Yeah, or if it's at all targeted, or affects the entire mouth. If they can get a missing tooth or two to regrow, that would help a lot of people. If you start getting teeth sprouting up everywhere that need to be surgically removed, that would be a lot less universally applicable.
Same for whether it only works once, or if it develops new buds. Gotta say, it would be nice to make it to grave with a full set of teeth, since people losing their teeth has a huge impact on their quality of life.
While that's true, this isn't a specific engineering problem. You need to grab a single cell from each relevant subcluster of neurons in the spinal cord, spatially record the exact positioning, send it off to have RNA seq. done, sample all of the subclusters of the target area, spatially record exact positioning, send it off to have RNA seq done, resample based off of RNA seq data, begin axon regrowth of a single subcluster, and then repeat after every growth cycle to ensure the targeting is holding.
You can improve RNA sequencing machines to reduce runtime, improve spatial tracking to make it easier to keep track of the anatomy, but without sci-fi advances in implant technology you can't get around the sheer amount of procedural time requiring MD-PhDs and post docs to be involved in every visit.
One of the issues with medical technology is that we know far more about how the human body operates than we can control, so compared to biological structures our manipulation of biology at the cell specific level is relatively crude. I'm not saying tech won't catch up, but it's going to be ruinously involved for a very long time.
Well, you'll be pleased to know there are a lot of projects working on indoor vertical farming. Both as a method to spin up food production in heavily populated cities, and as a method for sustainable Mars and Moon bases. Which are effectively just bunkers, in space.
It's a little grim, but there's a standard SCI (spinal cord injury) guillotine that drops a weight with an angled wedge to cause a near perfectly replicable SCI. The mouse is sedated, but it's not exactly a good time for the mouse.
But yeah, the alternative is testing on humans, which, I really don't think we need a reminder on why that's super illegal.
The difference though is that this treatment would require hundreds of hours of ongoing work from medical professionals for each treatment. What they did was use single cell RNA sequencing to determine which subpopulations of cells are supposed to connect and where, before stimulating cell growth and guiding each RNA mapped subpopulation to where it's roughly supposed to go. That's one thing for anatomically complete sub-millimeter spinal cord injuries in mice, but a massive endeavor for human spinal cords.
If you've seen the bioengineered cancer treatments where researchers grow immune cells to target a single individual's tumor, the amount of specialized work that goes into that pales to what current technology would require for this sort of spinal regeneration, and that's for relatively simple small scale lesions. Multiple lesions or large scale cell death could result in attempting to selectively guide millions of microscopic axons in neat clusters for over a foot.
I wouldn't be surprised if insurance companies refused to pay for cell regrowth, and instead went for implants that are comparatively much simpler to install and modify in brain-computer interfaces that skip over the damage. This is a great advancement and does open the door for recovering from spinal cord damage, but this is one of those treatments that people are going to get because they need to fill FDA trials and won't charge, or because the patient is filthy rich.
To be fair, they probably inherited the place and got to be the lucky person it closed down under, which probably doesn't feel great.
At least, it'd raise some eyebrows if its had the same owner since 1883.
This is a terrible and unhelpful take. The whole point of the comment above was that people don't have a clear path to genuinely improving things, and your response is "if you don't live like an ascetic monk, you're part of the problem." You can do all of those things and have literally zero impact unless everybody else also does the same.
You not buying mouthwash isn't saving lives, canceling Netflix isn't saving lives, not buying Cyberpunk 2077 does literally nothing. Even if everybody unilaterally decided to not buy the next Call of Duty, how exactly does that help reduce suffering?
You're basically saying that unless we dedicate ourselves body and soul to scripture, and donate our entire income outside of the bare minimum to survive, we are morally liable for capitalism. Which I think loops back to the original comment in that since there's no clear and actionable method to hold capitalists accountable, people desperately reach for anything that makes them feel like they're making a difference.
If you want an actual path to helping others, channel that monk energy into political activism.
I don't think I've taken emotional damage like this since I discovered what rejection felt like.
Eh, there's a difference between will and can, and it's pretty apparent that global climate change can bring about the conditions of the collapse of humanity. Crop growth zones are shifting and shrinking, climate change means more extreme weather, which results in more crop failures as land suitable for large scale agriculture shrinks. Sea level increases result in more salt water intrusion into groundwater, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is likely to collapse in the next 70 years, which determines the weather from the equator to Europe, crop production in Africa, and sea level rise on the east coast.
Warmer waters spawn more tropical storms and hurricanes, resulting in more lost crops and infrastructure damage in the south east, an entire years crop of Georgia peaches was lost for the first time after multiple weather impacts. Temperatures in areas unmoderated by large bodies of water are becoming so hot that human habitation is approaching a cost that is untenable across much of the southern US.
At any rate, its not like the sun is just gonna scorch us off the planet, but there are a thousand little things that could collapse international food production, kick off famines as developed nations buy up international supplies, spark conflicts as large populations start migrating from less habitable locations, and nations begin competing for newly limited resources. I'm optimistic that things can be resolved, but we're expecting agriculture production to shrink, waters are already overfished, and animal production relies on agriculture. Enough bad decisions and we can turn a series of collapsing supply chains into a post apocalyptic thriller.
Yeah, I remember when everyone was starting to get decent camera phones and then news articles started popping up about high schoolers being picked up by the FBI for producing child porn by sending nudes, and their girlfriend/boyfriend for seeing them. There was a bit of panic, that was then promptly ignored because "it'd never happen to us".
Can't imagine how different someones life would be if they were tagged as a sex offender before even turning 18.
Well, I mean we kinda are, capitalism and all that. There are thousands of authors of Patreon, Kofi, and the like that you can pay to write you the fanfiction you want. Further, if you don't know the provenance of a fanfic, how do you tell which ones are the copyright violation? The only way to do so is if you have records of its birth, especially as generative AI improves.
I'm not blind to the plight of creators here, but isn't the issue that a machine can, in theory, out compete the authors at their own style? If a random human can write Stephen King's style better than Stephen King, it's forgiven because that took time, effort, and talent, where a machine doing it alarms us. No author has ever been sued because they read a book and were influenced in their writing, unless they outright plagiarized without attributing. I just think that there needs to be a significant frame shift, since artificially limiting generative AI to protect the current business model instead of allowing it to reshape how people produce and consume media isn't realistic. The issue is figuring out how creators are still compensated for their work.
People are already building small generative AI projects, so there's no containing it, and it's only going to grow.
Confused me for a second, because I just saw this about growing teeth, which is aiming for reaching market in 2030, which is relatively soon. So hopefully you'll be able to see that before people start shoveling dirt at you.