Slashdot Mirror
Australian Science Makes the Regenerating Mouse
FruFox writes "Australian scientists have created mice which can regenerate absolutely any tissue except for the tissues of the brain. Heart, lungs, entire limbs, you name it. This is the first time this has been seen in mammals. The potential implications are positively mammoth. I thought this warranted attention. :)"
The slashdot summary says Australian scientists, but the article says "US Research Lab" and US based researchers. Unless there is some information that I am missing, I would say that this was a US breakthrough.
Don't get your hopes up. Medical break throughs tend to take a quite long time before they reach a hospital near you. (think Duke4Ever timescales) Thing is that medical research requires so many experiments to prove it is really save for use on humans, before it is allowed to be used in hospitals.
The only thing about this news that's Australian is the name of the paper you decided to link the story from.
A search for the researchers name comes up with her working at Penn State, in the good ol' U.S.A.
"Heber-Katz, who is also an adjunct professor in the pathology and laboratory medicine department at Penn's School of Medicine, now devotes about 80 percent of her time to mapping the gene loci that confer these unique regeneration properties and analyzing their patterns of expression."
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Couple of errors in the summary:
The lab responsible is in the US not Australia, even though the report comes from The Australian. The paper isn't that parochial, you know.
Also, it sounds like a serendipitous discovery rather than intentional creation. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
As the work doesn't appear to have been published yet, my guess is that it will turn out to be a bit less remarkable than it currently sounds.
So what makes this new or Australian?
The Australian is Australia's national level newspaper. It's quite well respected and generally deals with Australia wide events and news.
"And then I visited Wikipedia
On the night of June 23, 1993, Bobbitt cut off her husband's sex organ with a kitchen knife as he lay sleeping in their Manassas, Virginia, home. She then drove off with the severed appendage and flung it out her car window. Police performed a diligent search and located it, and it was then surgically reattached
from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/lorena_bobbit
http://www.chrcrm.org/medal03.htm
A link from 2003, has a bit more to it than the article cited in the original post.
Could this be used in conjunction with other gene therapy to reverse birth defects in people like ectrodactyl hands. Cut them off and make them regenerate as a normal hand? Or entire new arms for Thalidomide babies?
In theory yes -- most birth defects have no genetic basis (that's why "thalidomide babies" have perfectly normal children themselves) -- it isn't the information in their DNA that is damaged but rather the fact that their cells were misassembled during development in the womb.
When I was looking around for some more news on this, I came across this article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/08/01080 7080356.htm
Seems like the regenerative abilities of MRL mice have been know for quite a while.
Seems like Professor Ellen Heber-Katz did the initial discovery in 1998.
This will be very interesting to see what happens. growing a new kidney, or hand would be great, as long as it is safe.
..........FULL STOP.
The theories I have heard, as to why regeneration is switched off in larger creatures, boil down to this:
1. Cancer -
Enable easy regeneration, and the organism suffers from more run away cancers. With the need to keep a larger number of complex and different cells running as needed, damaged cells must auto destruct to prevent the rise of cancers.
Free running regeneration leads to tumors.
2. Hole Plugging -
When a large creature suffers a large wound - the number One way for that creature to survive is simply plug the hole as quickly as possible. Scar tissue grows relatively quickly and completely, preventing blood loss and preventing infections. Even with rapidly clotting and healing wounds - infection can kill the organism. The fast patch scar tissue saves life where otherwise a regenerating individual would die from just being slower healing.
3. Strength -
Regrowing a full adult arm or leg requires a lot of energy, the bones may be softer, the muscles weaker. So the limb will be less usefull, and more energy consuming. That works against the survival of the individual.
The human species survival scheme is based upon reproduction rates, not unbreakable individuals.
Being able to reproduce once a month, and birth offspring once a year, sometimes with twins or more, rapidly grows out a human population.
Like smaller organisms, if you make enough copies of yourself - the individual health is not as important. As a social creature, a larger tribe of humans provides strength and protection for the individual. Six Billion+ humans on earth have shown this survival plan to be most effective.
I would love a shot of regenerative juice, as long as I don't die of cancer at age 40. Even if a missing arm would take 5 years to grow back, it would be a welcome ability to the human race.
Other lines of mice are capable of similar things than just the MRL mouse, and even the MRL mouse has some serious limitations. For example, Heber-Katz cryo-injured the mouse heart and it healed, but other more relevant damage did not. Ischemic heart cells did not recover, which are those lacking oxygen supply, as in a heart-attack. Most of the other regenerations were not nearly as impressive, as several organs have the ability for significant regeneration anyway. Heber-Katz is known for her press releases being very sensational... and coming out before she presents her evidence. still, some of the papers she has released have some pretty cool stuff, just not as groundbreaking as popular news media would have you believe.
Yeah if the animals regenerate it will make it harder for PETA to kill them.
> Too bad nobody else could duplicate (cold fusion)
According to the latest issue of 'Make' magazine, there is a triving community of researchers who have succeeded, and are attempting to hone the process (mostly trying to figure out the magic ratio between palladium doping, heavy water, pressure and heat measurement). Pick up the latest issue; 'Make' is like 'Wired' done by Heathkit.
As an aside, most lizards that regrow tails don't actually regenerate a complete tail. The spine that forms the tail has a fracture plane near the base of the tail that allows it to seperate easily. Once lost the new tail is regrown without bones, its mostly fat.
I think Arthur C. Clarke was the first to postulate the idea of satellites.
Peter Schultz at the Scripps Institute had done similar work before; he had assembled "libraries" of mice with various genetic mutations, to see their effects on entire living systems. On one of the mice, he found that it could regenerated the tissue in its ear when they punched holes in them. I don't know whether they investigated that strain any further, or as drastically as these scientists had, but he did come up with a mouse line that did this.
Such irE
Title says it all. The following publication is but one by the main researcher concerning regeneration in MRL mice: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1529380 6&query_hl=2