May 6, 2010 • 15 mins
According to Richard J. Goss, "If there were no regeneration, there could be no life. If everything regenerated, then there could be no death." But how does this process work? Join Robert and Allison as they explore the science behind regeneration.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
works dot com. Hey guys, and welcome to the podcast.
This is Alison madam Ilk the science that are how
stuff works dot com. And this is Robert Lamb, science
writer at how stuff works dot com. Today we're talking
(00:23):
about the process of regeneration. And this topic comes to
you compliments of one Rob Chef, my colleague of ours
at how stuff works, and Rob send us a story
about a jellyfish, particular kind of jellyfish that can be
immortal essentially. Yeah, it's like that old saying immortality was
wasted on the jellyfish. Yeah, yeah, that old saying. Yeah. So,
(00:45):
the definition of regeneration is um the ability to regrow
lost tissue or destroyed organs or parts, and can be
routine or it can be sustained after injury. And the
regeneration is truly an amazing process. I mean, lest you
not regarded such, let me just regalue with a quote.
If there were no regeneration, there could be no life.
(01:05):
If everything regenerated, then there could be no death. And
that's the quote from the developmental biologist Richard Jay goss Um.
And goss was a pioneer in the field of developmental
biology and regeneration. Gossa taught up Brown for decades until
his death ironically from cancer actually, and a lot of
cellular and tissue growth. So that's pretty interesting. And Goss
(01:29):
was actually interested in antler regeneration and he published a
book called Deer Antlers in I was harping on this earlier,
but it's like, this is the guy, this guy's life work,
and he's just so passionate about and he just calls
the book dear Antlers just dear Antlers. Just sometimes the
topic speaks for itself, Robert, but not the complete Dear
Antlers or amazing or my life with Dear Antlers something.
(01:51):
I don't know. It just seems like a very gland title. Well,
Gas was a scientist, perhaps he felt no need for embellishment.
Unless the cover was a picture of himself with deer antlers,
then I would forgive the title. So anyway, Goss was
one of the main men in a pioneering regeneration um.
But there are some other pioneers in the field as well. Yeah,
(02:11):
I mean this is uh, the idea of regeneration is
is not know people have been noticing this for a
while Aristotle was writing about it, and if you go
back to the Greek myths, you might remember a certain
titan by the name of Prometheus, the firebringer um. And
his punishment UM was that he was chained to a
big rock and eagle would swoop down, eat his liver,
(02:33):
fly off, and then what happens, liver grows right back.
It's one of those eternal punishment type deals, but with
the bonus of livery generation um. And then also in greeknests,
you have the hydra, which is the multi headed serpent,
and every time you cut off one of its heads,
what happens, two of them grow back. That's correct, to
grow back in its place, um. And Hercules killed the
hydra correct, yeah, because he would, if I remember it correctly,
(02:56):
he had he realized, Hey, I just need to bring
a sword and a worch, and so every time he
cut off a head, he'd he'd cauterized the wound, burn it,
you know, shut. And so after a while you just
had this monster that was nothing but stumps, and I
guess it was dead. But it's a mythological creature, so
who knows. Who knows how these things work? As it
turns out, though, hydra eventually became a real thing, or
(03:18):
rather we applied that name to a living creature. Yeah,
it's a little tensicle microscopic animal. Yeah, I remember looking
at him in science class. This was discovered by Abraham
trimbley Um in seventeen forty and he picked the name
for it because every time one of the heads is
cut off, you can grow a new one, and as
it turns out, the human liver can also regenerate itself.
