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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Some vertebrates (some salamanders) can regenerate limbs. I knew someone years ago who was researching salamander reproduction precisely so they could raise them in the lab to study this.
But one political party has long sought to build themselves up by tearing others down. My friend’s research lost their funding in response to [this political pressure.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Fleece_Award?wprov=sfti1)
Sadly, this continues. [Senators like Ron Paul](https://www.science.org/content/article/rand-paul-takes-poke-us-peer-review-panels) and [Senator Ron Johnson](https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2021/06/28/wisconsin-senator-ron-johnson-promotes-views-odds-science/7418058002/) among others in public office have a weird obsession with being the only smart person, and will do stupid things to prove it, like insist that all science is wasting money because they don’t understand it, even when they haven’t tried.
Little kids actually can. (Source – I know a little kid who severed their finger in a accident. A year later she’s fine.)
Cells are great at looking at their buddy and saying hey whats your job again? Oh yeah i can do that. Lets do that together.
They arent good at saying what was there before and going back to the manual to figure out how to make that part from scratch. If humans could do this we would likely learned to grow more teeth rather than just 2 sets.
All these analogies and examples are complex and inaccurate. Simply put, all the body does is close holes. If the hole is small enough that it does not affect the shape of the structure, it will heal as good as new. If a finger is cut off, the “hole” at the stump will close off, but the regeneration of a complex structure is something else entirely.
Your finger forms while you are still a fetus, the conditions to grow entire new one when you lose your finger as an adult are not there anymore. Interestingly enough, it’s sometimes possible to regrow tip of a finger provided a bit of nail is still intact from injury. There is continuous growth from stem cells going on in a nail and that can guide reforming the tip of a finger.
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.
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