If we make skin and muscle cells when we heal cuts and heal/generate bones after breaking them, why wouldn’t we be able to grow a finger if one is cut off?

Question

If we make skin and muscle cells when we heal cuts and heal/generate bones after breaking them, why wouldn’t we be able to grow a finger if one is cut off?

In: 7967

Answer 1

We lost our ancestral ability to regenerate limbs, now only our very young can regenerate, grownups can’t regenerate more than a fingertip. We traded regeneration for reduced chance of cancer and faster scar formation.

There’s some research into regeneration, for example with preventing scar tissue, which blocks normal tissue. Some people can now recover from spinal injuries thanks to our research on blocking scar tissue. We can also make a extracellular matrix scaffold and have our cells build on that. Nothing in principle prevents us from regenerating limbs, only that our body doesn’t work that way so we need some medical research to do it.