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. :)"
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.
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?
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
... 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
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.
... And, being a Murdoch rag, it's not particularly well respected, either. I find the Sydney Morning Herald, aka the Sadly Moaning Horrid, to be a better paper all round, even if it does have a habit of riding particular bandwagons until the wheels fall off (*coughReneRivkincough*).
I have discovered a truly remarkable
Finally, I small hope for the Republicans...
We as in "humanity". The article itself reads like a nazi handbook. I'm not saying there aren't big leaps to be made to help people who have had parts of their heart arbitrarily frozen by probes, I'm just sayin in the cosmic view of things there are no free lunches.
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...
Good point. Remember when we cured polio, and the next day, ZOOOOOOOMBIES!
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.