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Researchers Identify Gene Involved in Regeneration
v1x writes "Researchers at the University of Utah School of Medicine have discovered that when a gene called smedwi-2 is silenced in the adult stem cells of planarians, the quarter-inch long worm is unable to carry out a biological process that has mystified scientists for centuries, regeneration."
Automatically regenerating veal.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I will bet john bobbit will be happy when this is finally perfected on humans ;-)
It's okay, I guess. Quad-damage is better.
You don't realize how true your words can actually turn out to be!! The most fascinating point of the research, which the submitter omitted completely, is the fact that a homologous gene is present in the Human genome!!
Now, just think of the implications of this research if we can somehow learn how this gene is regulated - no more amputations, no more diabetes type 1, no more any disease where a lost body part is gone forever!
Amazing, isn't it? I love to dream, but the reality may not turn out to be that ideal...but surely something amazing is going to result from these efforts by the Utah scientists.
When I cut off my head, I'll have a clone!
...and a job in Sony Management!
... when a gene called smedwi-2 is silenced in the adult stem cells of planarians ...
That doesn't mean the gene has anything to do with it's regeneration.
If you silenced a gene in me that allowed me to produce red blood cells would you then say you had found the gene responsible for me being able to respirate (live)?
This article comes close to saying that we'll have this in humans soon, probably to keep you interested. Let me set this straight, you won't be able to get a cool regeneration ability.
a. we don't know how this would work with the rest of the human genome
b. we have rules against testing a
c. the technology isn't complete for changing a humans dna
d. we have rules blocking a lot of research into c
e. It would be cool, so it's not going to be publicly available.
On the other hand, this is interesting research, and could help a lot in several fields of medicine, though i believe it would be mainly transplant medicine, and anything usable is still 10-20 years into the future. So get your hopes up for your kids, but realize this, you will die the same way as your grandparents.
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
I'm visually handicapped, not enough so that I can't see a large computer monitors, and I know others who are visually and physically handicapped in some way.
I can tell you that they would all welcome a new technology that would allow people who have lost limbs to grow them back or regenerate eyes so they could see. You underestimate the the lobbying powers of Disabled Americans. We have a great deal of influence, almost as much as the AARP and the NRA, and they both have immense clout.
Congress can ignore some of us some of the time but they can't ignore all of us all the of the time. If its proven that limbs and organs can be regenerated by activating such a gene in the human genome then mark my words we'll make them make it legal.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
Planarians are NOT worms like earthworms, they're more related to a liver fluke I'd guess. And you can press one through a screen and many of the parts will survive to become worms. Also, they are trainable, you can teach them to always take a certain path at a fork, or train them to go to the side lit by a certain type of light(red or green) It just takes hundreds of trys to do it right everytime. Want REALLY weird - get this - If you juice and inject a trained worm into an untrained worm, it can learn in only a couple dozen trials to do it right everytime.
The effect you mentioned was due to an experimental error.
Specifically, the maze used to train the worms were not cleaned and chemical trails were left allowing faster training of untrained worms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_RNA