Is There a Body Repairing Ability?

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The body has enormous latent capacity to fix itself, as long as we give it the right raw ingredients. We don't need to go in there with a scalpl and a micrometer or whatever, and carefully fix it cell by cell. Just give it food and stand back, and the body will fix itself. It's fascinating tweat the whole body, and yet it knows specifically to repairs.

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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