Regeneration occurs at many different levels in nature, from individual organisms (notably earthworms and hydra), through communities of microbes, to ecosystems such as forests. Researchers in the life sciences and the history and philosophy of science are collaborating to explore how the processes of repair and recovery observed at these different scales are related.
Regeneration has been investigated since Aristotle, giving rise to many ways of explaining what this process is and how it works. Current research focuses on gene expression and cell signaling of regeneration within individual model organisms. We tend to look to model organisms on the reasoning that because of evolution, information gained from other species must in some respect be generalizable. However, for all that we have uncovered about how regeneration works within individual organisms, we have yet to translate what we have gleaned into achieving the goal of regenerative medicine: to harness and enhance our own regenerative abilities. Turning to history may provide a crucial perspective in advancing us toward this goal. History gives perspective, allowing us to reflect on how our predecessors did their work and what assumptions they made, thus also revealing limitations. History, then, may show us how we can move from our current reductionist thinking focused on particular selected model organisms toward generalizations about this crucial process that operates across complex living systems and move closer to repairing our own damaged bodies.
To understand Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in modern terms, it is useful to go back several millennia to Aristotle’s ideas of what it takes to become fully and normally human. Victor Frankenstein’s creation acts like and is perceived to be a monster. As Aristotle noted millennia ago, a monster is a being that has not developed normally. Victor’s creature definitely did not develop normally, resulting in an incomplete being – something with the structure and material of a living, human type but without having gone through the process of emerging gradually and acquiring all the components to become a whole individual. Perhaps Victor’s own incomplete and imperfect education left him also “monstrous” in some ways and let him create a being and then run away from it before it was complete. Seeing Victor and his creature this way, we also gain insight into current practical and policy assessments about why a developing embryo or fetus is not a fully normal human.
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