Can my body regenerate?

Can my body regenerate?

Author: BBC World Service August 30, 2024 Duration: 31:33

It would be quite a superpower to regrow entire body parts. CrowdScience listener Kelly started pondering this after a discussion with her friend on whether human tongues could regrow. Finding out that they couldn't, she asked us to investigate the extent of human regenerative abilities.

Presenter Alex Lathbridge travels to Vienna, a hotbed of research in this area. He meets an animal with much better powers of regeneration than humans - the axolotl. In Elly Tanaka’s lab he finds out how she studies their incredible abilities – and shows off his new axolotl tattoo.

Why can these sweet-looking salamanders regrow entire limbs while we can’t even regrow our tongues? Palaeontologist Nadia Fröbisch has looked into the evolutionary origins of regeneration, and it goes a lot further back than you might think.

And in fact, even humans are constantly regenerating, by renewing the building blocks of our bodies: cells. New cells grow and replace old ones all the time – although, in some parts of the body, we do keep hold of the same cells throughout our lives.

However, cell turnover isn’t the same as regrowing entire organs or limbs. But can we grow new body parts in the lab instead? We meet Sasha Mendjan, who creates heart organoids using our cells’ innate ability to self-organise. How far off are we from implanting organs, grown from a patient’s stem cells, back into the human body?

Contributors: Dr Elly Tanaka, Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) Prof Martin Hetzer, Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) Prof Nadia Fröbisch, Natural History Museum Berlin Dr Sasha Mendjan, Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA)

Presenter: Alex Lathbridge Producer: Florian Bohr Editor: Cathy Edwards Production Co-ordinator: Ishmael Soriano Studio Manager: Bob Nettles


Curiosity drives discovery, and CrowdScience from the BBC World Service is built entirely on that principle. Each episode begins not with a scripted lesson, but with a question sent in by a listener from anywhere in the world. These aren't simple queries with easy answers; they are the wonderfully complex, often quirky puzzles about everyday phenomena and cosmic mysteries that make us all stop and wonder. What does silence sound like? Could we ever photosynthesize like plants? How does a crowd's mood physically spread? The team then embarks on a genuine investigative journey, tracking down the specialists at the very edge of our understanding-neuroscientists, ecologists, physicists, and engineers-to piece together credible, compelling answers. Listening to this podcast feels like having a direct line to the labs and field sites where knowledge is being created. The conversations are deep yet accessible, transforming abstract concepts into relatable stories. It’s a collective exploration where listener curiosity sets the agenda, making each episode a unique and democratic look at the machinery of our world and beyond. You become part of a global community pondering life, Earth, and the universe, one thoughtful question at a time.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

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