Has anyone heard this news story about the Texas A&M researchers who cloned a horse? If this is possible, then why is the future of hair cloning so unclear? With this recent break in science, I would suspect that cloning a human hair folicle would be a piece of cake!!
So they can clone a horse,but hair cloning is still far off?
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DarklyCharming
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From what I understand, it is easier to clone an entire being rather than specific parts. Specific parts are designed to grow in the environment of the being. When the being is removed, you have additional hurdles.
To clone an entire organism, all they do is strip an unfertilized egg of its genetic material, then insert the complete genetic code of the organism they are cloning.
Of course, if you were a really unscrupulous bastard, you could always have yourself cloned, raise the clone locked in a basement somewhere, then slice off his entire donor area to transplant it onto yourself.
What they're doing with hair multiplication isn't exactly cloning. It's more like tissue culturing. They take a bit of tissue, in this case dermal papilla cells, and somehow get them multiply outside the body.
Of course, if you were a really unscrupulous bastard, you could always have yourself cloned, raise the clone locked in a basement somewhere, then slice off his entire donor area to transplant it onto yourself.
What they're doing with hair multiplication isn't exactly cloning. It's more like tissue culturing. They take a bit of tissue, in this case dermal papilla cells, and somehow get them multiply outside the body.
sk8charlie
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Don't get confused between Hair Cloning (HC) and Hair Multiplication (HM). HC is using stem cells (found in bone marrow, hair cells, embryonic) and triggering them to re-create hair follicles only. The reason why we can clone a sheep from stem cells is because eventually, that is what the stem cell is programmed to do. It's very complicated to understand without a science background, but basically each and every cell, whether it is a stem cell or not has the book of directions to make a whole new you. The beauty of stem cells is that they are NOT programmed or assigned to use a certain chapter of directions to create a certain body part. Regular cells only use/read a certain chapter of the directions it has; it has the whole book, but only uses and only can use certain chapters. Stem cells can be triggered to use all or some of the chapters. That is why it is easier to clone a whole organism, rather than just a specific body part because it is harder to know the certain signals it takes to trigger a cell to become say, a hair cell. Or in otherwords, it is harder to tell the cell to just read or restrict certain chapters of a book than allow it to read the whole book. On the drawback, the newly cloned individual will have less telomeres, and thus age quicker. As we saw with dolly the sheep, the poor sheep had arthritis and other geriatric ailments even though she was very young. Those are some obstacles that stem cell research has yet to fix.
HM, on the other had, is gathering and culturing cells, and then re-inserting these cells back into the scalp. Cells always divide, until they die usually by degredation, when the products it makes becomes corupt and foreign to the body. (Cancer cells are just that, cells that are corupt, they multiply immensly, do not follow any chemical signals, and they produce byproducts that can be toxic to the body. Normally these cells would be tagged as non-self and destroyed, but they are not dude to genetic factors related to the immune system, etc) The beauty of stem cells is that when they divide, one of them stays a stem cell, and the other matures to become say a hair follicle eventually. Therefore, you will always have a resivorie of stem cells. Only certain organs have stem cells, bone marrow and hair cells being most popular. That is why we age, our non stem cells divide less rapidly as we get older, then we see wrinkles etc etc. The decreased ability of cell regeneration (not speaking of stem cells) is AGING... That's it folks, lack of regeration causes impaired organ functioning.
DHT and other hair loss factors strict the bloodflow, nutrients to the cell and thus all cells die stem cell or not. Once a stem cell is dead, it is dead, it will not be able to regereate itself. This is why people who are bald for long periods of time have extreme difficulty with growing hair back from dormant follicles. Because in actuality, their hair folicles are either extremely miniturized, or absent. The blood is the cells way to get food, without blood or with minimal blood, atrophy of the cell results. This is balding my friends. We know DHT is a culprit, but there may be many many factors....
