How to Make a Placenta: A User's Guide

 This week's episode is kind of a how to episode. It's how do you grow a placenta, an entirely new organ, and quickly. Probably a more accurate title would be how do we think we might grow a placenta? How does a placenta develop? Maybe because in truth we have by no means worked out all of the details about how this critical life-giving organ is formed.Having said that, let's run through some of what we think we know today.Growing the placenta is kind of like establishing a fetal embassy inside the united organs of you. It's subject to the laws and customs of the mother country expressed through her chemistry and the condition of her body. But the embassy has ways to get what it needs. Today, I'll highlight what we think is going on and the ways in which we're able to track this progress while it's going on, and what we can do if we run into trouble.