Gut Feeling

I've just ordered this box of catgut from eBay:

Catgut is a bit of a misnomer: it's actually a surgical thread made from sheep or goat intestines, not cat. Catgut eventually dissolves within the living body as tissue 'heals' and is therefore perfect for internal sutures. Here is how catgut used to be packaged and sold, historically (I'd love to have this object):

Click here to go to the medical antiques website.

I'll tell you why I've ordered this in a minute. Last week, I went to a local butcher and bought 10 meters of pig intestine (hog gut) for $10 and then knit it into a tight swatch. I had to knit it while it was still wet and malleable, meaning I knit it in a sink under a running faucet. Here's what it looked like afterwards:

You can see here that it is in the process of drying. The whole thing took about two days to dry.

Knitting intestine was relatively easy, its tensile nature cooperating with the looping and pulling I put it through. The end result, completely dried, looks similar to a piece of beef jerky:

The gut twisted as it dried.

Why gut as a material? In my process of mock ossification, I'm using gut as a stand-in for collagen. I don't currently have access to a lab (yet), so I have to be creative and substitute materials in the meantime. Originally, I chose gut because I feel that the level of elasticity, the tensile strength and the general material quality of gut closely resembles that of collagen strands. At least, enough for me to work with it in pushing my research forward.

What I have discovered about gut after making my decision and beginning my experiments, is amazing - the fact that it can be used to fuse together living tissue and will be absorbed by living organisms makes it even more a perfect material to work with for my purposes, and I think it may be entirely possible that I could explore real in vitro ossification (bone tissue engineering) with it. I also discovered that intestines have their own neurons (click to read an article about it), meaning that they 'think' on a certain level. Imagining the possibility that the intestine I'm working with is forming a response to me as I handle it is interesting. Well, such would be the case were it still alive. Scientifically speaking, this 'thinking' is more to form an emotional response, giving credibility to the old expression, "gut feeling". Also, there have been new discoveries that show that the gut brain is related to bone formation. All of the work I do is completely an intuitive invention of my own, but its relationship to hard science is fascinating to me, as I go along and discover ever more connections. It is precisely the metaphoric, the abstract and the intuitive that I'm operating through with this work of mock ossification. We'll see what else unfolds over the coming weeks. Ultimately, as the conceptual component of my tissue engineering work, I'm interested in understanding the intelligence of bone to design itself.

In the next blog post, I'll explain more about actual tissue engineering itself and what I know from my own lab work. Then, my work with crystals.

So, what am I planning to do with the catgut that I've ordered? Well, to see if commercially prepared intestine 'string' will behave the same way as the 'string' I've created from fresh intestine in my experiments. Besides, it's much thinner and will allow me a greater level of detail with my work. I'll keep you posted on how that goes.