Scientists have long been stymied by human regenerative healing — that is, wholesale regrowth of, say, a severed limb — an ability inherent in some species but lost on humans. But new research suggests the ability to regenerate isn’t based on something newts and flatworms have that we don’t; rather, it’s something we do have that’s keeping us from regenerating tissues. Researchers think a gene called p21 may control regenerative healing, and that by switching it off, humans could perform our own regeneration.
The new research suggests that the potential to heal without scarring — or possibly even to regrow a limb, albeit in a limited manner — may lie dormant in human cells, kept in check by the p21 gene. A group of lab mice engineered to lack p21 were able to regenerate surgically removed tissue to the point that no evidence of the surgery remained. Holes punched in their ears — a standard procedure for tagging lab animals — also healed perfectly, leaving behind no traces of scar tissue or previous damage.
But what will companies that manufacture earrings do!?!?!
You and your communist, liberal agendas! You’re out to destroy the free market as we know it! Aren’t you?
I wonder if an infant’s foreskin would grow back. That would really put the screws to the Jews (hehe rhyming).
i may be only one to think of the incredible hulk movie that come out in 03 cause i may be only one who liked that movie.imagine others may be thinking of star trek and khan.in so far as genetic manipulation goes at least.but this is one thing i’m kinda excited bout.long life i could do without but cool mutant powers? hell yeah!
I liked it, but I didn’t think of it here.
… god may not heal amputees, but darned if we’re about to. Wow.
You do realize that now people will point to this and say, “See God does heal amputees through doctors.” And then promptly declare that vaccines are Satan’s semen.
She turned me into a newt!!
A newt?
……I got better…….
Cancer, dude. Cancer.
Are you suggesting that the removal of this gene could cause a higher risk of cancer? I have to say that did cross my mind. A gene that prevents regeneration could also aid in the prevention of unregulated cell division. Still, I have my hopes!
The gene at issue is thought to be the last line of defense against cancer in mammals by regulating apoptosis of damaged cells. On the other hand, they didn’t notice a cancer uptick in the mice that this was tested on, so who knows?
Next step is to take those mice and Give them cancer and see how long they last.
How’s a mouse going to hold a cigarette … answer that one Mr. Fancy Pants!
I thought of the exact same thing initially as well.
So science is more powerfull that god? Who would have thought?
I had to piss on the parade, but full limb regeneration is not going to happen (certainly not in our lifetimes, and probably not in your childrens). Even if you were willing to tolerate the side effects of messing around with p53/p21 (they say these mice didn’t get cancer, but lab mice live very sheltered, stress free lives, which can sometimes mask the effect of mutations that would be near disasterous to free living animals), scar-free healing of a simple tissue is a million miles away from limb regeneration.
Think about it. You need the cells in your wound to produce a metre long organ, complete with perfectly formed bones, joints, muscles, blood vessels, and skin. In the embryo it develops as a pseudopod that is slowly sculpted into the arm and hand; the cells that become the muscles come from a different source entirely (a source lacking in adults). The only plausible way I can think of to regenerate a limb is by using some kind of artificial structure to convince the tissue to regrow in vitro and then grafting it on (or potentially grafting on the structure and encouraging cells to grow into the structure).
Limb regeneration in lower vertebrates is cool, but we’re not going to be able to tap into this ancestral ability easily for two reasons – firstly, it’s requires complex, finely regulated interactions between dozens of cell types. Without natural selection to keep it’s function intact, I reckon it will have degenerated very quickly. Secondly, there’s a massive scale issue – the sheer mechanics of generating a limb will get disproportionately more complicated the larger the animal.
It never ceases to annoy me how academics talk up the potential of their research beyond what it can take, but I guess it’s necessary in a world where grants are decided on potential impact to society.
As an addendum, I think the science on this story is really cool, and it does have the potential to have a great impact on a lot of degenerative conditions and treatment of many different kinds of traumatic injury (if the cancer risk can be escaped) – so the junk about regenerating limbs seems needlessly excessive to me. But then I’m a geek who finds this kind of thing interesting.
It doesn’t matter whether it will be another ten or even thousand years. What matters is that one day we will cure cancer, one day we will cure amputees, one day we will even conquer death itself. We are gods of our own design and that is more glorious than any religion can offer.
Not to be a downer or anything, but is it even possible for cancer to be cured? Look at what it is fundamentally….a group of cells stuck in mitosis (without interphase). We all have had cancer, we all will continue to develop cancers inside us. It just boils down to whether our immune system can effectively kill of these rouge tumors. Granted environmental factors play a role along with our weakened immune systems resulting from the horrible average american diet; but can it be CURED? Isn’t it moreso a ‘condition’ than a ‘disease’?
