I Wish I Wish ... Regeneration

We cannot reverse engineer the power of regeneration we see in shark teeth, lizard tails and octopus arms.

Stem cell research is the effort to persuade nature to build for us what we know we cannot build. Imagine the high level of skill required to invent the power of regeneration.

We see the lizard can lose its tail then grow it back.

An octopus can drop an arm to distract a predator, but later it can grow a new arm.

The shark will lose teeth and then will grow back new teeth. All of this is called "regeneration".

If only you could go to the dentist, plant a seed and within months grow

new teeth like the shark can. Wow, that would be fantastic technology, but we do not yet have that power or knowledge.

So far, we do not have a good theory on how we could ever do such a thing. A tooth, like everything else in nature, is more complex than we expected until we begin to try and duplicate it.

None of us will live long enough to witness man regenerating a hand from his own man-made manufactured parts. To grow back a hand with nerves, blood vessels, bones, muscles, tendons, fingerprints and healing skin that can also build a callus when stressed with friction. No prosthetic comes close.

It may not be impossible to someday build a hand like the ones that grow in the fetal stage, but it is absolutely impossible today.

But when you think about that fetal stage construction when the hand is generated, not one, but two matching yet opposite hands. So such a hand IS POSSIBLE to build, because most of us have two. We cannot claim it is impossible to build, just impossible to be built by man. Our hands are generated, not regenerated.

The wisdom to regenerate, does however exist in our own human body with our liver. Part of our liver can regenerate, but we don’t know how to regrow livers, lungs, hearts or brains. We are working with stem cells which do things we have not figured out to do ourselves.

Our current science is groping for ways to do what we clearly witness, but are not able to do. We cannot make teeth or hands. We cannot reverse engineer teeth or hands except cosmetically, like a plastic plant that neither grows, blooms or reproduces. We cannot comprehend how it all works.

Mankind has a great wish to regenerate everything that breaks or gets old.

We don’t know how to grow the things with which we are endowed in our mother’s womb.

We cannot pretend there is no genius here. We cannot fake that this elusive genius technology is the fruit of mindless acts. Despite all our best efforts to reverse engineer the biology that astounds us, we cannot attain it.

Rather than state it beyond our intellect, many educated people call it magic by claiming it is an accident, which is calling it "below our intellect".

I do not call it magic or an accident, but easily recognize this as superiority that I spontaneously admire.