The trick is to make regeneration fast enough to heal the wound without making fast enough to cause cancer. Maybe even supported by provisional fibrosis.
"I don't know how it works, so it must be fake news."
To be fair, the person being skeptical is just a surgeon, this is not a peer-reviewed study or anything actually scientific.
Your NPR link even shows that scientists realize there are still unknowns:
> "We think that nail stem cells may a have a special function to induce the whole regeneration process, including nerve attraction and growth of the bone," Ito say.
A cursory search seems to say that typical regrowth of a nail takes 4-6 months, but Spievak claimed his only took 4 weeks.
Can we say definitively that his "pixie dust" had nothing to do with it? I don't think so. Can we say it did have something to do with it? Also unknown... but the answer right now IMO certainly isn't a scientific "no."
If it worked on humans 13 years ago, then by now it would have worked on a human who was not sibling to the inventor, in a way not essentially identical to life without it.
I’m surprised this does not mention humans can grow back the tips of their fingers (past the white part of cuticle) https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/06/10/1903854...
Supposed to be only kids but I’ve chopped off a few mm by accident it came back as an adult or I can’t tell the difference.
2 years I ago I sliced maybe 1.5mm frommy thumb-tip; when taking off the bandage, I could clearly see the "straight cut" and that some material was missing.
In your first comment, replace “until today” with “since then” and you’re good!
“Until today” is one of those English phrases that is particularly unfair on non-native speakers. You know “until” and you know “today” and so it’s completely natural to combine them in the way you did.
But as ever, English is dumb and annoying and hard work, all at the same time.
Lol, I once sharpened my knives and went to cook. During the prep I said, "wow I wonder how sharp the knife is", next thing you know, i cut about 1/4" of my finger tip off, right through the finger nail with zero resistance.
Besides the blood getting everywhere and needing superglue to stop it, it grew back completely fine.
"During the prep I said, "wow I wonder how sharp the knife""
Is there something missing in the story? (drugs, coercion, self harm ideas, anything)
I have had my fair share of avoidable cuts, but none of them included looking at the edge before happening.
You shouldn't really sharpen kitchen knifes too sharp. And even if they're not super razor sharp (cutting a finger with no resistance), you should still warn people new to your kitchen or even family members/regular users right after each re-sharpening.
Additionally, too low angle will make the knife very suspectible to blunting and/or require constant drawing on the sharpening steel¹. Unless you have super high quality steel like Japaneese knifes or some craft smith knifes.
Butcher knifes, to be used along with a chainmail glove, are fine. Just don't test their sharpness on body parts. Or use them to shave a bit of hair, but very carefully.
It's totally true, and more so true in a slaughterhouse. Blunt knifes cause strain injuries on joints, and make people use much more force than necessary, which comes at a loss of precision. And then it turns out, that with enough force, a semi-blunt knife will still cut through a kevlar anti-cut glove and hit fingers.
BUT!, once the knife is sharp enough for a job, and I mean for comfortable work, not just barely enough, then it's enough.
Giving somebody who never held a sharp knife in their life a knife that is so sharp it will cut their fingers without them feeling it (or even close to that sharp) is like telling somebody to run a coding agent on their system and not in a VM. Things can get bad really fast.
Most people (at least in central Poland where I come from) used semi blunt knives* for everything. Some would have a household knife sharpener or maybe even low quality sharpening steel like the ones you get in a knives set. Maybe they or their grandma had a butcher in the family. They will have nice sharp knives that can cut tomatoes without crushing them.
But with a knife that is sufficiently thin, a throwaway leather belt, a little skill and an hour or more of time, you can get a mirror-like polished blade that is so sharp you can amputate limbs in seconds. Just need to go through the joint at a correct angle.
That's how our grandfathers shaved.
* just realized I was typing plural for knives wrong - with an 'f'
The exact same thing happened to me. I chopped off a good half a cm with an axe when splitting firewood about 5 years ago. After no less than 6 months there wasn’t any sign of the mutilation.
Does your fingerprint look normal? When I was a kid I was goofing around with a pair of scissors and lopped off a good chunk of the pad of one finger. Thirty years later my fingerprint looks like a bunch of little dots at that location. The ridges never grew back properly.
Retina is a good example of this. Zebrafish can regrow damaged retina, but while mammals have the same stem cells (Muller glia), they dont repair the retina, but form scar tissue. There is a lot of research and I think they have managed to modify rat genome, so that their retina has showns some repair abilities. The problem is that it often causes tumors.
I have other retina permanently damaged, and suffer from double vision when looking small objects like text.
Yep, the unfortunate flipside of "let's use stem cells to rebuild stuff" is always "let's use stem cells to give us cancer". Technology might help alleviate the cancer part compared to blind evolution, hopefully.
Some aging mechanisms like telomeres are also mechanisms to prevent cancer by limiting cell division.
It looks like one of the optimization edges walked by evolution is a conflict between longevity and the ability to repair and regenerate versus not getting cancer.
It’s easy to make human cell lines immortal, but that will kill you.
One route I can imagine to radical life extension is to start by editing the genome to introduce much more robust but different anti cancer adaptations. Then start turning regenerative stuff and things like telomerase back on.
