Growing New Body Parts:

Believe it or not, I spoke to one of the guys at Osiris at a cardiovascular medicine symposium where a large portion of the science paid attention to innate stem cells, those that originate from your own bone marrow. This is actually a failed attempt at immunizing soldiers to bacterial biowarfare agents, as MSC are largely immunosuppressive rather than antigen presenting/T-cell activating. They did find that they are immensely useful at regenerating organs to some degree or another, and preventing graft versus host disease. Maybe it was my imagination or my eyes were playing tricks on me, but I was able to induce bone marrow cells to become beating heart cells at a very, very low rate when they were co-cultured with heart muscle cells in a dish. No point in trying to be persuasive; I leave it that I performed it and saw it. Prove it or disprove it yourself. It is in theory possible to take your bone marrow white blood cells and change them into nearly any other to regenerate you with brand spanking new body parts.

Here is an engineering application of making new body parts in the case of something catastrophic happening to you that goes far beyond the capability of simple nutrition to fix. If this biotech were advanced today, no victim of catastrophe, malice, or accident would ever fret as they could literally be rebuilt with their own cells.

Growing new bones.

Columbia University's applied biology/medicine department are real pioneers - they create biology where it wasn't there before. Others look to "experts" for footing, because they themselves will not be experts. The reality is that everything is demarked and organized that wasn't demarked and organized before by very intelligent people who knew nothing about the field. They become the experts by virtue of their interest and rigor in defining something that was undefined.

Well if it isn't Vitamin C again. Inducible Pluripotent Stem Cells Need It.

The race towards rejuvenating the body by literally rebuilding it continues on in the milieu of stem cells. There is still quite a large misunderstanding of what one is, and actually there isn't one, there are many from many sources. Right now, your body is churning out cells from your own stem cells in your bone marrow, muscles, organs, everywhere. The problem is to keep this process going in an organized way well into old age. Too little, and you get the familiar loss of function of old age. Too much, and you get things like cancer.

Another promising new field of work is taking any cell from the adult body which contains the chromosomal makeup of the entire body except in rare chimeric cases, and taking it back to a primordial source cell. This inducible pluripotent stem cell (IPSC) can be tweaked to become an entirely different cell, offering hope for organ and tissue regeneration and repair or even rebuilding entire systems in the future.

Some grouchy old persons will be annoyed to read that you can't do it efficiently without Vitamin C.