HM will circumvent this phenomenona by insterting cells taht are resistant to DHT and hair loss factors. These hairs stay on our heads for ever due to genetic factors we are not sure of. All we know is that they will be there, and so the cells we take from them, will produce hair that will stay. HM, will use stem cells from these follicles and create new hair cells that will be injected back into the scalp and hopefully be able to manifest into a hair follicle. It is not cloning. In fact, this is what goes on in your body, HM is basically taking it out of the body, and putting the cells back into the body where appropriate. Oh ya, if you inject a hair cell in your head, it will divide into a stem cell and a hair cell. We dont' know why, it just does, it's because hair cells have that special ability to regenerate itself. And the body only keeps a certain amount of stem cells, it's not like a perpetual cycle.. We have less stem cells than hair cells for sure but if a stem cell dies, then it will be replaced etc.
Honeslty my explanation is quite curtailed, it takes a long time to understand biological processes to even fathom how much we DO NOT KNOW about our bodies especially at the cellular level. Honeslty, and I do not want to sound pessimistic, but the dangers of HM, being uncontrollable cells growing (basically cancer cells), and the risk of it matastisizing (spreading) is quite dire and so I highly doubt that the FDA will let HM or HC slide with ease. Who knows though, maybe hair cells will be good and stay hair cells and follow chemical orders in the body, instead of growing uncondtrollably and spreading to say your brain and causing brain cancer.... hopefully they will but we have to put it in a humans head or heads to know so we gotta start from somewhere... fingers crossed....
HM, on the other had, is gathering and culturing cells, and then re-inserting these cells back into the scalp. Cells always divide, until they die usually by degredation, when the products it makes becomes corupt and foreign to the body. (Cancer cells are just that, cells that are corupt, they multiply immensly, do not follow any chemical signals, and they produce byproducts that can be toxic to the body. Normally these cells would be tagged as non-self and destroyed, but they are not dude to genetic factors related to the immune system, etc) The beauty of stem cells is that when they divide, one of them stays a stem cell, and the other matures to become say a hair follicle eventually. Therefore, you will always have a resivorie of stem cells. Only certain organs have stem cells, bone marrow and hair cells being most popular. That is why we age, our non stem cells divide less rapidly as we get older, then we see wrinkles etc etc. The decreased ability of cell regeneration (not speaking of stem cells) is AGING... That's it folks, lack of regeration causes impaired organ functioning.
DHT and other hair loss factors strict the bloodflow, nutrients to the cell and thus all cells die stem cell or not. Once a stem cell is dead, it is dead, it will not be able to regereate itself. This is why people who are bald for long periods of time have extreme difficulty with growing hair back from dormant follicles. Because in actuality, their hair folicles are either extremely miniturized, or absent. The blood is the cells way to get food, without blood or with minimal blood, atrophy of the cell results. This is balding my friends. We know DHT is a culprit, but there may be many many factors....
HM will circumvent this phenomenona by insterting cells taht are resistant to DHT and hair loss factors. These hairs stay on our heads for ever due to genetic factors we are not sure of. All we know is that they will be there, and so the cells we take from them, will produce hair that will stay. HM, will use stem cells from these follicles and create new hair cells that will be injected back into the scalp and hopefully be able to manifest into a hair follicle. It is not cloning. In fact, this is what goes on in your body, HM is basically taking it out of the body, and putting the cells back into the body where appropriate. Oh ya, if you inject a hair cell in your head, it will divide into a stem cell and a hair cell. We dont' know why, it just does, it's because hair cells have that special ability to regenerate itself. And the body only keeps a certain amount of stem cells, it's not like a perpetual cycle.. We have less stem cells than hair cells for sure but if a stem cell dies, then it will be replaced etc.
Honeslty my explanation is quite curtailed, it takes a long time to understand biological processes to even fathom how much we DO NOT KNOW about our bodies especially at the cellular level. Honeslty, and I do not want to sound pessimistic, but the dangers of HM, being uncontrollable cells growing (basically cancer cells), and the risk of it matastisizing (spreading) is quite dire and so I highly doubt that the FDA will let HM or HC slide with ease. Who knows though, maybe hair cells will be good and stay hair cells and follow chemical orders in the body, instead of growing uncondtrollably and spreading to say your brain and causing brain cancer.... hopefully they will but we have to put it in a humans head or heads to know so we gotta start from somewhere... fingers crossed....
michael barry
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MY cloning idea is this:
Implant the cloned stem cells in your thigh.....when they grow in haphazad directions the surgeon simply FUE's them out to implant in your head in the RIGHT direction.