I've learned about the cancer vs tissue repairability (or cancer vs heart/cardiovascular failure) from Joe Rogan's podcast with Bret Weinstein (or his brother, don't remember).
It's visible in death causes - pretty much all non accident deaths are divided between cancer and heart attack.
A very interesting thing discussed in that podcast was about transgenic (or maybe all?) lab mice bred in USA. These mice are used for initial screening for nearly all drugs. And due to some error and ignorance, unbeknownst to most people using the mice, nearly all mice are predominantly on one side. (Sorry, don't remember which). They just all come from the same family.
Which means that nearly all drugs in the past few decades are skewed toward either giving people cancer or heart attacks.
This is due to mice being extra resistant to one of these and therefore not properly signaling when the drug is likely to give people heart attacks or cancer.
This is ironic. They didn’t say they believe. You offered your belief that you know something that happened long ago (extraordinary claim), and they are naturally curious how you could know that. If you’re a time traveler or whatever we’d be quite interested to hear more.
I think to claim that 2000 years ago there was one person who performed miracles and/or healed people that nobody else could, with no actual evidence it was done and nobody else has been able to do it since, you need a better response to someone questioning it than “oh were you there? prove it didn’t happen.”
even the Jews of the time that did not believe or follow Jesus wrote that he performed signs. They claimed it was sorcery.
in Folio 43a of Tractate Sanhedrin of the Babylonian Talmud as follows:
‘It is taught: On the eve of Passover they hung Yeshu and the crier went forth for forty days beforehand declaring that "[Yeshu] is going to be stoned for practicing witchcraft, for enticing and leading Israel astray.”’
The relevant portions of the Bible record that the Jews of the Sanhedrin acknowledged the signs and miracles but said it was by the power of Satan that he did these things.
They also have countless records proving hundreds of thousands of women were witches, with ironclad proofs such as “if we stab them they scream so they must be witches, off to the pire” or “throw them bound in the water, if they float it means they’re evil because water (baptism) rejects them so they’re witches -> burn.”
He's not unique though. Quite a few people are on record for performing miracles in front of large audiences. Seemed like it was all the rage around this time period.
Vespasian apparently healed blind people in Alexandria. Apollonius of Tyana had a very colourful life performing all kinds of magic. Honi the Circle Maker was bringing the rain over in Judea.
Must've been something in the water other than lead!
In the whole Christian tradition, God/Jesus generally does not go for organ or limb regeneration. Two counter examples are a healed ear in Luke (but this may well have been resumption of hearing? details are a little light), and then a single Spanish example in the 1600s.
For His own mysterious reasons, He simply doesn’t go in for that stuff, however much intercessionary prayer ends up in His inbox.
not an amputee, but he did heal a man with a withered or malformed hand in Matthew 12. he also healed plenty of cripples, so I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that some or many of them were missing limbs.
In a study they figured out that organs seem to have an electrical potential range as a signature/command for stem cells for which organ to build and where.
In a frog they were able to grow legit eyes in the gut just by artificialy inducing a certain voltage in that area. No need for any cell transplantations: the voltage really seems to be the only signal needed.
This might also be how it might be done in the future in humans: block scar tissue then induce voltage with the signature of the organ you wish to regrow.
anticensor | a day ago
ck_one | a day ago
flir | a day ago
malfist | a day ago
ranger_danger | a day ago
Found it: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7354458.stm
lazyasciiart | a day ago
Dude's brother had him throw his product on the finger as it did so, definitely an astute marketing trick. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2008/may/01/finger.claim
ranger_danger | a day ago
To be fair, the person being skeptical is just a surgeon, this is not a peer-reviewed study or anything actually scientific.
Your NPR link even shows that scientists realize there are still unknowns:
> "We think that nail stem cells may a have a special function to induce the whole regeneration process, including nerve attraction and growth of the bone," Ito say.
A cursory search seems to say that typical regrowth of a nail takes 4-6 months, but Spievak claimed his only took 4 weeks.
Can we say definitively that his "pixie dust" had nothing to do with it? I don't think so. Can we say it did have something to do with it? Also unknown... but the answer right now IMO certainly isn't a scientific "no."
lazyasciiart | 11 hours ago
RajT88 | a day ago
stevenwoo | a day ago
KellyCriterion | a day ago
Until today, it recovered completely
oniony | a day ago
KellyCriterion | 22 hours ago
Is this sentence better?
mootothemax | 21 hours ago
“Until today” is one of those English phrases that is particularly unfair on non-native speakers. You know “until” and you know “today” and so it’s completely natural to combine them in the way you did.
But as ever, English is dumb and annoying and hard work, all at the same time.
delfinom | a day ago
Besides the blood getting everywhere and needing superglue to stop it, it grew back completely fine.
catlikesshrimp | a day ago
rpastuszak | a day ago
delfinom | a day ago
coryrc | a day ago
wafflemaker | 23 hours ago
Additionally, too low angle will make the knife very suspectible to blunting and/or require constant drawing on the sharpening steel¹. Unless you have super high quality steel like Japaneese knifes or some craft smith knifes.
