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?
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You can buff the scratches and hammer the dents out of a car with just what’s in your garage, but can you build a new engine?
Your body is decent at fixing minor damage that just requires cells to haphazardly copy themselves to fill in a gap, but fully replacing missing functional tissue is much more difficult. You can’t just tell the fingertip cells to make a little more fingertip, they’re all gone.
During development you undergo an enormously complex series of steps that form your systems and tissues in sequence. You can’t re-start that sequence at some random point in some random location. This is by design, as accidentally turning that function back on would be disastrous.
Figuring out how do do it in a controlled manner is the holy grail of bioscience.
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