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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. :)"
ignoring PETA: i wonder which organization will be first to denounce the use of this sort of thing in humans?
By the same token, if these people go public with it they probably already have a preprint up somewhere. Anyone in the field know anything?
Pathman, Free (as in GPL) 3D Pac Man
..but I'm sceptical. Really, if this can be controlled by just changing a dozen genes, then why on earth do we (mammals) not have this ability already? It would obviously be a huge evolutionary advantage -- unless there are some pretty grim side effects.
Sterility perhaps?
As someone else here pointed out, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and, in these cases, extraordinary caution. I'm looking forward to the results though.
I assume you're referring to natural selection -- a random process that drops good and bad features alike, as long as the creature isn't outright killed by the omission? Bummer that. Be careful assigning 'Intelligence' to anything so brute.
...because I think this is a truly amazing news item regardless of socio-poltical concerns or minor posting errors. It is *very* encouraging news indeed and I read it first on /. for a change. :)
(Presuming governments try and withhold the technology).
People will die in mass over population if the government give us this technology.
People will die in riots if the government give us the technology but try to control over population with laws controling birth rights
It at time like this I wish I hadn't read Kim Stanley Robinson's 'Red Mars' series.
"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
You know, on a purely Karmic level, we're gonna have to pay up bigtime eventually...
Imagine how much more likely you'd be to take risks if you could grow new body parts :)
/.
I think this is one of the coolest things I've ever read on
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
Though in this case I reckon the Military could get very in this kind of 'medicine'. Imagine an army of self healing soldiers. Get a leg blown off and then grow it back.
One (big?) concern of having an increased ability to REgenerate might be an increased ability to generate... While a 3rd arm/2nd head might provide great casting advantages in the Hitchhiker's sequal, having random growths appearing in one's body isn't the best news one can have.
I don't think there's any hard physical limitation to a body living for millenia, barring extreme damage. I mean, there are living things that do that already. But obviously that's not how most creatures work.
One possible explanation is that it was just never important for a creature to live longer than it takes to rear it's young. So there's no evolutionary driver for it.
And the counter driver might be that living too long causes you to use resources that would otherwise be available to your young.
That kind of puts life in perspective.
Just a thought. Cheers.
you are aware of the fackt that the regeneration is a slow process? its not instaheal. a fatal wond will still kill it just as eazyaly. it wont be able to heal faster just heal more of its body. its exectly the same mechanism most reptiles have. and mamels still have part of that same mechanism in tackt. we still signal cells to start the regeneration, we just dont have cells that can respond to the call anymore. apperently the gene that is resposable for creating those cells is turned on again in these mice. stemcell research is based on the same signals btw. and so humans still have the signal too. a bit of GM and we too can grow back a arm! or whatever else you lost.
Indeed, it's usually on the order of ten to fifteen years before it hits the general market.
Just think about this for a moment though. What entity would most oppose regenerative organs?
You guessed it, the pharmaceutical industry. After all, anti-rejection drugs are a tidy little market for them.
We're entering a brave new world though. Every day discoveries that will impact the human lifespan are made. Aubrey DeGrey is an interesting person whose work is a must follow.
I am not geneticist or even a scientist, so if the following opinion sounds stupid, please take that into consideration ... I was thinking about that and have an idea. Imagine this a mouse in the wild that regenerate a leg after, say, a week. For that one week period, the three legged mouse will barely be able to move and when it does it will slow and shambling, i.e. perfect owl/stoat/dog/cat food. The regeneration genes will never get passed on to the next generation. A blind mouse would eaten even faster.
Staying circumcised would be problematical...
:-(
All joking aside there are quite a few people, myself included, who would welcome the chance to replace the aforementioned parts since they were removed without our permission.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
Find out what the stars used to look like. At least Michael Jackson can get a new nose.
So they lose one tidy little market. So what? You don't think that the potential market in pro-regeneration drugs (and other drugs used during these sorts of surgeries) looks the least bit enticing, and potentially even MORE lucrative, than anti-rejection drugs? If they have ten to fifteen (or more) years, don't you think they will conduct studies left and right and get with the times? Pharmaceutical companies are not exactly the recording industry, they have some smart people working there...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Where do you think we'd be if older people who are stuck in their ways and have power and authority stuck around for longer, and retained their powerful positions?
There are advantages in replacing old minds with fresh young ones who challenge the old perspectives. We love children for a reason.
That is facilitated by death, and also by crippling injuries both physical and mental.
These advantages are particularly obvious in our human social structures - for the time being, anyway. As an example, in the recent article about computers automatically learning language grammars, there was an interesting comment that linguistics won't move on until Chomsky dies... There's some truth to that in all of science, politics, etc.
Complex social evolution does not necessarily favour health for all individuals.
An interesting corollary to that hypothesis is that there exist changes to the structures of society, and changes to the structures in which we propagate knowledge and learning and questioning, and changes to the way we collectively think, which would adjust evolutionary pressures to favour greater individual health, particularly including the expression of long-evolved genes which we're carrying already but not using, like those involved in tissue regeneration and dare I say it, longevity.
-- Jamie
Remember, evolution doesn't necessarily favor the fittest. It favors the most readily reproducible. It's also lossy. When you rely on one major advantage to get by, others can deteriorate.
