
No, however, from what you thought! Biomedical engineers from Duke University in North Carolina announced via a paper in Nature that they created (for the first time) functional human muscle cells, starting from skin fibroblasts.
The process became possible after first “reprogramming” the skin fibroblasts. They thus evolved into muscle cells; and subsequently, when placed on special “scaffolds”, with the proper “nutrition”, they became essentially functional, in the sense that they reacted “somehow” to electrical pulses and biochemical signals.
Where will this invention be useful? Specialists will have some answers, as always. There are, for example, rare muscular dysplasias in babies that, if the technique improves, will be able to be treated more easily than with autologous transplants.
Otherwise, if the thing actually becomes operational, it might find a larger clientele in “mass addition” for gym-goers. A few injections of appropriately “programmed” stem cells, and behold the “wardrobe”…
(The photograph is of the aforementioned muscle cells, but from a microscope).