A Drug Shows an Astonishing Ability to Regenerate Damaged Hearts and Other Body Parts

Scientific American April 2019

A once abandoned drug compound shows an ability to rebuild organs damaged by illness and injury

A tale of shark bites at a Scottish pub has led us to some new ideas about rebuilding broken bodies. In the early 2000s American geneticist Michael Zasloff of Georgetown University had traveled to the University of St. Andrews to give a talk about several natural antibiotics found in animal skin. After the lecture, he and some of the university scientists went for a drink, and one of them, a marine biologist, began to talk about how dolphins were frequently savaged by sharks, sustaining some bite wounds 45 centimeters long and 12 centimeters deep. But remarkably the dolphins healed up in weeks, with no signs of infection.

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