Nearly 2,000 miles northwest of Sacramento, Matthew Perkins rode a boat out into the Gulf of Alaska and saw nothing but endless potential for growth. “It’s kind of overwhelming how much opportunity there is,” he says. “You’re on the water, snow-capped mountains in the backdrop, you look down and see this incredible biomass growing. It’s literally the bounty of nature.”

In 2022, the United States Food and Drug Administration approved the TransMedics Organ Care System, or OCS device. Known as the “heart in a box,” this device uses normothermic perfusion to pump blood through a removed heart and preserve it for longer periods until it can be transplanted into a new person.

Within minutes, the words he wanted to speak appeared on a monitor and were spoken aloud by a computer in a voice resembling his own using recordings from videos made before his diagnosis. It brought everyone in the room to tears. “On day two of this use by Casey, he was talking to his daughter for the first time in her memory. That was so gratifying,” says UC Davis Neuroprosthetics Lab co-director Sergey Stavisky.

The approach of Whole Health, a movement led by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, is “Let me understand who you are as a person. … What matters to you as opposed to what’s the matter with you,” says Dr. Michelle Dossett. “I think eventually it’s going to transform what we do in conventional medicine in this country more broadly.”

Increasingly, more people are choosing IVF as the route to parenthood, but the process remains expensive and time-consuming. Over the years, however, improvements in technology have helped and even streamlined treatments. And researchers aren’t done.