become sophisticated enough to replace damaged human hearts. The bioengineered machine, dubbed a "medusoid," took four years to create from the cells of a rat's heart muscle, and it mimics the movement of a real jellyfish. "Morphologically, we've built a jellyfish. Functionally, we've built a jellyfish. Genetically, this thing is a rat," explained Kit Parker, a Harvard biophysicist who led the work, if you can call such a weird-sounding sentence an explanation. [Source]