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Comment on The ability to regrow body parts is dormant in mammals, not lostparent

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"I don't know how it works, so it must be fake news."

To be fair, the person being skeptical is just a surgeon, this is not a peer-reviewed study or anything actually scientific.

Your NPR link even shows that scientists realize there are still unknowns:

"We think that nail stem cells may a have a special function to induce the whole regeneration process, including nerve attraction and growth of the bone," Ito say.

A cursory search seems to say that typical regrowth of a nail takes 4-6 months, but Spievak claimed his only took 4 weeks.

Can we say definitively that his "pixie dust" had nothing to do with it? I don't think so. Can we say it did have something to do with it? Also unknown... but the answer right now IMO certainly isn't a scientific "no."

If it worked on humans 13 years ago, then by now it would have worked on a human who was not sibling to the inventor, in a way not essentially identical to life without it.

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