(03:40):
But that was an old Abraham different Abraham was main
really interested in the hydas. Then seventeen twelve you had
another guy that was really interested in this. So with
the last name renew and I can't say the rest
of it. You're gonna have to jump in with your French. Yeah,
I believe his name is a renee Antoine Fair. So
he made the first scientific observations of regeneration in crayfish,
(04:03):
which I was kind of surprised to hear that they
could regenerate because my wife's um of Cajun descent, so
I've never seen a crayfish have really a good chance
at surviving anything, just right in the pot. Yeah, So
back then a regeneration actually caught on with the public,
and according to Bruce Carlson, who published a textbook on
regenerative biology, the public just you know, went wild for
(04:27):
this concept. And so all of a sudden you have
members of the French nobility wandering out into their gardens
and chopping the heads off snails just to see the
poor snails grow new one. And I'm glad that's where
that story went, because when you first told me about it,
I had this vision of, um, you know, a French
noble has been getting all excited about regeneration, just hacking
off loombs, willy nilly, you know. Yeah, the French evidently
(04:48):
have a propensity for hacking off stuff, the poor snails.
So there are other examples of limb regeneration among animals. There's,
of course, the aforementioned hydra, which is that you know,
small to of their freshwater polyp, and the crayfish, which
we just talked about. There's the starfish. Do you remember
that scene in life that we just read about, Yeah,
where the crab snatches one of the limbs away. Yeah,
(05:10):
the starfish is just sitting there and minding its own
business and along comes this kid king crab. Don't don't,
don't do, and he just wrenches off the appendage. Well
you should. I mean, he's got he's got plenty to spare,
so I might as well grab one. Yeah, especially since
the starfish can can regrow them. Yeah, and this is um,
you can. You can kind of hack a starfish to
pieces as I recall, and each one will become a
(05:30):
new starfish pretty much. Did you do this in science class? Um? No,
but I remember hearing about it. We didn't have access
to starfish. But it's just like the SORCER's a press,
you know, SORCER's apprentice. Tell me Walt Disney Fantasia, Mickey
Mouse in a wizard costume. Mickey Mouse is practicing your generation. No,
he's practicing sorcery. But he has a there's like a
(05:52):
broom that gets chopped to pieces. Then all the little
they've turned all these little brooms and start marching everywhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I do you remember that? Now? That's magical regeneration. That's
a whole different can of worms. Speaking of worms, yeah,
the ability to regenerate, that's a that's a good example.
And so regeneration is common among invertebrates, or at least
(06:13):
more common than it is among vertebrates like us, like
as humans, but a mind. Vertebrates. Salamanders are the kings
of regeneration. Yeah, they can like regenerate things like their
retina's right, I mean, it's just yeah, they can regenerate
a ton of stuff like their limbs and their tail,
their jaws there, and then yeah, eye tissues that you're saying,
that's one they had to move underground because the French
(06:35):
people were just trying to chop them up like crazy. Yeah,
they can even regenerate parts of the heart. And then
frogs they can they can survive from a broken heart then, right,
I guess I guess right, Yeah, his heart and he's
back out on the scene the next night. I'm sorry,
I'm getting a stuft topic, but anyway, you're to other animals, um.
And then, according to Scientific American, the embryos of some
(06:58):
mammals may be able to replace developing limb buds. But
this happens way, way, way way before the mammals are born,
right and then after they're born. That's so we humans
are capable of regeneration to just not necessarily limb regeneration.
But if you think about it, we're i mean human
limbs aren't really all that different from a salamanders, according
to the Scientific American story that I read. I mean,
(07:20):
they both have bones and muscles and tendons and nerves
and blood vessels and all this kind of things that
make a limb necessary. Um, mine are pretty pasty and
are a little freckled. Yeah, but if a salamander were
to lose a limb, it can regrow over and over
and over again. In fact, they think that this process
of regrowth can happen indefinitely, which is kind of crazy.
