There was a post about a woman who grew a “homonculus tumor”, with brain tissue, teeth, a spinal nerves and other organs. But how? Human bodies can’t grow those things after birth, AFAIK. For example, once your adult teeth are in, that’s it. So how are tumors able to do this? Are the cells in tumors different from those found normally in human body?
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Simple reason: Your body isn’t designed to regrow things from the stem cells it has. Those stem cells *can* do it (they’re not diversified and are capable of becoming any organ), but there’s no instruction available to make them do it.
A teratoma is effectively a cancer in a stem cell that causes it to start dividing and doing ‘stuff’ that it’s programmed to without proper instruction, let alone in a way that would produce a desired outcome.
It just starts mulitplying on its own and the damaged DNA is just telling itself to start dividing into whatever it can – although there is enough coordination to produce organs like eyeballs and teeth. But not in a way that makes sense (ie, it makes a clump of random eyeballs, hair, teeth instead of a skull with eye sockets, a mouth, jaw, etc.).
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