[2] The ear mouse, as it became known, was created by Charles A. Vacanti in the Department of Anesthesiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Linda Griffith at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Joseph P. Vacanti in the Department of Surgery at Boston Children's Hospital.
Charles Vacanti later moved to the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
The results were based on the works of many others who seeded cells onto scaffolds to regenerate organs.
In an interview with Newsweek,[3] Joseph Vacanti joked that the mouse had the ear removed and then "lived out a happy, normal life".
However, it is standard for lab workers to kill the mice they work with, and in the original paper[4] published it mentions the state of the mice "after sacrifice", a term referring to the killing of laboratory specimens.