Comment on send thoughts and peer review
cynar@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoThere’s some evidence that mammals never lost the ability. Unfortunately, our scarring response is massively faster and locks wounds down.
A few years back, they engineered mice to lack a gene, to find out what it did. Initially, someone got in trouble for not properly marking the modified mice (via holes in their ears). They later discovered the holes healed completely, including regenerating fur etc.
Unfortunately, it also makes recovery from larger wounds difficult, since without a scarring response they don’t close quickly.
I mean holes in ears healing and closing up is one thing, entire limbs regrowing is another, and we already know from salamanders and lizards that things can go wrong:
Who’s to say a regrown human arm won’t have similar issues, possibly even internal issues only humans would notice due to having opposable fingers.
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Yes, I’ve read some old books that talk about the “current of injury” and how you can induce something like regeneration in humans if you leave the scab alone, but only for small things like fingertips.
I suspect, as you say, that you trade one thing off for another, but we’re all office workers these days so we can probably figure out something even for large wounds, since we can just sit around for weeks and heal.
I hope that when this AI craze dies down that we can redirect our humongous computing resources to simulating entire cells, maybe entire organs.
Deep down I’m a life extension nutter but reality had a way to knock that out of me…