Moonbase

Here’s an article about a recently discovered strain of mice discovered with salamander-like regenerative abilities. Interestingly, normal mice injected with cells from the mutant strain also became capable of regenerating tissue in the same fashion.

Man, I need to start publishing more of Lunar 8 before the remainder of it comes true. ^_-

(Hat Tip: Father Jim)

update: Remembering that my blog is read by more people than immediate friends who are privy to the Lunar 8 writing process, I should probably explain the quip…

In short, one of the Lunar 8 characters was plotted out as performing research into tissue regeneration in mammals (mice and rabbits, to begin with). Now, in the case of Lunar 8 he’s also artificially stimulating it with rather dubiously acquired biotechnology, but the basic principles are the same.

There are basically two ways in which most vertibrates heal from major injuries:

1. regeneration
2. scarring

The first involves actually re-growing the affected tissues; basically cells de-differentiate back into a stem-cell-like state. Development begins as it would in an embryo, and winds quickly forward into the mature structure. This healing method is shared with invertebrates.

Scarring, on the other hand, just fills the gap with scar tissue and leaves it at that. This is (as far as I know) peculiar to vertebrates—it’s not clear what the advantage is, but scarring is appreciably faster than regeration, so there may at least be a reduced risk of infection.

Thing is, early in development most vertebrates are capable of almost complete regeneration—it’s only as they mature that most slowly lose that ability in favor of scarring. Even humans retain the ability to regenerate some tissues, and very small children (besides being less likely to scar in general) can sometimes regenerate partial severed digits (at least according to an anonymous source on Wikipedia).

Anyway, while the relevent part of Lunar 8 was written about four or five years ago, I’m not claiming any special prescience on my part—regeneration in adult mammals has been a fairly well-known “holy grail” for biotechnology for some time and I played on it for that reason. It just happens the folks in the article actually managed to get there.

As far as what it actually means for humans? Not much yet. Mice are handy for testing, but they’re not human and we don’t know whether similar mechanisms would work for humans yet. Plus the most obvious way of doing it for humans - experimentally genetically engineering a child - would run into more than a few ethical problems.

However, since injecting small amounts of tissue from the mutant mice into normal mice apparently confers the regenerative ability, it’s possible that there is a signalling hormone/protein/etc involved which could be administered to genetically normal humans.

But what would that mean exactly? Not immortality. It’s not clear that any mechanisms involved in aging would be affected, and most injuries that would kill you would still kill you since you wouldn’t have time to regenerate anyway. We’re not talking Wolverine here.

Additionally, it’s not clear what the side-effects might be. After all, remember that they encountered this genetic variation in the process of breeding mice to be susceptible to Lupus. Heck, since it’s playing with the norm for growth in adult mammals, some new and entertaining form of cancer could be in the offing.

But really we don’t know yet. So it registers as “interesting; something to keep an eye on”. If successful, it would of course be the ultimate adult stem cell [ yes, the non-controversial sort ] treatment.

Wow. Inadvertant essay. Um, good night?