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Two Heads Are Better Than One
from the mad-scientist-in-the-house dept
Other than the Bio-nerd coolness of being able to induce the growth of two heads in a simple animal, there is another important medical and business reason why this is great result. That's because the use of chemical signals to induce the growth of another body part (like the head) could have some very interesting implications for human medicine. Particularly in the use of bio-chemical signals to grow replacement organs for patients whose organs have been damaged. It isn't as far fetched as it sounds.
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While it's true that this experiment demonstrates growth of extra parts on a mature, rather than a developing animal, this result does not make growth of replacement organs seem any less far fetched.
Cells from virtually any organ in the body can be grown in culture indefinitely with addition of telomerase. The problem with growing replacement organs is that there's no way to provoke a collection of heart cells to organize themselves into the macro-physiology of a heart; no way to organize kidney cells into a kidney.
The reason these cells can't organize themselves is that they exist in the absence of the scaffold the rest of the body. In short there is no currently imaginable way to grow a single replacement organ short of growing an entire replacement animal.
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my two cents....
But after that little rant, I'll defend Ryan for his suggestion that perhaps organ replacements are not so far-fetched... While this particular article doesn't address the issue, the idea has been bounced around for a long time. I think someone has tried growing a kidney inside the animal which needed it, using the old kidney as scaffolding. So *someday* maybe replacement organs could be grown to order. But yes, it hasn't been done yet quite right, so it's really up to your optimism to judge how far-fetched it sounds. But it hasn't been "disproven" to my knowledge, so it's definitely not in the FTL-travel category...
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I also have to disagree with your last statement that there is currently no imaginable way to grow a single replacement organ, HA! Umm... try artificial scaffolds (both cartilage and other reabsorbable materials), it isn't perfect yet but there are some great signs that these methods will lead to fairly good organ reproduction(far from unimaginable eh?).
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