"The joint is a complex organ, with bone and cartilage being in one organ together. Bone is actually a very simple tissue, because bone remembers how it grew."DW-TV: "Dr. Tobias Winkler is a doctor of orthopedics and also a researcher on muscle regeneration. Doctor Winkler, why go through this complicated process of breeding bones and joints instead just putting in a new one out of metal?" Tobias Winkler: "New ones out of metal are never as good as they are promised to be. So patients get gradually older and they need exchange operations and with every operation tissue has to be sacrificed and function is deteriorating." DW-TV: "So is there actually hope that one day these artificial breeded joints will be as good as the original ones?" Tobias Winkler: "The hope exists, although we are far away from that." DW-TV: "It seems quite easy to breed the bones, but it seems very complicated to breed joints. Why is that so?" Tobias Winkler: "First of all, the joint is a complex organ, with bone and cartilage being in one organ together. Bone is actually a very simple tissue, because bone remembers how it grew." DW-TV: "Actually when we break our bones then they will just heal again by itself." Tobias Winkler: "Absolutely ... this is a fact. So the bone will heal by itself, and the cartilage doesn’t know how to heal, so we need to help it." DW-TV: "Why?" Tobias Winkler: "Cartilage has no vessels to bring blood and oxygen to the tissue, and bone has its vessels, has its nerves, and with this, all the circumstances which are needed for bone regeneration --for tissue regeneration — are fulfilled in bone." DW-TV: "But does it work quite well to breed actually artificial cartilage?" Tobias Winkler: "It works quite well. We already harvest cartilage out of patients, and we then cultivate this in the lab. And the cartilage is then put back into the patients, either in structural forms or without structure. We even can put only structure in cartilage defects, and...