DARPA Sponsoring Limb Regeneration Research 221
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."
Stub. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Stub. (Score:5, Funny)
Jokes aside, if they can regenerate limbs, surely its just a hop skip and a jump to regenerate organs? If we can do that, immortality is just around the corner...
Re:Stub. (Score:5, Interesting)
Second of all, this may increase lifespan, but would not provide immortality. Human cells stop reproducing after a certain number of reproductions. The cell chromosomes have end-cap like things called telomeres which are shortened with each mitotic cycle. When they get too short, the cell stops reproducing. This is to prevent too many mutations from accumulating after a while. Generally, if cells divide without shortening the telomeres, they're usually malignant tumor cells. So to get immortality, you'd have to augment the mitotic cycle to a) "spellcheck" the chromosome copying, and b) prevent the telomeres from being shortened.
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Both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells have copy verification and repair machinery which drastically reduce replication errors.
Re:Stub. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Carry on:)
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Re:Stub. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Stub. (Score:5, Informative)
b) is easy, you can shut off telomerase for a while(http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articleren
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They do have controlled drugs in development (two that I know of off the top of my head) that can temporarily increase telomerase activity. I don't know how well targeted they are, though, and to me that's important, because in my mind, if you have a precancerous cell and you turn up telomerase activity then WHAM, you've just triggered a malignancy.
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They can culture skin artificially, as well as use various mechanical methods to 'stretch it'.
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If you could use a given adult's body to grow a blastema or whatever it is and then use it to grow a limb or organ, the cells would remember their "age" and would still not be as resilient as a child's organ or limb. Therefore, you could replace your heart at the age of 75 but it would still be a 75 year
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Perhaps the brain could drop its oldest memories in favour of new ones, but would this seem like immortality to mind of that person?
worthy of King Midas (Score:3, Insightful)
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Wikipedia (Score:2)
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Reminds me of The Forever War (Score:5, Interesting)
(WARNING - SPOILERS)
When William Mandella lost his leg in an accident he was under the impression that he would simply be given an artificial one and would then be free to persue a semi-normal life. To his horror he discovers they'll simply grow him a new leg and chuck him right back in to active duty... :)
Re:Reminds me of The Forever War (Score:4, Interesting)
+1 Creepy but probably true
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Why? They had the policy during wartime when they were busily drafting people.
Oh, and it's not three PH's and you're able to get out, it's three PH's and you have the option of transfering to a non-combat area.
I imagine that regrowing a limb and retraining you on the usage of it would be something that'll take years. The nerve endings are never quite the same...
Oh, and you'll never really get combat troops until you realize that there have been documen
Not too far from reality (Score:2)
Has no one seen the Spider-man cartoons (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't underestimate prosthetics (Score:4, Interesting)
Why not? I see no good reason why competent engineering can't eventually beat a chunk of meat.
It's not like we were intelligently designed... we evolved. Evolution will tend to produce good solutions to problems, but it will hardly ever produce the best possible solution. Once we get nerve-circuit interfaces down, we should have no problem outengineering most of the human body.
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Sure, the human body is a result of evolution, but that doesnt mean that its not sophisticated at all. Its the result of a billion years of "everything thats not good enough died", starting from the level of cellular chemistry up to the general layout.
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Oh, I think we can do better than that. Remember that "everything that's not good enough dies" combines with "anything that's better than it needs to be gets pwned by random mutations".
Re:Don't underestimate prosthetics (Score:5, Insightful)
we should have no problem outengineering most of the human body.
Yes and then the batteries in your cyberleg run down and you have to haul the entire 40 kilo hunk of metal across town in the rain... on one leg. Besides that you are forgetting that the limbs aren't seperate components of the body; its all interlinked. Its no good having an arm able to flip over a truck, your torso would compact and tear itself apart if you didn't just rip the thing off, nerve circuits and all. The only real option for enhanced performance cybernetics would be a Ghost in the Shell effort, with full body replacement except for the brain. If you can manage that, without regular maintenance and some sort of 50 year power source, I'll admit you have a point.
Re:Don't underestimate prosthetics (Score:4, Interesting)
Consider that cyberleg. We can build it to run off glucose in order to avoid it running out of batteries. We can easily give it the performance characteristics of an athlete - we know the human body can take that. It will never get out of shape. Assuming it has sufficient glucose (which is easy to introduce to your body, especially if you deal with the insulin thing right), it will never get tired.
Now, that's no car-tossing cyberarm, but it's definately an improvement on the stock equipment. The downside is maintnence, but anyone who's paid too much attention to cyberpunk settings knows that - and that can be reduced with better engineering.
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Not to mention layers and layers of redundancy, of course -- if something goes wrong, our body can easily adapt and on occasion, rewire the synapses.
A synthetic body should be capable of the same thing, too.
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Re:Don't underestimate prosthetics (Score:5, Insightful)
There is also no reason both areas of research can't operate simultaneously, nor anything that is restricting them from working coopoeratively.
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You are absolutely correct.
It just annoys me when people assume that technology isn't going to improve, or that the human body is the pinnacle of perfection.
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1. It will take a while! I think it is more a matter of centuries than decades.
2. It will be too expensive for most people. Look at the moon landings. They would never have happened if not the richest nation on earth would have poured so much money into it. Even now it is still too expensive to put people into near orbit. The few exeptions only go there, because the governments still spend A LOT of money on it. The few tourists (that still pay more than some thousand people in Africa s
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Actually, this is probably not the accurate way to look at it. The only government flying paying space travelers is doing so after bankruptcy essentially - and it is typical for an after-bankruptcy bussiness to sell close to marginal cost.
