{"id":46715,"date":"2022-01-30T12:41:01","date_gmt":"2022-01-30T20:41:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=46715"},"modified":"2022-01-30T12:41:01","modified_gmt":"2022-01-30T20:41:01","slug":"everyday-erinyes-303","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2022\/01\/30\/everyday-erinyes-303\/","title":{"rendered":"Everyday Erinyes #303"},"content":{"rendered":"

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto<\/span><\/strong>, Megaera<\/strong><\/span>, and Tisiphone<\/span><\/strong>. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”<\/p>\n

Science. Science deniers. This is not new. The two kinds of people have existed side by side for literally thousands of years. Taking one fact as an example, consider the “flat earth.” Scientests have known the earth ws not flat, but instead a more of less spherical shape, as early as the 5th century B.C.E. I say scientists have known, not that everyone has known. Galileo ws threatened with excommunication and improsonment as recently as the 1600s C.E. for suggesting that the earth mpved around the sun. (Yet 200 years earlier, Dante’s Inferno\/ Purgatorio\/ Paradiso was based on the premise of a spherical earth, through which he descended to the lowest levels of Hell at the center (he did get the temperature wrong – he pictured it as frozen – he wasn’t a scientist himself, but he must have listened to some) and then ascended through the levels of purgatory to come out into paradise on the other side. Today most people have grasped at least the concept of the solar system, and yet some still have not, and consider th earth to be flat.<\/p>\n

Medical advances have a bad name in some circles because testing advances can be problematic. Of course no one would consider trying an idea on humans before doing animal testing, which brings up the question of how do you get informed consent from a frog? There might be a way, but we certainly don’t know what it is.<\/p>\n

But I really find it exciting what this particular group of scientests is trying to do – and I have to believe that TC also would be excited – peersonally. Of course they are not going to get results usable by humans in my lifetime – nor in the lifetime of anyone here – and, discouraging as it is I have to wonder if the human race itself will last long enough to get results usable by humans.<\/p>\n

But it’s still exciting.
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A new treatment helped frogs regenerate their amputated legs \u2013 taking science one step closer to helping people regrow their body parts,\u00a0too<\/h1>\n
Reactivating the signals cells use to regenerate could help patients regrow lost limbs and damaged tissue.
\nGeorge Jones\/Stockbyte via Getty Images<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Michael Levin<\/a>, Tufts University<\/a><\/em>; David Kaplan<\/a>, Tufts University<\/a><\/em>, and Nirosha Murugan<\/a>, Algoma University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Our bodies connect us to the world. When people lose parts of their bodies to disease or traumatic injury, they often feel that they\u2019ve lost a part of who they are, even experiencing a grief akin to losing a loved one<\/a>. Their sense of personal loss is justified because unlike salamanders<\/a> or snarky comic book characters like Deadpool<\/a>, adult human tissues generally do not regenerate \u2013 limb loss is permanent and irreversible.<\/p>\n

Or is it?<\/p>\n

While there have been significant advances in prosthetic and bionic technologies<\/a> to replace lost limbs, they cannot yet restore a sense of touch, minimize the sensation of phantom pains or match the capabilities of natural limbs. Without reconstructing the limb itself, a person won\u2019t be able to feel the touch of a loved one or the warmth of the sun.<\/p>\n

We are researchers in regenerative<\/a> and developmental<\/a> biology and biomedical engineering<\/a>. Our recent study in the journal Science Advances<\/a> showed that just 24 hours of a treatment we designed is enough to regenerate fully functional and touch-sensitive limbs in frogs.<\/p>\n

Kickstarting regeneration<\/h2>\n

During very early development, cells that will eventually become limbs and organs arrange themselves into precise anatomical structures using a set of chemical, biomechanical and electrical signals<\/a>. In considering ways to regenerate limbs, we reasoned that it would be much easier to ask cells to repeat what they already did during early development. So we looked for ways to trigger the \u201cbuild whatever normally was here\u201d signal for cells at the site of a wound.<\/p>\n

One of the major challenges in doing this, however, is figuring out how to create an environment that encourages the body to regenerate instead of forming scars<\/a>. While scars help protect injured tissue from further damage, they also change the cellular environment in ways that prevent regeneration.<\/p>\n