Slashdot Mirror
DARPA Sponsoring Limb Regeneration Research
fragmentate writes "Wired News is reporting: 'In response to the hundreds of soldiers coming home from war with missing arms or legs, Darpa is spending millions of dollars to help scientists learn how people might one day regenerate their own limbs. Prosthetics are getting better all the time, but they will never be as good as the limbs we were born with. So two teams of scientists at 10 institutions across the country are competing to regrow the first mammalian limb ... The researchers' first milestone is to generate a blastema — a mass of cells able to develop into various organs or body parts — in a mammal.' Apparently this is a relatively new area of research, even Wikipedia's stub on blastemas is very terse."
The chromosome copying is already spellchecked.
Both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells have copy verification and repair machinery which drastically reduce replication errors.
a) "spellcheck" the chromosome copying, and b) prevent the telomeres
d er.fcgi?artid=14711&tools=bot)
b) is easy, you can shut off telomerase for a while(http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articleren
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Not quite as good, but I just interviewed someone about new research into interfacing neurons with electronics that could lead to Luke Skywalker-like replacement limbs. Harvard researchers have figured out a way to directly read and write to a neuron with digital electronics.
The actual engineering involved isn't that important. What's important is that researchers no longer consider aging to be just something we have to live with, and consider it their goal to increase the human lifespan. Note, this isn't all researchers. Many people still believe that humans should always grow old and die and to perform research into indefinitely extending human lifetimes is wrong.
How we know is more important than what we know.