Regenerative Medicine

Can we grow new hands and limbs after having them amputated? Can we heal ourselves and regrow parts of our body that have been damaged one way or another?It seems like the answer is yes. In this TED Talk by Alan Rusell, he describes how engineered tissues can start regenerating themselves thus growing into new body parts as normally as a newt regenerates its own body parts. It seems that this ‘auto-healing’ mechanism is present in our DNA during our very early stages of life but is lost as we grow older. Specifically Alan mentions in his speech that a 6 month old baby will regrow a finger if it is for any reason amputated, but this capability is lost by the age of 5. So regenerative medicine aims at ‘waking up’ this mechanism in our body irrespective of our age. In the talk you will see a woman’s completely damaged foot by diabetes how it regenerated after treatment and a man’s amputated finger grown back after about 4 weeks. I know that all this sounds completely science fiction but they are already doing it.Check Alan’s speech and you’ll get an idea of what the future holds.