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DARPA Sponsoring Limb Regeneration Research
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Sep 24, 2006 04:27 PM
from the regrow-the-ungrowable dept.
from the regrow-the-ungrowable dept.
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."
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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...
Parent
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells have copy verification and repair machinery which drastically reduce replication errors.
Re:Stub. (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
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Re:Stub. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Stub. (Score:5, Informative)
b) is easy, you can shut off telomerase for a while(http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articleren
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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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
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
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
Parent
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.
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
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
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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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.
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.
can we grow some extra limbs in advance? (Score:4, Funny)
Potential for other applications (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Yes, but don't be surprised if people look at you funny -- or maybe that should be funnier.
KFG
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?
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.
How about some hair regeneration? (Score:5, Funny)
Thanks.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
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.
Time for the new DARPA challenge! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
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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