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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. :)"
I do hope this is applied to humans soon. there are way too many people on waiting lists for heart, liver, kidney transplants. Also, maybe this is a new hope for people that have gotten limbs amputated, or were born with defects.
I'M NOT ANGRY!
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? Would someone blind from birth generate the ability to see or is that too heavily dependant on brain tissue?
I hate to ask, but given the penchant of biotech copanies to patent anything that walks crawls or oozes, has this genetic sequence been patented?
Also I've always been fascinated to understand how a regenerated body part knows when to stop growing - visions of Tetsuo's transformations at the end of Akira come queasily to mind.
There I said it. If we can identify these genes in humans, then I say we start clinical trials right away. There are people who are going to die because they've suffered a horrible injury or are waiting for a transplant. Certainly some of them would jump at the chance for life. Do we always have to wait 20 years after a medical discovery before we even see any practical application of it?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/1999/living_
check the date...
Or not.
We hand our software industry off to India, and we put up barriers to the next "new" thing being biotech.
Long live Intelligent Design.
Long live making biotech illegal or un-funded.
I am off to returning to my Walmart job now.
What's most curious about this is why less complex creatures have an enormous ability to regenerate but more complex ones don't. If it is a matter of a few genes, you would expect that random mutations would impart the self-regeneration trait onto us but evolution has chosen not to.
I can only surmise that for complex creatures, self-regeneration is not only worthless, but is undesirable (since no complex creatures seem to have self-regeneration but many less complex creatures do). This, of course applies to complex creatures as a species anyways. I think I'd find it extremely valuable for myself.
I don't know the answer but perhaps it has to do with the thinking aspect of complex creatures and how that affects mating. I'd be interested in hearing others hypothesize about this.
Sunny
Be my Friend
Really, if this can be controlled by just changing a dozen genes, then why on earth do we (mammals) not have this ability already?
Because natural selection is a random process. Just because a beneficial feature 'could' exist doesn't mean it will. In fact, there's a good chance that we have many such wonderful features in our genome just waiting to be turned on.
Apparently, we share like 90% of our genome with all of the other creatures on earth. Just think of all of the things they can do, and wonder if we can 'flip a switch' to 'turn on' those features! Five minutes in a lab, and you too could have the regenerative power of lizards, the claws of a tiger, the speed of a cheetah, and the wings of an eagle. You'd look awful funny, though.
Look like the professor discovered something incredibly similar - about 7 years ago!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/56799.stm/
It does sound great. I just wonder if there is likely to be an increased chnace of cancer with this sort of regerative tissue. Mind you if someone does get cancer perhaps with this technology the affected part of the body can simply be removed and regrown...
Heh. How cute.
So, did you know that when doing research into fixing spine damage, they actually have to break the spines of the rats?
Think about how they do that for a while.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
It just says that other pressures have been greater than the pressure to (keep the ability to) regenerate. Or the costs of being able to regenerate are probably prohibitive.
The competing pressures might include (for example) a pressure to be smart or strong enough not to lose body parts in the first place, or a pressure to develop coping strategies when a limb is lost. Or the pressure to give food and resources to offspring, over attempting immortality. Or the pressure to have more complex tissues (even if they are more difficult to regenerate), although the article sheds a shadow of doubt on this last one. If these competing pressures are great enough, and more importantly, the pressure to keep the regeneration trait is low enough, the trait will simply drift away (randomly mutate) into nonfunctional genetic code. It doesn't mean it is completely undesirable.
More "complex" animals like humans don't lose a lot of body parts on a day to day basis. And those who do, have their (evolutionary) fitness determined by their ability to cope with the loss, rather than by their ability to regain those parts.
Thats an interesting idea. How much would hormone activity affect what grows back? Hormones are critical when the organs initiall develop after all, it is plausible that they could affect the regeneration of humans who have that ability, of course depending on exactly how the regeneration works.
My real question is how long will it take to regenerate? Mice Grow Up rather fast. But if it will take 18 years to regenerate a missing leg, or will it take a year or two? Or what about people who want to do body alterations could they cut their noses in half and make sure they dont heal together and they end up with two noses. Or someone with a serious arm damage. Could this cause them to have 2 forearms and hands?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
As previously reported on slashdot, scientists have also found it possible to replace blood with ice-cold saline, and revive the subject hours later. In other words, before long it will be possible to survive any bodily injury as long as you get medical attention before brain damage begins. With this, you can then grow back whatever was damaged, too.
