I recently read an article titled “Growing it Back” by Matthew Hutson. The piece explores the concept of triggering the human body to grow back missing fingers, arms, legs, and so on.
We are not talking science
fiction. Much of the work revolves
around research conducted by a man named Michael Levin. He, and many others, contend it is not a
matter of “if” we can do this, but a matter of how soon. Among many other things, they have
successfully triggered a frog to regenerate a missing leg.
Most interesting to me is the
way the researchers prompt the regrowth of missing body parts. They are not tinkering with genetics. They simply use electrical impulses at the
cellular level to urge regrowth. Levin
considers what they do as something akin to reprograming the cells.
Weirdly enough, my response to
the article was to shed a few tears.
I thought about my departed
wife. She spent the last sixteen years
of her life disabled and suffering from chronic pain due to a damaged spinal
cord as result of transverse myelitis.
For a while she tried
controlling her pain with a TENS unit. The
TENS (transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) machine injected electrical
impulses into the small of her back by way of electrodes placed on her skin.
For a while that seemed to
work. But soon enough her body selected
pain again.
After finishing the article, I
sat there thinking about some of Uyen’s lousy, especially painful days. How different our lives would have been if a
modified electrical signal could have spared her from that.
—Mitchell Hegman
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