Butcher knifes, to be used along with a chainmail glove, are fine. Just don't test their sharpness on body parts. Or use them to shave a bit of hair, but very carefully.
1: https://www.dick.de/messer/en/sharpening/dickoron-family/dic...
KellyCriterion | 22 hours ago
There is a sentence among cooks: "only with a stub/butt knife you cut yourself" - isnt this true anymore?
wafflemaker | 14 hours ago
BUT!, once the knife is sharp enough for a job, and I mean for comfortable work, not just barely enough, then it's enough.
Giving somebody who never held a sharp knife in their life a knife that is so sharp it will cut their fingers without them feeling it (or even close to that sharp) is like telling somebody to run a coding agent on their system and not in a VM. Things can get bad really fast.
Most people (at least in central Poland where I come from) used semi blunt knives* for everything. Some would have a household knife sharpener or maybe even low quality sharpening steel like the ones you get in a knives set. Maybe they or their grandma had a butcher in the family. They will have nice sharp knives that can cut tomatoes without crushing them.
But with a knife that is sufficiently thin, a throwaway leather belt, a little skill and an hour or more of time, you can get a mirror-like polished blade that is so sharp you can amputate limbs in seconds. Just need to go through the joint at a correct angle.
That's how our grandfathers shaved.
* just realized I was typing plural for knives wrong - with an 'f'
stymaar | a day ago
adamors | a day ago
roarcher | a day ago
VladVladikoff | a day ago
csr86 | a day ago
I have other retina permanently damaged, and suffer from double vision when looking small objects like text.
cortesoft | a day ago
Cancer is a sensible answer.
Sharlin | a day ago
api | a day ago
It looks like one of the optimization edges walked by evolution is a conflict between longevity and the ability to repair and regenerate versus not getting cancer.
It’s easy to make human cell lines immortal, but that will kill you.
One route I can imagine to radical life extension is to start by editing the genome to introduce much more robust but different anti cancer adaptations. Then start turning regenerative stuff and things like telomerase back on.
wafflemaker | 23 hours ago
It's visible in death causes - pretty much all non accident deaths are divided between cancer and heart attack.
A very interesting thing discussed in that podcast was about transgenic (or maybe all?) lab mice bred in USA. These mice are used for initial screening for nearly all drugs. And due to some error and ignorance, unbeknownst to most people using the mice, nearly all mice are predominantly on one side. (Sorry, don't remember which). They just all come from the same family.
Which means that nearly all drugs in the past few decades are skewed toward either giving people cancer or heart attacks.
This is due to mice being extra resistant to one of these and therefore not properly signaling when the drug is likely to give people heart attacks or cancer.
Sorry, don't remember which it is exactly.
themafia | a day ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teratoma
rendaw | 18 hours ago
warumdarum | 11 hours ago
buddhistdude | a day ago
cheema33 | a day ago
I think this is what all healers used. They were all way ahead of their time and clearly misunderstood.
krapp | a day ago
buddhistdude | a day ago
krapp | a day ago
buddhistdude | a day ago
krapp | a day ago
halfcat | 22 hours ago
kennyadam | a day ago
buddhistdude | a day ago
malfist | a day ago
LooseMarmoset | 23 hours ago
in Folio 43a of Tractate Sanhedrin of the Babylonian Talmud as follows:
‘It is taught: On the eve of Passover they hung Yeshu and the crier went forth for forty days beforehand declaring that "[Yeshu] is going to be stoned for practicing witchcraft, for enticing and leading Israel astray.”’
The relevant portions of the Bible record that the Jews of the Sanhedrin acknowledged the signs and miracles but said it was by the power of Satan that he did these things.
ornornor | 11 hours ago
halfcat | 22 hours ago
What’s your evidence for this claim?
ornornor | 11 hours ago
gaiagraphia | 9 hours ago
Vespasian apparently healed blind people in Alexandria. Apollonius of Tyana had a very colourful life performing all kinds of magic. Honi the Circle Maker was bringing the rain over in Judea.
Must've been something in the water other than lead!
casey2 | a day ago
serf | 21 hours ago
a 4 word summary of the entire works of every religion in the world, ever -- the original Pascal's Wager flavored FOMO social networking maneuver.
petesergeant | a day ago
For His own mysterious reasons, He simply doesn’t go in for that stuff, however much intercessionary prayer ends up in His inbox.
malfist | a day ago
gaiagraphia | 9 hours ago
LooseMarmoset | 23 hours ago
abroadwin | a day ago
david-gpu | a day ago
https://as.tufts.edu/biology/tufts-center-regenerative-and-d...
joedevon | a day ago
NotGMan | a day ago
In a frog they were able to grow legit eyes in the gut just by artificialy inducing a certain voltage in that area. No need for any cell transplantations: the voltage really seems to be the only signal needed.
This might also be how it might be done in the future in humans: block scar tissue then induce voltage with the signature of the organ you wish to regrow.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22159581/
gste | a day ago
(Probably for a good reason)
12_throw_away | a day ago
anticensor | 10 hours ago
yehosef | 19 hours ago
kittikitti | 23 hours ago
fsiefken | 14 hours ago