Monday, November 29, 2010
Biomimicry is COOL!
okay so imagine losing your favorite body part and never seeing it again. It would suck,right? After taking a few days to think about what would be the best freakin thing ever I finally realized what it was. THE ABILITY TO GROW BODY PARTS BACK LIKE A STARFISH!!!! Imagine your favorite loved one getting into a horrible car crash and losing all their limbs. Who cares??? They will just grow them right back like a starfish! This would be the best thing ever because it would make the human race better by making the human body more durable. All we would need to do is find a way to get some starfish genes inside the human body some way or breed humans with starfish.
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I'm sorry to delude you, but it probably won't work, unless you act at the embryo level. Starfishes are not exactly made like humans, and their development is very different, you will not solve this problem just by breeding a couple of genes.
ReplyDeleteIn biology, everything is linked to everything, and not being able to grow back a limb is a very basic property of humans, linked with the very first stages of its life. Do you know that salamanders are also able to grow back limbs ? The drawback of this incredible property is a very short lifetime, because this incredible power is tightly linked to the premature development of cancers... Basically, you have to choose between being able to regrow your limbs / organs and die early (very early, maybe a few months) of cancer, or not growing them, but having a much lower chance to die of cancer...
But the main issue is ethical ? What do you think of the idea of breeding humans ? It's very dangerous to make these techniques available... Imagine that someone would say, like in 1939, that only blond people with blue eyes should be accepted, and decides to breed all the human genomes so that only blond people with blue eyes can live, and all the others should not even be born...
Biomimicry is quite a different thing than genetic engineering, and should be limited to tochnology. This kind of approach is called regenerative medicine, and it arises a lot of questions, ethical and technical...