If anyone knows about this more in depth and wants to correct me, please feel free. I am in no way a medical professional; I am just looking at what makes sense to me in a scientific perspective.
Well what about nano technology, someday we could inject cancer patient with nanobots to kill off cancerous cells. Who commands that our immune system must be the one to fight? Why cant we create an artificial one.
Yes we will eventually cure cancer, but it might take another few hunderds of years.
I agree with you about the complexity but not the time line. I was just reading an article the other day about a new scaffolding system for full organ growth that is showing remarkable promise, so on that front things are progressing nicely. And IIRC, the gene switch causes cells at the injury site to revert to pluripotent stem cells, avoiding the whole rhabdomyogenesis problem. Bioengineering, I think, is on the cusp of a progress acceleration akin to Moore’s Law.
Agreed.
Isn’t that slightly scary? Or have I been reading too much sci-fi? Bioengineering progressing at Moore’s Law speed could have fairly damaging consequences.
Slightly? If I’m right about that, we’re all either immortal or dead in thirty years.
I’ll take either one.
Speaking of which…
As someone missing my teeth, spleen, three lymph nodes, and my gall bladder, this sort of thing really grabs my interest. The prospect of eventually being able to regrow lost organs and limbs is extremely exciting.
To clarify, this isn’t for people currently living, this is for people who are about to live.
At least, I think that’s how it works.
Err…no. They’re talking about tissue regeneration in adult living mammals.
YOU KNOW WHAT I THINK ABOUT THAT?! FU-
Actually, that’s pretty cool. How the hell do you switch a gene on or off in an adult? I thought that had to be done with uh…stuff in test tubs.
I honestly know very little about epigenetics and gene activation. If LRA is hanging around, I’m sure she could give you the more thorough run-down, but from what I understand, genes are turned on and off by a complicated set of chemical triggers that in normal circumstances are usually precipitated by reactions to the environment or hormones.
The activation of genes is regulated by binding of proteins to their regulatory regions for example p53 binds and activate p21 in response to damage to the DNA leading to arrest of cell division that can allow for time for repair mechanisms to do their thing. Some genes are kept permanently off by mechanisms such as DNA methylation. We start to get a much better understanding of these epigenetic mechanisms. One of the biggest breakthroughs of the last few years is the fact that by introducing only 4 genes (by infecting cells with a recombinant virus) can lead to a large scale reprogramming of the epigenetic state and turn an adult cell back into a stem cell however we don’t fully understand how. This is where I think we will first see tissue engineering probably starting with internal organs such as livers (Insulin producing cells that may be able to cure diabetes may only be a few years in the future). taking that into limb regeneration is a much bigger problem. at the moment we can turn a stem cell into different type of cells in a culture dish but the process is still in an early stage and you will usually get at least 10% of wrongly differentiated cells since our understanding of the signals that control differentiation as well as our ability to manipulate them are far from perfect.
I”m not sure how the scientists went about it, but the mice could be knock outs of p21. The article calls them p21-free mice, but that may not mean squat as many reporters of science regularly get the facts wrong. Anyhoo, there are lots of ways to control gene expression. It would be easier to insert a plasmid with off/on switches than to mess with a gene that is epigenetically sealed (methylated). I’d have to read the original journal paper to know what’s going on there.
Wolverine FTW.
I don’t think it was very “intelligent” of god to turn off this p21 gene. ;)
Yeah? Well, look at it from his perspective: He’s immortal and his entertainment comes from things being killed(We know this because the smell of sacrifice’s blood was “pleasing” to him, among other genocide done in the bible). If he’s immortal and his only source of entertainment is gone, where does that leave him? Bored as hell.
We’re 30 comments deep into this article, and nobody bothered to bring up The Lizard?
haha sweet
I’ve been reading Transmetropoloitan, it’s kind of hilarious the degree to which bizarre, even horrific, body-modification is considered normal in that version of the future. For all the fears people have of bioengineering, It seems to me to just be more about fear of the unknown. Think of how horrified people were at the prospect of sugery 200 years ago, the idea that you should cut someone open and tinker with their organs was considered monstorous. Now intrusive surgery is so common that if someone objects to going under the knife they are considered odd.
