Scientists discovered that removing specific molecules from developing mice can completely reverse their sex from male to female.

    • tal@lemmy.todayOP
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      5 months ago

      Like, growing a female clone of parts of your body, and then implanting organs from it into your body? That’s creative. I dunno, good question.

      I don’t know whether immune rejection of cloned organs is an issue or not. I guess it’d be comparable to implanting an organ from an identical twin.

      kagis

      Sounds like that’s possible, at least in terms of immune response.

      https://www.verywellhealth.com/understanding-and-preventing-organ-transplant-rejection-4147557

      Isograft: This type of transplant is done between a genetically identical donor and a recipient, such as an identical twin. There is virtually no risk of rejection in this case, as the body does not recognize an identical twin’s organ as foreign.

      thinks

      I think that a problem you’d have with anything that has a lot of sensory input and output is that you’d have to regrow nerves. My understanding is that in cases of something like spinal cord damage, an issue is that scarring prevents nerves from reconnecting correctly – suppressing scar formation is something that had to happen when trying to deal with spinal cord issues. I’ve also got no idea what the constraints are on wiring things up correctly, but I imagine that there are some.

      kagis

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerve_injury

      Recovery of a nerve after surgical repair depends mainly on the age of patients. Younger the patients, better the prognosis, because of better healing capacity of young tissues. Young children can recover almost normal nerve function.[29] In contrast, a patient over 60 years old with a cut nerve in the hand would expect to recover only protective sensory function, that is, the ability to distinguish hot/cold or sharp/dull; recovery of motor function would be likely incomplete.

      So even with one’s own body parts, nerve regeneration apparently isn’t going to be perfect, but we can have some degree of it.