If the mouse loses it's heart, it will regenerate? I'd like to know just how quickly this process takes place...
or else!
Nice moderator bias in here. This post gets modded 3: Funny. Post below making a similar joke about Democrats gets modded 0: Flaimbait. Welcome to Leftdot, err Slashdot.
J
As my old high-school physics teacher used to say, the Princes of Serendip paid that lab a visit. Luck got the ball rolling, but hard work made it into something with potential. It took an observant, inquiring mind to note that the ear holes were closing, and to choose to investigate it further. Fortune favors the prepared mind, especially in science.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
Is there some nasty side effect that makes it better to NOT have this ability and put up with loss of limbs, and other damage?
There is another mechanism for dealing with major injuries: development of scar tissue. Scaring happens much faster and takes fewer resources than regeneration. There appears to be an anti-correlation between scaring and regeneration: animals that scar don't regenerate and vice-versa, so there may be some overloading of the genes that control both processes, making them mutually incompatible.
Given that survivable loss of limbs and survivable loss of internal organs is a relatively rare occurence for most mammals, it is likely that scaring has been favoured over regeneration in our evolutionary history as it is the mechanism that gives injured organisms the greatest chance of survival.
In particular, mammals lead active lives because we are warm blooded, and therefore need to hunt/scavange/forage regularly for food to keep our body temperature stable. This means that rapid healing is a big advantage, so scaring is favoured. Modern reptile are cold-blooded, and therefore can sustain much longer periods without food, making them more able to take the time out of their busy schedule to regenerate.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Am I the only person who has thought that this could mean more and more years of life for senile people? The only organ that doesn't get repaired is the brain - so if it goes, you're still stuck in a healthy, regenerating body. Talk about a nightmare.
Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, which is why engineers sometimes smell really bad.
According to the (too brief) article, ordinary mice injected with the cells also were able to regenerate lost organs. So rather than an inherent trait, this can be applied only when the benefits overwhelm any risk.
The potential is so enormous that I'm amazed this is not getting more coverage. It makes me suspicious. Googling for news reports containing "Heber-Katz" returns only two articles!
I dont know. if you lost a heart, you might die before a new one could grow back...
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
Honestly, surfing at 4 and still nearly every post is brain dead, except the ones noting that the researcher is in the U.S., not Australia.
However it is at he University of Pennsylvania (U Penn), which I believe is a different school from Penn State which one person posted.
Google: Ellen Heber-Katz Wistar
You will note that a genome screen was conducted at some point in time finding genes on 5 different chromosomes involved in wound healing and regeneration. The regeneration takes place by a mass of cells forming at the wound site that can form into many different tissue types, i.e. like stem cells. Indeed it seems (from a cursory scan of a few links) that stem cells injected into other mice also work. And this facility can be inherited.
There is related research going on in different areas including observation of self-healing optical nerves, heart muscle, and even spinal cord once the scar tissue and scarring agents if that's what they are saying, are cleared away.
It is being reported at a conference in a week but already Nature and other publications seem to be involved at least in the past. Wistar is famous for vaccine development too.
If someone with real knowledge in the field could pop in now I'd sure appreciate it.
I can say one more thing. Humans can regenerate to a very limited extent already. I know because my mother chopped off the tip of her finger in a folding chair (shiver) when she was little. The tip grew back with the nail, though I'm not sure if a joint actually grew back the way these mice did.
The point is scientists never believed regeneration was possible even with such evidence, then views turned around, and now we have finally gotten to this amazing milestone. It is not an instantaneous thing. There is a paper cited about heart regeneration in the MRL mouse in 2002. They found the "healer" mouse in 1998. But it seems a milestone has obviously been met and it sounds like things are going to accelerate if more people can start working on the gene functions and biochemistry involved.
Heber Katz' talk
will be given on Sept. 7 at Queens' College in Cambridge, England. The whole conference sounds very interesting, it would be nice if someone with a brain and some training could report on it to slashdot.
Forget using this on humans - think about getting this into production with animals. Imagine having a farm where you don't kill the cows for beef, you just keep lopping the legs off after they've grown back. Perhaps with enough genetic engineering, animals could be convinced to grow great slabs of useless muscle tissue, which could be 'harvested' when the time is right.
I could also imagine the barricades and machine-gun emplacements that would be needed to keep the PETA activists out.
Yes, yes, wouldn't it be horrible if all those people with reduced abilities or special needs suddenly had much great potential to be productive, or suddenly didn't need expensive support systems to just live their lives.
The applications are mind-boggling. Of course the amputees are the most obvious beneficiaries. But one of the mice regrew optic nerves, that means quadrapeligics, blind deaf. Maybe people with MS, diabetes, various other degenerative and chronic diseases that pour resources into drug manufacturing companies.
I'm only focusing on the money/resources aspect because it is the most concrete, and because that investment could be spent on making the planet more livable, or reducing the impact of humans on the environment. One could also make a pretty good arguement that curing a fellow man is the right thing to do in a moral sense, but that isn't my point. I'm saying that worrying about the environment is a luxury that many people who are just trying to survive and live their lives don't have, and if you raise their qualitiy of life, they may be able to start thinking about the long term.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.