I can't find a link handy, but I know that research into preventing brain cells from dying after trauma is progressing nicely as well. Ultimately we'll reach the point where just about any non-catastrophic physical injury is recoverable, assuming prompt medical attention.
When all that's left are death, aging (but we might be fixing that too) and psychological problems, maybe people will finally realize just how horribly we've been neglecting mental health for so long.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
Ive already checked the journals on this one, and the research involving the regrowth of toes etc has not been published, so i can't say much about that. However, several papers have been published on heart muscle cell regeneration, and it looks nice. Regeneration of bodyparts requires plasticity in cell type differentiation. Either primary cell types undergo a revertion to a more totipotent form or reserves of stem-like cells multiply and differentiate to form the new bodypart in question. Generaly, this is Not A Good Thing, ie cancer, and so the body has a whole slew of checks and balances to prevent this from occuring. Im guessing that in more primitive organisms, short lifespan and low cell turnover (they're cold blooded) means that the adaptive advanges of regenerating missing bodyparts outweighs the higher risks of developing cancer.
As a matter of fact, I have often wondered about this:
Are Sci-Fi writer visionaries or are they those that inspire scientists?
Take Jules Verne for example, his stories sent people to the moon, featured televisions, subs etc... did he foresee what was to come, or did he set a goal for all those future scientist who read his books when they were young?
May I use your sig please?
The article has almost no details on how these mice were made. It also uses the words "discover" and "create" pretty much interchangeably. So are these mice the result of a deliberate experiment, cutting-edge genetic engineering, or a natural occurrence that a scientist luckily happened to notice as was the case with penecillin?
I think most SF-writers extend past advances of science and engineering to the future. Take television, at the end of the 19th century it was possible to record and transmit sound. It doesn't take much imagination to extend that to images. Subs aren't that big a leap either. A diving bell exists since the middle ages.
I really doubt SF writers can predict the future, some simply know their science and can make an informed guess how things are going to evolve.
So if you have your brain scooped out and put on a dish,
it would grow back a skull, a neck and a torso with limbs.
Quite thrilling I would say, think about it.
The reasoning being utterly flawless, one may nevertheless experience
a few unreasonable hesitations, but that's only normal
with forms of amusement as innovative as this. Don't worry about that. It'll pass.
It depends what you mean by "heal". Eg, if you get your ear pierced the open wound will "heal" (close the wound) over the course of a few months to leave a neat circular hole through your ear, with skin on the inside.
If you then take out the piercing, the hole will generally slowly close up, until it's eventually absorbed back into your body and disappears.
So yes, the wound does "heal" (in the sense of "closing the hole") when you take the piercing out (sometimes earlier, like eyebrow piercings which frequently grow out even with the jewellery left in).
However, the actual open wound (in the sense of a hole into your body, not all the way through it) generally heals within a few days or months (depending what you get pierced) of first getting it done.
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
I always wondered by he couldn't just take a dip in a bacta tank to accomplish that. Maybe he just likes the suit too much.
Seriously though, this could be amazing for cancer patients. Imagine being able to remove lots of tissue around the cancer to ensure it doesn't spread, and it just growing back. Maybe it will even be possible to do operations like mastectomies without permenant damage.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
I believe that was Newton, actually. He postulated that if you fired a cannon from a "very tall mountain" with a great enough velocity, then ignoring the resistance of air, and if it was fast enough, then the curvature of the earth would fall away from the cannonball at the same rate at which it fell to the earth.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
Just think if they made mice with all these abilities. They'd some kind of race of atomic super-mice! I guess all that time as playthings of science had some beneficial effect.
So, these atomic supermice could go in one of three directions: "Here I come to save the day!," "Same thing we do every night...," or "At last we shall have our revenge!"
I know which one I'm betting on. Anybody else scared?
And this last paragraph is so Slashdot will stop complaining about characters-per-line. I give you this summary of the excellent book, The Mouse that Roared:
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]