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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?
Yeah, it means we have to aim for the head when the monster-mice attack. Personally, I welcome our new genetically modified near-unkillable regenerative mice overlords.
That aside, I first thought they had made a computer mouse that generated power when moved á la regenerative braking in electrical cars.
Money for nothing, pix for free
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!
that succeeding generations will now be called regenerations?
They called it Wolverine did they?
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
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.
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?
Now I can just retire and keep selling kidneys on eBay!
So if one of those bites me do i become mouseman?
Do i get the amazing ability to pee all over the place and crawl into small spaces?
Or do i need to irradiate it first?
Since Australia already has a huge problem with billions of unwanted rodents, rabbits, rats and mice in particular, I don't know what the advent of zombie creatures will bring them now. Oh yes, they will never leave the lab. That's what they want us to believe.
Not to be fearful again, but ahem, do we really need mammals that can only be killed by headshots? Don't these guys ever learn from zombie movies? Think of the CHILDREN!!! I guess it's time to zip over to S-Mart and grab a shotgun, because I KNOW some mouse will sooner or later BITE one of the scientists and then all hell breaks loose.
Anyone seen Bruce Campbell lately? We might need him.
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
You see why open source is a good thing? The Quake 3 source hasn't been open for a month and already the REGENERATION upgrade has been incorporated into mice. Now let's all hope and pray that the QUAD DAMAGE code doesn't fall into the wrong hands.
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.
..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.
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?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/1999/living_
check the date...
I long for the day, in the far future, when I can lose an arm is a horrific fishing accident and automatically grow it back again.
Of course, waiting five years to have a toddler's arm hanging out of your shoulder isn't ideal either...
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
Oh no! Now we will have regenerating trolls in real life as well! ..This might be the end of slashdot as we know it!
Quick - do they regenerate fire damage and holy damage as well? What about +1 weapons?
File not found. Fake it(Y/N)? _
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
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
... to achieve immortality. We are working for them and still don't realize it.. Douglas Adams was right!!!!
I fuse with Mercer every single day...
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.
Unfortunately this breakthrough doesn't apply to brains, so the Slashdot editors are screwed.
Regenerating mouse = longer time to play with it before it dies and has to be eaten.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
(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
http://www.chrcrm.org/medal03.htm
A link from 2003, has a bit more to it than the article cited in the original post.
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.
You know, on a purely Karmic level, we're gonna have to pay up bigtime eventually...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Finally, I small hope for the Republicans...
http://www.vroma.org/images/mcmanus_images/brothel _painting1.jpg
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.
Surprised noone mentioned this before. But in the Highlander series, if you were immortal, you could no longer have children.
Think about it, the Immortals cannot have children, they can heal from any wound, and they can only be killed by being beheaded.
Maybe the lines between fact & fiction might be getting a little blurrier...
Isn't it a contradiction if the mice can regenerate any tissue "excpet" for the heart, lungs, entire limbs "you name it"?
Note the period between brain and heart. Usually that means some sort of ending. In other words, the brain can't be regenerated but everything else can.
Geez someone pissed in your corn flakes this morning
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.
I just can't avoid the nagging feeling that we will eventually be smoten for pulling crap like this...
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
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.
Us humans are left with the crumbs from rodent health research. We've just about cured all disease, cancer, aging, and now trauma in mice and rats. How? Billions of dollars spent researching disease and testing cures on the little guys. Maybe Douglas Adams was right.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
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?
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
But will it be long division? Or just a quickie?
Michael J. Bertrand, AKA Fruvous or FruFox My
Man, Splinter is going to kick so much ass now.
When humanity finally sinks into evolutionary obscurity we'll leave behind a legacy of near-immortal supermice! Perhaps that what was what the mice were after all along when they built the earth...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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
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.
...that I almost had a heart attack when I read it. Then I got to the part where it's not ready for humans, just mice, so I decided to wait on the heart attack.
If the mouse loses it's heart, it will regenerate? I'd like to know just how quickly this process takes place...
or else!
As soon as they get this into humans, my side business of stealing kidney's and selling them on the blak market is going to go strait down the drain.
Trying to be different, just like everyone else.
> 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 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
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.
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?
You ignorant fool. This behavior is by Intelligent Design. One day soon, when the sun has warmed the costal rocks and the moist air carries the scent of lilac, our new regenerating, non scar-tissue forming reptile overlords will scramble across the sands and we will welcome them.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.
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
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 but heavy enough doses of female hormones in females can ALSO cause depression in men, so what's your point?
"Good things don't end with eum, they end with mania or teria." - H. Simpson
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.
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]