Medicine: freaky sci-fi stuff

In what might be a nice poster for stem cell research:

German doctors have given a man the ability to have his first solid meal in nine years, by rowing him a new jaw bone on his back. The 56-year-old German man lost part of his lower jaw to mouth cancer, leaving him with limited ability to eat only soft food and soup for the past nine years. Doctors were able to reconstruct the man's face by growing a new jaw bone for transplantation on the man's back. For the bone graft, doctors constructed a titanium mesh cage and filled it with bone mineral, morphogenetic protein and stem cells from the patient's bone marrow.

Now sure, these aren't embryonic stem cells. But as a general approach, this is some pretty cool medicine that gives a patient back his ability to eat solid food. And that's awesome. This won't be common practice anytime soon, but we gotta start somewhere.