Mary Roach

It's a bespoke process.

It's very expensive.

It's not going to be covered by insurance anytime soon.

But what the hope is, is that there could be kind of off the shelf, pre-regressed pluripotent stem cells

that evade the immune system.

They're called stealth cells.

And in that case, you wouldn't have to take each individual patient, you know, take some blood cells, regress them,

train them to become something else, and then put them in.

You would skip the regression.

So you'd be ready to go with these off-the-shelf pluripotent stem cells.

So everything is changing so fast that predicting what's going to be out there is really hard.

You know, I just covered one particular procedure, which isn't very commonly done.

I had dinner with the director of the Cedars-Sinai Institute.

transgender surgery and health center.

He's a urologist, a surgeon, and we met at an Italian restaurant across the street from the urology tower.

And he was explaining this procedure, which is done sometimes if the more typical operation for a trans woman doesn't work out.

And the more typical operation is to kind of invert the penis, you know, to do it that way.

But if that hasn't worked, you can actually take a stretch of the colon

and use that.

And I was just fascinated by just kind of the surgical creativity, you know, that somebody would go, well, I don't know, a colon, it's a tube, it's stretchy, it's moist.