New Scientist: In a remarkable feat of tissue engineering, major parts of the penises of several rabbits have been replaced with segments grown in a lab from their own cells. The animals were able to use the reconstructed organs to mate. The next step is to try to recreate the entire organ from scratch. The technique could make it possible to reconstruct the penises of men who have suffered injuries or those of children born with genital abnormalities.

Oh. Um ... yes. Well. Indeed.

Well, there's just not a lot you can say about that, is there? Penie in a test tube. Yes. (And for those people who might be thinking, "Hey! A way to get rid of the guy!" -- you still need a live human to attach the thing to so that it will work, OK?)

It could also provide an alternative to the crude methods currently used to enlarge the organ, such as injecting fat cells or cutting the penis's suspensory ligament and "pulling out" more of the internal part. Instead, a patient would have penile cells removed by a doctor and, a few weeks later, the organ or parts of it grown using the cells could be surgically implanted.

Of course, someone would think of that, wouldn't they? Just imagine the organ that an unethical plastic surgeon (or whoever would do that sort of thing) could create. You could become the pornster of your wildest dreams! Of course, most women (and men, for that matter), pornster or not, wouldn't touch the thing or let you touch them with the thing, but that wouldn't stop those people who always think "bigger is better".

And the interesting downside to that is: with current methods, if it goes wrong or you change your mind, at least to some extent, it can be undone. You can remove fat deposits, or wait for them to absorb. You can have suspensory ligaments reattached and the "internal part" put back in. (You know, I don't even want to know what that's talking about. Never. Ever. No.) But if they've used your own cloned cells to encourage your pene to actually grow more erectile tissue, more blood vessels, more of whatever it would need to be bigger (and purely as a side note, one wonders if you'd need skin grafts to accommodate the increased ... er, expansion capabilities, as it were) ... if it was all actual penile tissue, and you discovered too late that your desires outpaced anyone else's desire to do anything with it ... there's nothing you could do. You would be stuck with the overlarge organ. (Interestingly enough, there currently seems to be no such thing as "penile reduction surgery"; all such queries seem to map to circumcision, which, however necessary it may or may not be, really isn't that.)

Heck, if they can replace the whole organ, just lop it off and start over.