(07:42):
Whereas we just form a scar and that's the end
of the process by a peg lag and we're good
to go. So, yeah, what are the types of regeneration? Yeah,
as exciting as getting a whole new limb is as
exciting as getting a whole new limb, Maybe regeneration and
compasses is a lot more. In fact, you're probably doing
um little or a lot of regeneration right now while
(08:03):
you're listening to this. And I don't just mean the
salamanders out there. Um. So, here are a few different
ways that regeneration occurs in animals. Um, do you want
to take the first time? Yeah? Okay, So, according to Carlson. Um,
there's physiological regeneration, and that's just you know, think of
it as your body replacing worn out body parts. Yeah,
(08:23):
wearing out and building itself back up again. Yeah. It
can be as simple as replacing blood. You know, so
you just give blood, you know, you have to replace
the blood, right. Yeah. It's like they're you know, people
often you know, point that it's like you're not even
like the same person after a certain amount of time,
you know, because you've replaced so many different cells. Al Right,
I remember you talking about this. This is fascinating and uh,
(08:44):
and some people even take the extra mile and like
sort of talk about the how the mind changes and
about how you're not even the same you're not the
same person physically anymore after a certain amount of time,
and you're not the same person, uh you know mentally, uh,
constantly changing, constantly regenerating. Right, So the regeneration kind of
leading to this whole new composition of the body, and
(09:05):
that's the whole new person. Yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting.
Like I like to point out to you sort of
in a way, you're sort of building that new body
out of the things you buy the grocery store. So
which is my whole argument for why would you buy
a whole bunch of crappy food? You know, why don't
you buy a whole bunch of you know whatever kind
of crappy food is not in some way you know,
(09:25):
right right right? Well food food arguments aside. Um regeneration
also happens, you know, just on a very basic level
with your skin cells. You know, think about it. You're
constantly shedding skin cells. Did you forgear that fact about?
You know, if you have a mattress for a couple
of years, what percentage of that mattress is basically just
your dead skin cells filling it up? Yeah, well there's
(09:46):
a crazy fact out there, but I can't remember exactly
what percentages, Like your mattress just becomes your skin cells
or you might you need to check when you buy
a mattress because it's not composed only of skin cells.
Before we're not the ladder um. There's another form of
regeneration called hypertrophy, and this one is when an oregan
gets bigger to compensate for um. So you lost a
(10:09):
kidney or donated to kidney, so then you just have
one and it's got a whole lot more work to
do so it gets bigger. UM. They've also documented this
taking place with the lungs. UM livers. Pancreas can also
experience some regeneration if they're damaged. This reminds me a
little bit of that phenomena they've talked about in UM.
People who lose the sense, you know, visually impaired people,
(10:31):
and you know the other senses compensating for that. I
wonder like you you go blind, you're hearing gets better. UM,
you go deaf, you're smelling gets better. So the final
kind of regeneration is called reparative regeneration. And you might
find this happening and your muscle, bone, and your skin,
your heart, tissues, anything along those lines. And this is
also where that handy ability to form new limbs would fall.
(10:54):
And Um, this happens with courtesy of a blastema. And
the blastema is just a grouping of undifferentiated cells that
are capable of growth and later differentiation. And so by
differentiation we just mean you know it's going to go on.
It starts off life, maybe without a purpose, it's a
blank slate, and then it goes on to become a
heart cell. Say that's all we mean by differentiation. Well,
(11:15):
let's bring it all back to jellyfish. What about Tatopsis ah.
Tatopsis s. Neutricula is a particular species of jellyfish that
maybe the only animal in the world that's a maybe
has something in common with vampires, and that is it's
a it may live forever and how many do that? Well,
it's capable of cycling, uh, from an adult to to
(11:35):
an immature stage, the polyp stage, like a frog being
able to rewind to tadpole form and then advance into
frog again then rewinded the tadpole form, that kind of thing. Yeah,
So as you can imagine, if you have this kind
of ability, your numbers, your population numbers of this particular
species would probably spike, as they are. In fact with
Totopsis neutricula they were found originally in the Caribbean, I believe,
(11:59):
but now they've spread to waters all over the world.
