You’re at the hospital, worried what the doctor is about to tell you. Yesterday, your leg was damaged in an accident at work. You have several deep cuts and a possible fracture. Everyone worries that you will lose your leg. Silently, you pray for a miracle.
The doctor finally walks in. He begins to explain what happened, and how bad the damage is. He says that they will have to operate, but then he says something that you did not expect to hear. “We will be able to give you some medicine that will allow your leg to heal without any scaring. It will be as good as new.”
Astonished you wonder how this could be. For as long as you could remember healing from such wounds involved scaring and lasting damage. To be able to fully heal was a miracle you could have never believed was possible. But now, it could be.
Recently scientist Ellen Heber-Katz, lead scientist at Wistar Institute, believes she found a way that they believe may allow humans to heal in ways never before seen with the possibly of regrowing severed limbs. In the mid 90's the Wistar Institute was testing what they call MRL mice. These mice are a kind of "healer" mice that show extraordinary tissue regeneration abilities. This was discovered by the Wistar Institute and led Heber-Katz to study further the regenerating abilities of different animals. "By 1998, the Heber-Katz group had identified areas on five different chromosomes associated with the extraordinary healing." (Fikes)
Through Heber-Katz new line of research, the p21 gene was recently found to be a determining factor in regeneration abilities. The trait of regeneration is one that is found in many amphibians, but was seemingly non-existent in mammals. Not so. It turns out that the p21 gene is what prevents humans and mammals from being able to regenerate. Thus we see that the answer for regeneration lies not in something that we don’t have, but in something that we do have.
Studies done on mice in which the p21 gene was...