I guess what I’m saying is that, in the grand scheme of things, that the prospect of growing limbs will be new and terrifying for about ten minutes. Thereafter it will be mundane. Besides if there is a danger, such as increased rates of cancer, what is to stop from bioengineers from turning the gene back on after the limb has been regrown? If the technology reaches a point where gene manipulation is like flipping a switch, then it becomes a reversible technology and risks associated with it become much less likely.
The reason you don’t think it’s scary is because you’re thinking too small. What about weaponizing fine-tuned gene activation? There are several disease-causing gene groups that are carried widely in a population. If you understood the mechanism properly and perfected the delivery mechanism, you could give an entire nation cancer, or Parkinson’s, or ALS. First nation to perfect that wins the next-generation arms race.
If it is a nation, and not a guy in a basement, because unlike nuclear physics or computer science, the physical and cost overhead for bioengineering is tiny. It wouldn’t be long before the next Unabomber could hold a nation hostage with a retrovirus he cooked himself.
An interesting post. What about bioengineering makes is so substantially cheaper to deal with compared with nuclear physics and the like?
Well, the manufacturing end is the very definition of cheap; growth medium, lightbulb, and time are really all you need. The research end is presently what is expensive, but if I am correct about the Moore’s Law analogue (which would require advances in treating genetics as an information science, allowing genetics progress to piggy-back on progress in computer engineering), that won’t be true very long.
Good point. I suppose what I’m typing on right now is something that you’d have only expected someone like NASA to have ten years ago, so if your analogy holds, I can see the average Joe ending up with the tools required without too much effort.
If I’m thinking too small, the your thinking too one directional. If the technology becomes cheap and accessible enough for some guy to cook up a super retro virus in his basement, then the technology to stop it is equally accessible. The high tide rises all ships. If biotechnology becomes susceptible to Moore’s law, you may find that you got a new kind of cancer one day, only to have it cured by that evening.
Your not taking into account the massive degree of change that would occur due to this technology. A similar analogy would be that say in the mid-90′s, some analyst looks at Moore’s law and says “In a generation some hacker will have enough processing power on his desktop to crack the Pentagon, NORAD, defense satellites, and set off every nuke in the world!” Of course hes ignoring that a leap in technology would make hacking those targets that much harder, because they have access to it too, hes taken a technology outside of its context and purposely manufactured the worst case scenario.
Take a technology outside of the context of the environment that created it and of course it looks too powerful. But that context is more important than the technology itself. Because the context determines what is actually feasible in such an environment, what good is a super retro virus when people have nanites in their blood to destroy viruses? What if people have edited their own genetic codes to the point that the gene the virus would activate doesn’t even exist in 90% of the population anymore?
If someone had access to such technology right now, yes it would be scary. But if we’re talking about twenty years into the future, where everybody has access to it, it becomes mundane.
If the technology becomes cheap and accessible enough for some guy to cook up a super retro virus in his basement, then the technology to stop it is equally accessible. The high tide rises all ships.
Symmetry is *not* guaranteed, and from our experience right now with pathogens, it is very, very likely that the symmetry you are outlining here is not obeyed by pathogen-borne illness. It is much easier to mix-and-match a virus that will kill millions that come up with the cure for *that* virus, and if it does get as easy as we’ve been discussing, then a would-be terrorist wouldn’t create one virus and release it, but several thousand. Simultaneously. The best-maintained computer servers in the world can still be crushed by a reasonably crude DDoS.
The example with the hacker is a partially inapt metaphor because with few exceptions you can always unplug a computer or have something critical not connected to a network. You can’t (yet) unplug a person from their body without killing them.
This whole thread smacks of Karl Pilkington. A lot of round headed buffoonery.
I would like to punch holes through these scientists ears, perhaps remove some of their tissue from their bodies.
Ugh. I’ve done about 5 years worth of animal research, and I do have holes punched in my ears. I had them pierced when I was 12, it wasn’t a big deal.
Animal research is a humane and important endeavor for understanding how our bodies work and for curing disease. If given a choice between not performing animal research and watching people needlessly suffer/die and doing research and helping people, I’ll take the latter.
And every time you step on an ant and kill it, I suppose we should want someone to kill you?
Yeah, but your earrings were kinda your choice, right?
“Humane”
Yes, how very, very humane:
http://www.stopanimaltests.com/
“important”
Again, disagree:
http://caat.jhsph.edu/
http://www.pcrm.org/resch/anexp/
Given your professional bias, that will be all – I don’t particularly like banging my head against a wall. More than enough information can be found above if anyone’s interested in actually doing so.
