fragmentate writes "Wired News is reporting: 'In response to the hundreds of soldiers coming home from war with missing arms or legs, Darpa is spending millions of dollars to help scientists learn how people might one day regenerate their own limbs. Prosthetics are getting better all the time, but they will never be as good as the limbs we were born with. So two teams of scientists at 10 institutions across the country are competing to regrow the first mammalian limb ... The researchers' first milestone is to generate a blastema &mdash; a mass of cells able to develop into various organs or body parts &mdash; in a mammal.' Apparently this is a relatively new area of research, even Wikipedia's stub on blastemas is very terse."</img>


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That would be great! If the U.S. gives grants for this discovery and they find the answer, the regenerated limbs should be given free to the soldiers that were doing as ordered by their country.

Mammals can't naturally regenerate limbs or digits beyond the fetal stage. Amphibians like salamanders and newts, however, can regrow limbs, eyes and even spinal cords. So the scientists are on a hunt for the molecular signals responsible for controlling that regenerative ability.
"We're looking for what genes get turned on and off to make one regenerative and one not," Badylak said. "We can regenerate as a fetus. We know the potential is there, but it's a matter of unlocking that potential (in adults)."

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I could use a real knee again!

Dave