Sunk costs, and all that... trust me, the former soviets are not flying rich Americans with a government subsidy!
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Not so. Unless the space of solutions is extremely unusual -- not simply connected, something like that -- natural selection will always find the optimum solution, given enough time. Deliberate engineering gets you to the optimum faster, that's all. But natural selection has got one hell of a head start on deliberate engineering as far as our bodies go, like maybe four million years' wort
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So.... the human brain which isn't the best possbile solution because of evolution, will produce the best possible solution?
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Re:Don't underestimate prosthetics (Score:5, Funny)
That's a bold statement of fact, considering even the most avid proponents of evolution refer to it as "theory".
Not a great troll... poignant, with a hint of maple... but lacking in the body and depth that a really rich, warm troll should have... I'll have to give this one star, I'm afraid.
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To be fair to the little troll, the original post clearly is referring to the theory of evolution.
The fact of evolution does not make predictions about the degree to which the design of any biological organism is optimized. All scientific theories of evolution derived from the Darwinian one seem implicitly to do so.
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Yup. Like the theory of gravity.
There's no question that organisms evolve any more than there is question that masses attract eachother. There is some debate about the exact mechanism for these effects, but there's no question that they happen.
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That's not to say that you're not right. We have a ton of stuff to learn from biological systems - we've barely begun to scratch the surface on all the useful stuff that evolution has come up with.
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What, exactly, do you mean by "versitility" and "adaptability"? Give examples.
Outengineering a biological system isn't nessisarily easy, but I assure you that it's possible. High tech devices aren't always better, but they frequently are - which is why we build them.
Wikipedia's stub on blastemas is very terse (Score:3, Funny)
is this really the right reason? (Score:2, Troll)
You *know* the Army's thinking behind this is to regenerate their limbs so they can just send them back to war.
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can we grow some extra limbs in advance? (Score:4, Funny)
just grow a spare parts clone (Score:2)
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In all honesty, it's a good book. Go check it out at the library. I commmand you!
Potential for other applications (Score:2, Insightful)
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Yes, but don't be surprised if people look at you funny -- or maybe that should be funnier.
KFG
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But it would rock for those who had a mastectomy.
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I sense a disturbance in the Force (Score:3, Funny)
One step closer... (Score:3, Funny)
Why yes, my hat ismade out of tin. How did you know?
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It's apparently blocked you from reading my nick properly...
Millions ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Am I out of whack or it's $7.6m like peanuts for this kind of research? I'd guess any serious effort on that would need to be in the billions level, and that likely for many years.
You don't have to build accelerators or reactors (Score:2)
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In hindsight you can often recognize the tender little shoot of the Right Idea growing, and, yes, it is often growing in some neglected garden with very little fertilizer (a.k.a. money). You'd naturally think that "all" you have to do to be much more
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How about some hair regeneration? (Score:5, Funny)
Thanks.
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further info (Score:2)
Timelines for Manipulating and Greatly Enhancing Human Regeneration
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/000929.php [fightaging.org]
Transhumanism: Regenerative Medicine
http://digitalcrusader.ca/archives/2006/05/regener ative_me.html [digitalcrusader.ca]
recall the transhumanist point of view (Score:2)
Potential for new cybernetic prosthetics (Score:4, Informative)
Not quite as good, but I just interviewed [mos.org] 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.
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It gives new meaning to the BSOD.
Akira... (Score:2)
Cue out-of-control flesh monster, Akira-style.
Been done in rats (Score:2)
And isnt a rat pretty close to a human? Thats what they keep saying anyway.
Talk about going for cheap karma points (Score:2)
Only if he's a lawyer.
In the same vein, all engineers are nerds who can't get a date. All designers are homosexuals. All male programmers are socially inept, and there are no female programmers. All doctors have a God Complex. All firefighters, of course, are heroes ;-) .
Prosthetics beat natural limbs (Score:3, Insightful)
Inspector Gadget
Luke Skywalker
Fake limbs can resist bullets. They can have powerful weapons and other tools. If you buy the Dr. Strangelove model, you get to blame the arm's buggy software when it grabs a woman's butt.
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Until the control is good enough that I can, say, play guitar without any more difficulty than I do with my meat hand, I think I'll stick with meat.
Time for the new DARPA challenge! (Score:3, Interesting)
so about the guy who got the penis transplant.... (Score:2, Funny)
"So it'll just grow back then, will it?" (Score:2)
Perkins: Bitten sir. During the night.
Ainsworth: Hm. Whole leg gone eh?
Perkins: Yes.
[As they talk, the din of battle continues outside. Screams of dying men, crackling of tents set on fire.]
Ainsworth: How's it feel?
Perkins: Stings a bit.
Ainsworth: Mmm. Well it would, wouldn't it. That's quite a bite you've got there you know.
Perkins: Yes, real beauty isn't it?
All: Yes.
Ainsworth: Any idea how it happened?
Perkins: None at all. Complete mystery to me. Woke up just n
MILLIONS? Surely Not. (Score:2)
I'm way ahead of them (Score:2)
Why? (Score:2)
Blastemas and Anime (Score:2)
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I'm sure that's already occurred to DARPA. Unfortunately, the military goes off to Iraq when they are ordered to by the elected representative of you, the voter. So what are you doing about it?
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Yes.
Re:Radical idea (Score:2)
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So, without us doing anything except minding our own business and s
not Washington (Score:2)
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It's not quite clear the nation owes the same consideration to J. Random Citizen who gets himself racked up on the highway, say, by drinking and driving, or even through plain bad luck.
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