I wish I could get a Doctor to comment on this on whether it would work or not. Im not crazy about implanting fibrose scaffolds in my skin (thus insuring major leage scarring on my head).
The leg/thigh area could be dermabrated and have a skin-colored tatoo placed on it after hairs were extracted.
I honestly think this would be the easiest way to get cloning in the near term. Otherwise.....we mgiht be waiting 20 more years
Implant the cloned stem cells in your thigh.....when they grow in haphazad directions the surgeon simply FUE's them out to implant in your head in the RIGHT direction.
I wish I could get a Doctor to comment on this on whether it would work or not. Im not crazy about implanting fibrose scaffolds in my skin (thus insuring major leage scarring on my head).
The leg/thigh area could be dermabrated and have a skin-colored tatoo placed on it after hairs were extracted.
I honestly think this would be the easiest way to get cloning in the near term. Otherwise.....we mgiht be waiting 20 more years
elguapo
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I think injecting the extracted follicular cells into another part of the body is a great idea.
I wonder if the problem is just the random outward direction of hair growth, or if the hair could even grow inward and into the skin, rather than growing out.
I also wonder if they either haven't thought about this idea, or why they might think that the scaffolding approach is a better option. Maybe they think that since it is such a hastle to cut out up to 2000 hair grafts in one procedure, then cutting out up to double or quadruple this amount would simply take way too long.
Who knows. But it wouldn't hurt to email a doctor about it, or even try to talk to Dr. Washenik (sp?) or somebody from Intercytex about the idea.
I wonder if the problem is just the random outward direction of hair growth, or if the hair could even grow inward and into the skin, rather than growing out.
I also wonder if they either haven't thought about this idea, or why they might think that the scaffolding approach is a better option. Maybe they think that since it is such a hastle to cut out up to 2000 hair grafts in one procedure, then cutting out up to double or quadruple this amount would simply take way too long.
Who knows. But it wouldn't hurt to email a doctor about it, or even try to talk to Dr. Washenik (sp?) or somebody from Intercytex about the idea.
Fallout Boy
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Re: So they can clone a horse,but hair cloning is still far
Just for the update on cloning.. they have cloned sheep, mice, cows, pigs, rabbits,horses, cats and now dogs. Cloning dogs , considered one of the most stubborn cloning challenges , was just solved recently. This is all according to Time Magazines latest article. Look how the cloning world is advancing and moving on. Scientists arent dumb. I think HM will be solved sooner than most think.
Jay Tee said:
Just for the update on cloning.. they have cloned sheep, mice, cows, pigs, rabbits,horses, cats and now dogs. Cloning dogs , considered one of the most stubborn cloning challenges , was just solved recently. This is all according to Time Magazines latest article. Look how the cloning world is advancing and moving on. Scientists arent dumb. I think HM will be solved sooner than most think.
michael barry
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Fallout boy,
I certainly hope so, but I really think that there must be hurdles. One is different interests trying to patent parts of the procedure to make it harder for other compeditve groups to do it.
I really mean what I say about implanting the stem cells in the leg. WHatever the direction the cells grew hair in, they could simply be reimplanted in the head the right way. If the hair grew "ingrown", a boil would no doubt develop that the person could simply drain or have lasered or electrolyised out at a later time. This seems so doable to me.
We are all waiting. Im sure you feel like I do.....they clone entire animals. Little cells from the outer root sheath and dermal papilla should be easy compared to that.
I certainly hope so, but I really think that there must be hurdles. One is different interests trying to patent parts of the procedure to make it harder for other compeditve groups to do it.
I really mean what I say about implanting the stem cells in the leg. WHatever the direction the cells grew hair in, they could simply be reimplanted in the head the right way. If the hair grew "ingrown", a boil would no doubt develop that the person could simply drain or have lasered or electrolyised out at a later time. This seems so doable to me.
We are all waiting. Im sure you feel like I do.....they clone entire animals. Little cells from the outer root sheath and dermal papilla should be easy compared to that.
