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- Open Thread – 30 August 2024
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- SpaceX is about to send four people on a wild — and risky — mission into the radiation belts.
Long way off from growing limbs but big things start from small beginnings. I will say the science we have now ain’t all that bad. I should have lost an arm in Afghanistan but the Brooke Army Doctor saved it. He said he cursed his way through the surgery and cursed all through recovery but I got the damn think back fully functional. 100 years ago it gets the bone saw and I die of infection.
The miracle and/or natural achievement lies in the cells of the frog’s stump. The scientific achievement lies in creating the right conditions for those cells to begin their magic. Experiments with flatworms, whose cells are masters at this regeneration, show that things like variations in magnetic field strength affects the cells at the atomic spin level which affects the cellular production of ROS (reactive oxygen species) which affects the rate and direction of the regeneration process. This could lead to another way to aid wound healing and cancer treatment at the atomic level. This regenerated frog leg experiment could do the same, find a way to encourage cells to perform their own magic.
Beyond the practical potential of all this, there is the simple wonder of the whole phenomenon. I enjoy watching the many lizards roaming around my front porch. Like a lot of lizards, they can lose their tails and regrow them. When I see several of my lizards without tails, I know it’s time to look for snakes. (As the self designated lord protector of the five lined skinks, I catch and move those snakes a good distance from the area.) Many of these skinks have a beautiful shade of blue on their tails and their undulations are graceful and mesmerizing. It’s like watching Shakira. I know my lizards and I know when some of them lose and regenerate their tails. The regrown tails don’t have the same beautiful blue coloration, but their undulations remain as graceful and mesmerizing as the original tails. It’s indeed a natural wonder.
Regenerated frog legs and skink tails present no philosophical dilemmas. Divided and regenerated flatworms, however, do… at least to someone who retains vestiges of the old ways and sees living spirits everywhere. Do these regenerated flatworms have separate spirits or do they share the same spirit? What happens when our biological technology gets so good that we can clone a sheep or even a human without the assistance of a host egg cell? When does ensoulment occur in that case?
TTG
What happens when our biological technology gets so good that we can clone a sheep or even a human without the assistance of a host egg cell? This:
When I first read these words they were an entertaining fantasy. Now they read as an accurate description of the not too distant future.
Some years ago I read a book called The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life, by Robert Becker, who was a researcher into the therapeutic uses of low intensity DC electric fields. One of the chapters of that book discussed his experiments on regrowing limbs from stumps in salamanders with controlled electric fields. One wonders what could be achieved by combining this multi-drug cocktail with those controlled electric fields.
Here is a link to that book:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/277641.The_Body_Electric