And so the key in this process that allows um
a mature adult to cycle back into this immature poly
up stage lies in a cellular process called trends differentiation,
which we've just kind of touched on a little bit. So, yeah,
differentiation is the process by which an unspecified imbryonic cell
(12:19):
acquires the features of a specialized cell, such as a
hard liver or muscle cell, all right, and it's controlled
by an interaction of the cells genes with physical or
chemical properties. Trans Differentiation is a little different in this
adult stem cells can differentiate into cell types of scene
(12:40):
and organs or tissues other than those expected from the
cells predicted lineage. So like brains, like brain stem cells
might differentiate into blood cells or blood forming cells, um
into brain cells, et cetera. Yeah, I mean it's kind
of amazing. Jellyfish typically die after the propagate, but this
particular jellyfish can just i mean, keep on reproducing and
(13:03):
you know, carrying on its life forever. I mean, as
a mom, I find that prospect a little horrifying, the
fact that, you know, perhaps you might have to go
through childbirth numerous times. Not the jellyfish in fact go
through childbirth, but just comparing it to my own human
perspective on the reproduction cycle, Yeah, it's kind of like
it's almost like they're going through just repetitive midlife crisis.
(13:27):
You know. It's like, oh, I'm getting old, I'm gonna
act like a young jellyfish again. But they actually become
a young jellyfish. But the interesting thing is they have
no idea what how this happens. They don't know the
mechanism behind the life cycle. They know that cells are
able to turn from one type into another, from general
to specific, from specific to general, and keep going back
and forth, but if they don't know why, and it's
not very I mean, ultimately, it's not like a sustainable thing.
(13:49):
Like you mentioned the vampires um our own. Josh Clark
did a blog post a while back where some scientists
like sit down and look at the whole vampire thing,
and they're like, look, it could never happen because obviously
you'd end up with more vamps, so many more vampires
than humans. It wouldn't be any humans to feed on,
and you just have vampires and they'd starve or whatever. Right,
It's not so immortality is just not sustainable. Sustainable. Yeah, So, I,
(14:13):
for one, I'm very interested in regeneration and its prospects
for medicine and stem cells in the lake in the future.
So I would love to do a follow up podcast
on this. Let us know if you guys are interested
um in a in a podcast also on regeneration in
the meantime, come check out our blogs, where we'll keep
you up to date on whatever we're podcasting about for
the week and uh any other interesting scientific tidbits that
(14:34):
cross our desk. And if you guys have a question
about immortality, vampires, jellyfish, or regeneration in fact, send us
an email at science stuff at how stuff works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics
because at how stuff works dot com. Want more how
(14:57):
stuff works, check out our blogs on the how soworth
dot com home page.
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
works dot com. Hey guys, and welcome to the podcast.
This is Alison madam Ilk the science that are how
stuff works dot com. And this is Robert Lamb, science
writer at how stuff works dot com. Today we're talking
(00:23):
about the process of regeneration. And this topic comes to
you compliments of one Rob Chef, my colleague of ours
at how stuff works, and Rob send us a story
about a jellyfish, particular kind of jellyfish that can be
immortal essentially. Yeah, it's like that old saying immortality was
wasted on the jellyfish. Yeah, yeah, that old saying. Yeah. So,
(00:45):
the definition of regeneration is um the ability to regrow
lost tissue or destroyed organs or parts, and can be
routine or it can be sustained after injury. And the
regeneration is truly an amazing process. I mean, lest you
not regarded such, let me just regalue with a quote.
If there were no regeneration, there could be no life.
(01:05):
If everything regenerated, then there could be no death. And
that's the quote from the developmental biologist Richard Jay goss Um.
And goss was a pioneer in the field of developmental
biology and regeneration. Gossa taught up Brown for decades until
his death ironically from cancer actually, and a lot of
cellular and tissue growth. So that's pretty interesting. And Goss
(01:29):
was actually interested in antler regeneration and he published a
book called Deer Antlers in I was harping on this earlier,
but it's like, this is the guy, this guy's life work,
and he's just so passionate about and he just calls
the book dear Antlers just dear Antlers. Just sometimes the
topic speaks for itself, Robert, but not the complete Dear
Antlers or amazing or my life with Dear Antlers something.
(01:51):
I don't know. It just seems like a very gland title. Well,
Gas was a scientist, perhaps he felt no need for embellishment.
Unless the cover was a picture of himself with deer antlers,
then I would forgive the title. So anyway, Goss was
one of the main men in a pioneering regeneration um.
