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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. :)"
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
The body piercing people are going to hate this.
The Union of Science Fiction Writers? Must be frustrating having your best ideas copied by reality so often.
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.
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?
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...
(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
At first glance I would agree with you. However, I can envision an extreme (EXTREME!) surgery where the patiant was bombarded with hormones from the opposite sex, then had their genitals totally removed, with the hopes that genitals from the opposite sex would grow back naturally. Pretty freakin' crazy eh? Of course if you cut your lip during the healing process you may end up looking like this.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
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.
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.
... 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...
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.
Good point. Remember when we cured polio, and the next day, ZOOOOOOOMBIES!
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.
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?
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
This may save my life personally.
I have slow, chronic kidney failure, originally caused by an over-active immune system. Now that it is damaged, each bit of protein I eat kills a portion of my Kidney, even if it is tofu protein. Eat no protein = starve to death.
I am currently trying to eat a minimal amount of protein each day (40 grams), but is very tough to stay on my diet and even if I do this, my kidney still gets worse just slower.
Luckily with this diet I still have time, possibly even 10 years till total kidney failure (assuming I don't drink, etc. etc). With any luck, they will either have gotten this to work or found a way to at least clone a kidney for me.
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