Aging and a near degenerative diseases. Do these new techniques or technologies potentially open a way to extend our life spans, or our alertness life spans? That's the hope. It's hard to speculate responsibly in that direction but i think th in the broader hope of regenerative medicine is exactly that. If we can maintain our tissues and kin conditions and fix our brains, or something goes wrong, then we can improve our life span. And it can improved our life quality.
Biological organisms are pretty good at healing themselves, but their abilities fall short in crucial ways. Planaria can be cut into pieces, and each piece will regrow into an entire organism; but for most advanced animals, loss of a limb becomes a permanent condition. But why should that necessarily be so, if an organism’s genome knows what it’s supposed to look like? Lea Goentoro’s lab has recently produced surprising results that indicate that it’s easier than you might think to coax animals into regenerating limbs.
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Lea Goentoro received her Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Princeton University. She is currently Professor of Biology at Caltech. Her research involves how biological systems function and develop across a variety of scales, including perception, organization, and self-repair.
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