But there are some other pioneers in the field as well. Yeah,
(02:11):
I mean this is uh, the idea of regeneration is
is not know people have been noticing this for a
while Aristotle was writing about it, and if you go
back to the Greek myths, you might remember a certain
titan by the name of Prometheus, the firebringer um. And
his punishment UM was that he was chained to a
big rock and eagle would swoop down, eat his liver,
(02:33):
fly off, and then what happens, liver grows right back.
It's one of those eternal punishment type deals, but with
the bonus of livery generation um. And then also in greeknests,
you have the hydra, which is the multi headed serpent,
and every time you cut off one of its heads,
what happens, two of them grow back. That's correct, to
grow back in its place, um. And Hercules killed the
hydra correct, yeah, because he would, if I remember it correctly,
(02:56):
he had he realized, Hey, I just need to bring
a sword and a worch, and so every time he
cut off a head, he'd he'd cauterized the wound, burn it,
you know, shut. And so after a while you just
had this monster that was nothing but stumps, and I
guess it was dead. But it's a mythological creature, so
who knows. Who knows how these things work? As it
turns out, though, hydra eventually became a real thing, or
(03:18):
rather we applied that name to a living creature. Yeah,
it's a little tensicle microscopic animal. Yeah, I remember looking
at him in science class. This was discovered by Abraham
trimbley Um in seventeen forty and he picked the name
for it because every time one of the heads is
cut off, you can grow a new one, and as
it turns out, the human liver can also regenerate itself.
(03:40):
But that was an old Abraham different Abraham was main
really interested in the hydas. Then seventeen twelve you had
another guy that was really interested in this. So with
the last name renew and I can't say the rest
of it. You're gonna have to jump in with your French. Yeah,
I believe his name is a renee Antoine Fair. So
he made the first scientific observations of regeneration in crayfish,
(04:03):
which I was kind of surprised to hear that they
could regenerate because my wife's um of Cajun descent, so
I've never seen a crayfish have really a good chance
at surviving anything, just right in the pot. Yeah, So
back then a regeneration actually caught on with the public,
and according to Bruce Carlson, who published a textbook on
regenerative biology, the public just you know, went wild for
(04:27):
this concept. And so all of a sudden you have
members of the French nobility wandering out into their gardens
and chopping the heads off snails just to see the
poor snails grow new one. And I'm glad that's where
that story went, because when you first told me about it,
I had this vision of, um, you know, a French
noble has been getting all excited about regeneration, just hacking
off loombs, willy nilly, you know. Yeah, the French evidently
(04:48):
have a propensity for hacking off stuff, the poor snails.
So there are other examples of limb regeneration among animals. There's,
of course, the aforementioned hydra, which is that you know,
small to of their freshwater polyp, and the crayfish, which
we just talked about. There's the starfish. Do you remember
that scene in life that we just read about, Yeah,
where the crab snatches one of the limbs away. Yeah,
(05:10):
the starfish is just sitting there and minding its own
business and along comes this kid king crab. Don't don't,
don't do, and he just wrenches off the appendage. Well
you should. I mean, he's got he's got plenty to spare,
so I might as well grab one. Yeah, especially since
the starfish can can regrow them. Yeah, and this is um,
you can. You can kind of hack a starfish to
pieces as I recall, and each one will become a
(05:30):
new starfish pretty much. Did you do this in science class? Um? No,
but I remember hearing about it. We didn't have access
to starfish. But it's just like the SORCER's a press,
you know, SORCER's apprentice. Tell me Walt Disney Fantasia, Mickey
Mouse in a wizard costume. Mickey Mouse is practicing your generation. No,
he's practicing sorcery. But he has a there's like a
(05:52):
broom that gets chopped to pieces. Then all the little
they've turned all these little brooms and start marching everywhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I do you remember that? Now? That's magical regeneration. That's
a whole different can of worms. Speaking of worms, yeah,
the ability to regenerate, that's a that's a good example.