You don’t know what in the hell you are talking about, do you? I performed research on the genetic controls involved in learning and memory. Anytime I performed a surgery, the animal was double anesthetized. That’s one more anesthesia than a human gets in surgery.
Take your concern trolling somewhere else.
wow. every now and then I forget people like this exist then one day *bam* I’m reminded just how messed up this world is. It’s like encountering a flat-earther, you have to readjust your cynicism to account for it.
I used to think the problem was that animal rights activists considered human and animal life equivalent. While not agreeing with it, I can understand that on a philosophical level. But the truth is they have devalued human life to the point that it isn’t even worth experimenting on a handful of monkeys to potential cure a disease for the entire human race. They don’t care about the advances animal experimentation has caused, because human life isn’t worth it to them. Its environmentalism turned nihilism.
You can’t perform medical experiments in a vacuum, by its very nature it requires a living subject. So until organizations like PETA start volunteering human replacements for the rats, they don’t really get to complain about how medical science produces results that benefit everyone else.
Thanks for the words in my mouth. Jackass.
fair enough. but all i have to go on is your vindictive willingness to pierce scientists for routine lab procedures.
So, in your own words answer the following questions:
What degree of animal experimentation, if any, is justified to improve human quality of life?
If you consider animal experimentation unethical, what medicines or techniques have you personally forsaken because of the ‘unethical’ way in which they are obtained and manufactured?
Exactly. When Kris’ child gets some terrible disorder that could have been treated with medicines developed using animal research, let’s see if he/she forgoes it out of principle and lets his/her kid suffer and die.
I would like to add that my passion for this kind of scientific research stems from my experience as a special education teacher who had two terminally kids in my class. One had leukodystrophy and died at age 9. The other had Lennox-Gestalt syndrome and died at age 14. The parents of these precious souls cried on my shoulder as their children suffered and died. If I could have given them some hope for gene therapy or some other treatment that develops using animal research, I would have. Had we had the bio-technology in place to treat these degenerative disorders, these two children wouldn’t have had to die. So when animal rights nutballs come along and criticize my work, I want to know how far they’ll go to live by their principles. I want to know if their child had a degenerative disorder, if they’d sit by and watch the heartbreaking course of these disorders carry out their natural progression.
“What degree of animal experimentation, if any, is justified to improve human quality of life?”
None.
“If you consider animal experimentation unethical, what medicines or techniques have you personally forsaken because of the ‘unethical’ way in which they are obtained and manufactured?”
“Exactly. When Kris’ child gets some terrible disorder that could have been treated with medicines developed using animal research, let’s see if he/she forgoes it out of principle and lets his/her kid suffer and die.”
The past is past. I look to the future and the suffering being caused by it. Foregoing medicines developed using animal research in the past would do nothing towards my goal – stopping the unnecessary (yes, see two out of the three links I posted – they are really not that hard to click) and cruel experimentation on animals.
I also have to say, I love how the hypotheticals get thrown about from pro-animal-research people when they are confronted in the most simplest way. Suddenly I’m supposed to choose whether or not I would drown Mother Teresa to convince Hitler’s mother to have an abortion, nevermind the reality of what is actually going on.
Oh, and I didn’t respond to the question about stepping on ants earlier, to which my answer is this: really? You think that is comparable to the willful experimentation on animals in what way? Seriously, I might expect a knee-jerk response like that from someone who believes in God and is used to erecting strawmen everywhere, but from an atheist blogger? Please…
“vindictive willingness”
So does this apply to the researchers, or just those who find what they do to be morally repugnant?
If you would choose not to have animal research-based therapies (like gene therapy) over your child being cured of a painful, debilitating, and deadly disorder, then you are sick.
“I also have to say, I love how the hypotheticals get thrown about from pro-animal-research people when they are confronted in the most simplest way. Suddenly I’m supposed to choose whether or not I would drown Mother Teresa to convince Hitler’s mother to have an abortion, nevermind the reality of what is actually going on.”
I gave you two real world examples of kids I knew personally that died. So your point is moot.
Like I said, hypotheticals (not to mention false choices).
And I’m the sick one: http://www.petatv.com/tvpopup/video.asp?video=testing123&Player=flv
Please. I think I’ve taken you about as far as I can. Here’s to wishing you might step back from the defensive position you’ve cornered yourself in and wake up.
What false choices? The research I did had implications for neurological disorders that are currently incurable. And it was humane (whether or not you understand that is not my problem). You are the one who needs to wake up. And to quit talking out of your ignorant ass.