“Growing it Back – Can we persuade the body to regenerate by speaking a language it understands?”
In this New Yorker Article (3/10/2021), the author Matthew Hutson, is referring to the “bodies language”. I am making a different reference: that the language in this article is dense with visual art & design terms: from shapes and values to colors including the electromagnetic fields. Without this visual language, the story could not be told. Here is a brief excerpt.
“The team tried the drug on real embryos that had been damaged by nicotine, and found that their brains rearranged themselves into the proper shape. The software, the researchers wrote, had allowed for “a complete rescue of brain morphology.”
The I.Q. machine gave them another way to measure the extent of the rescue. Inside it, colored L.E.D.s illuminate petri dishes from below, dividing them into zones of red and blue; when a grown tadpole ventures into the red, it receives a brief shock. Levin found that normal tadpoles uniformly learned to avoid the red zones, while those that had been exposed to nicotine learned to do so only twelve per cent of the time. But those treated with the bioelectricity-recalibrating drug learned eighty-five per cent of the time. Their I.Q.s recovered.”
The New Yorker Magazine
Annals of Science Issue May 10, 2021
By Matthew Hutson
(The New Yorker online title is slightly different than the Print version)
“Persuading the Body to Regenerate Its Limbs – Deer can regrow their antlers, and humans can replace their liver. What else might be possible?”
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