And so regeneration is common among invertebrates, or at least
(06:13):
more common than it is among vertebrates like us, like
as humans, but a mind. Vertebrates. Salamanders are the kings
of regeneration. Yeah, they can like regenerate things like their
retina's right, I mean, it's just yeah, they can regenerate
a ton of stuff like their limbs and their tail,
their jaws there, and then yeah, eye tissues that you're saying,
that's one they had to move underground because the French
(06:35):
people were just trying to chop them up like crazy. Yeah,
they can even regenerate parts of the heart. And then
frogs they can they can survive from a broken heart then, right,
I guess I guess right, Yeah, his heart and he's
back out on the scene the next night. I'm sorry,
I'm getting a stuft topic, but anyway, you're to other animals, um.
And then, according to Scientific American, the embryos of some
(06:58):
mammals may be able to replace developing limb buds. But
this happens way, way, way way before the mammals are born,
right and then after they're born. That's so we humans
are capable of regeneration to just not necessarily limb regeneration.
But if you think about it, we're i mean human
limbs aren't really all that different from a salamanders, according
to the Scientific American story that I read. I mean,
(07:20):
they both have bones and muscles and tendons and nerves
and blood vessels and all this kind of things that
make a limb necessary. Um, mine are pretty pasty and
are a little freckled. Yeah, but if a salamander were
to lose a limb, it can regrow over and over
and over again. In fact, they think that this process
of regrowth can happen indefinitely, which is kind of crazy.
(07:42):
Whereas we just form a scar and that's the end
of the process by a peg lag and we're good
to go. So, yeah, what are the types of regeneration? Yeah,
as exciting as getting a whole new limb is as
exciting as getting a whole new limb, Maybe regeneration and
compasses is a lot more. In fact, you're probably doing
um little or a lot of regeneration right now while
(08:03):
you're listening to this. And I don't just mean the
salamanders out there. Um. So, here are a few different
ways that regeneration occurs in animals. Um, do you want
to take the first time? Yeah? Okay, So, according to Carlson. Um,
there's physiological regeneration, and that's just you know, think of
it as your body replacing worn out body parts. Yeah,
(08:23):
wearing out and building itself back up again. Yeah. It
can be as simple as replacing blood. You know, so
you just give blood, you know, you have to replace
the blood, right. Yeah. It's like they're you know, people
often you know, point that it's like you're not even
like the same person after a certain amount of time,
you know, because you've replaced so many different cells. Al Right,
I remember you talking about this. This is fascinating and uh,
(08:44):
and some people even take the extra mile and like
sort of talk about the how the mind changes and
about how you're not even the same you're not the
same person physically anymore after a certain amount of time,
and you're not the same person, uh you know mentally, uh,
constantly changing, constantly regenerating. Right, So the regeneration kind of
leading to this whole new composition of the body, and
(09:05):
that's the whole new person. Yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting.
Like I like to point out to you sort of
in a way, you're sort of building that new body
out of the things you buy the grocery store. So
which is my whole argument for why would you buy
a whole bunch of crappy food? You know, why don't
you buy a whole bunch of you know whatever kind
of crappy food is not in some way you know,
(09:25):
right right right? Well food food arguments aside. Um regeneration
also happens, you know, just on a very basic level
with your skin cells. You know, think about it. You're
constantly shedding skin cells. Did you forgear that fact about?
You know, if you have a mattress for a couple
of years, what percentage of that mattress is basically just
your dead skin cells filling it up? Yeah, well there's
(09:46):
a crazy fact out there, but I can't remember exactly
what percentages, Like your mattress just becomes your skin cells
or you might you need to check when you buy
a mattress because it's not composed only of skin cells.
Before we're not the ladder um. There's another form of
regeneration called hypertrophy, and this one is when an oregan
gets bigger to compensate for um. So you lost a
(10:09):
kidney or donated to kidney, so then you just have
one and it's got a whole lot more work to
do so it gets bigger. UM. They've also documented this
taking place with the lungs. UM livers. Pancreas can also
experience some regeneration if they're damaged. This reminds me a
little bit of that phenomena they've talked about in UM.
People who lose the sense, you know, visually impaired people,
(10:31):
and you know the other senses compensating for that. I
wonder like you you go blind, you're hearing gets better. UM,
you go deaf, you're smelling gets better. So the final
kind of regeneration is called reparative regeneration. And you might
find this happening and your muscle, bone, and your skin,
your heart, tissues, anything along those lines. And this is
also where that handy ability to form new limbs would fall.
(10:54):
And Um, this happens with courtesy of a blastema. And
the blastema is just a grouping of undifferentiated cells that
are capable of growth and later differentiation. And so by
differentiation we just mean you know it's going to go on.
It starts off life, maybe without a purpose, it's a
blank slate, and then it goes on to become a
heart cell. Say that's all we mean by differentiation. Well,
(11:15):
let's bring it all back to jellyfish. What about Tatopsis ah.
Tatopsis s. Neutricula is a particular species of jellyfish that
maybe the only animal in the world that's a maybe
has something in common with vampires, and that is it's
a it may live forever and how many do that? Well,
it's capable of cycling, uh, from an adult to to
(11:35):
an immature stage, the polyp stage, like a frog being
able to rewind to tadpole form and then advance into
frog again then rewinded the tadpole form, that kind of thing. Yeah,
So as you can imagine, if you have this kind
of ability, your numbers, your population numbers of this particular
species would probably spike, as they are. In fact with
Totopsis neutricula they were found originally in the Caribbean, I believe,
(11:59):
but now they've spread to waters all over the world.
And so the key in this process that allows um
a mature adult to cycle back into this immature poly
up stage lies in a cellular process called trends differentiation,
which we've just kind of touched on a little bit. So, yeah,
differentiation is the process by which an unspecified imbryonic cell
(12:19):
acquires the features of a specialized cell, such as a
hard liver or muscle cell, all right, and it's controlled
by an interaction of the cells genes with physical or
chemical properties. Trans Differentiation is a little different in this
adult stem cells can differentiate into cell types of scene
(12:40):
and organs or tissues other than those expected from the
cells predicted lineage. So like brains, like brain stem cells
might differentiate into blood cells or blood forming cells, um
into brain cells, et cetera. Yeah, I mean it's kind
of amazing. Jellyfish typically die after the propagate, but this
particular jellyfish can just i mean, keep on reproducing and
(13:03):
you know, carrying on its life forever. I mean, as
a mom, I find that prospect a little horrifying, the
fact that, you know, perhaps you might have to go
through childbirth numerous times. Not the jellyfish in fact go
through childbirth, but just comparing it to my own human
perspective on the reproduction cycle, Yeah, it's kind of like
it's almost like they're going through just repetitive midlife crisis.
(13:27):
You know. It's like, oh, I'm getting old, I'm gonna
act like a young jellyfish again. But they actually become
a young jellyfish. But the interesting thing is they have
no idea what how this happens. They don't know the
mechanism behind the life cycle. They know that cells are
able to turn from one type into another, from general
to specific, from specific to general, and keep going back
and forth, but if they don't know why, and it's
not very I mean, ultimately, it's not like a sustainable thing.
(13:49):
Like you mentioned the vampires um our own. Josh Clark
did a blog post a while back where some scientists
like sit down and look at the whole vampire thing,
and they're like, look, it could never happen because obviously
you'd end up with more vamps, so many more vampires
than humans. It wouldn't be any humans to feed on,
and you just have vampires and they'd starve or whatever. Right,
It's not so immortality is just not sustainable. Sustainable. Yeah, So, I,
(14:13):
for one, I'm very interested in regeneration and its prospects
for medicine and stem cells in the lake in the future.
So I would love to do a follow up podcast
on this. Let us know if you guys are interested
um in a in a podcast also on regeneration in
the meantime, come check out our blogs, where we'll keep
you up to date on whatever we're podcasting about for
the week and uh any other interesting scientific tidbits that
(14:34):
cross our desk. And if you guys have a question
about immortality, vampires, jellyfish, or regeneration in fact, send us
an email at science stuff at how stuff works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics
because at how stuff works dot com. Want more how
(14:57):
stuff works, check out our blogs on the how soworth
dot com home page.
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