Comments on: The amazing disappearing reappearing finger

By: ELLIEEA

ELLIEEA — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 08:28:26 +0000

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By: Waider

Waider — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:42:47 +0000

Trawling through the very large backlog of talks on TED, I find one Alan Russell exhibiting exactly the same finger regrowth clip as part of a collection of slides on regenerative medicine. I've found the TED talks in general to be informative, if occasionally on the wiggy side, but I had not expected to find out-and-out bad science therein...

By: dustypixie

dustypixie — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 09:03:59 +0000

Brooke Army Medical Center seems to think this story is real. The Pentagon laid out $250 million for more pig’s bladder “pixie dust” which is what the Army actually calls it.

www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/05/26/regrowing.body.parts/

By: Persiflage

Persiflage — Mon, 19 May 2008 12:02:12 +0000

I had the end of my finger more-or-less sliced off (hanging on by a shred of skin) when delivering papers as a teenager. My Dad used miracle pixie dust to fix it, I seem to recall…

Oh no, hang on, he used iodine and Sellotape. Hurt like stink at the time, was all better a fortnight later. Fingers seem to be pretty damn resilient things, by and large!

By: ACH

ACH — Thu, 15 May 2008 07:25:55 +0000

Where can I get the pixie dust? I nearly sliced the end off my finger at the weekend and am sporting a deep ragged wound, which I am sure will miraculously close up with a sprinkling of pixie dust.

(Actually, it’s doing a fine job of healing with nothing more than the application of a triple layer of elastoplast – the blood soaked throught he first 2 layers)

By: Arthur Embleton

Arthur Embleton — Fri, 09 May 2008 00:32:37 +0000

CDavis, thats excellent. Makes it very clear what was actually cut off.

By: CDavis

CDavis — Thu, 08 May 2008 18:48:23 +0000

Just to see if it was instructive, I mocked up a picture of what the ‘Before’ image might look like if viewed from the same angle as the ‘After’ picture.

It’s at www.cubicsecond.org/images/web/magicfinger.jpg

A rather different, er, perspective…

By: warhelmet

warhelmet — Wed, 07 May 2008 23:12:35 +0000

Yup, agree with TheGoodDoctor. I read the article in SciAm as well and sort of understood it. But, from my own experience, a nasty slice of the finger tip – right to the bone – that looked as if it would cause a bit to drop off actually healed with no scarring at all. Not quite regeneration in the sense of the above, but the non-formation of scar tissue suggests regeneration. Looking at my fingers now, I can’t even work out which one it was – not that I can remember.

It’s actually the business about scarring that is more important than the sensationalism about growing back missing bits.

By: TheGoodDoctor

TheGoodDoctor — Wed, 07 May 2008 13:36:29 +0000

I just finished reading the April Scientific American, which has an article “Regrowing Human Limbs”. The authors start with “how do salamanders do it?”, move to mouse digit tip regeneration, and end with: “Our fingertips have an intrinsic ability to regenerate. Fostering regeneration in a fingertip amputation injury is apparently as simple as cleaning the wound and covering it with a simple dressing. If allowed to heal naturally, the fingertip restores its contour, fingerprint and sensation, and undergoes a varying degree of lengthening.”
(SciAm, April 2008, p61)
So doing almost nothing may allow regeneration, pigs bladder extract aside.

By: Mog

Mog — Tue, 06 May 2008 14:08:30 +0000

Damn – just when I thought medical science might be able to grow me a tail after all.

By: Robert Carnegie

Robert Carnegie — Mon, 05 May 2008 11:25:15 +0000

The bloke on [Today] also had to rack his brain to remember that Ben might be a [Guardian] contributor as well as hosting an independent web site – a site consisting mainly of the [Guardian] columns in blog form, plus witterspace for readers.

At the early hour, I thought Ben sounded a bit like the prize-winning author whose name I’ve forgotten, recently featured as a an audio archive question on Radio 4′s [The Write Stuff], who seemed preoccupied and ended up confessing to [Today] that he had quite a hangover from celebrating! But just being crowbarred out of bed before seven-thirty would do the same to me!

By: churnerprize

churnerprize — Sun, 04 May 2008 20:46:29 +0000

Hey Ben,

We covered this story too but you’ve done the best job. GirlWithAOneTrackMind reckons we should should make you an honorary fellow (see comments at www.churnerprize.co.uk/?p=63). Consider yourself fellowed.

TCP

By: drunkenoaf

drunkenoaf — Sun, 04 May 2008 19:35:21 +0000

The depressing thing about the digs/ reddit/ boingboing sites are that everyone there has bought the story hook line and sinker. >3500 diggs, people amazed by the progress of medicine… And about 300 penis regrowth jokes. Ah, the digital frontier of tech types that know nothing of bad science and when they are being fed it. Not one digg for Ben’s article either.

By: Tom P

Tom P — Sun, 04 May 2008 13:45:54 +0000

The other interesting thing about that Times article, apart from the brazen hypocrisy of slamming the BBC for the exact same thing that they did, is that they refer to Ben as being “Ben Goldacre of the BadScience website”. Nice that the site gets a plug, but can they really not bring themselves to admit that he does (most of) his journalistic work for a rival newspaper? I’ve noticed several papers doing this lately – it strikes me as rather odd. If they like what Ben’s doing, but don’t want to admit that the Guardian’s getting the jump on them, why don’t they just hire someone else with a clue about science to do the same job for them?

By: projektleiterin

projektleiterin — Sun, 04 May 2008 12:31:44 +0000

Damn it, I’m not clicking on any posts anymore that mentions the word finger! If I was a more suspicious person I might believe that someone is posting the picture of the cut-off fingertip on purpose in order to shock people (I would, if I didn’t find it too gross, hehehe. )

By: db_c

db_c — Sun, 04 May 2008 09:58:24 +0000

hmm. not only have the times pulled the original article from their website, they've published another one which opens by slagging off the bbc for falling for it, while completely failing to mention that the times did as well.

By: onegoodmove

onegoodmove — Sat, 03 May 2008 20:36:43 +0000

Are you still looking for the video? Send me an email at normjenson at yahoo.com if you want the clip.

By: hairnet

hairnet — Sat, 03 May 2008 09:15:10 +0000

woodchopper, maybe, except the bank holiday isnt until monday the fifth in england/wales…

I wonder if the BBC will ever be run by non-idiots again?

By: gimpyblog

gimpyblog — Sat, 03 May 2008 07:29:25 +0000

I notice The Guardian aren't allowing comments on your article today, a sense of shame at their credulity perhaps? Anyway, I don't know if anybody has commented on this before but doesn't the healed finger carry a fairly visible scar and it looks ever so slightly shorter and narrower at the tip. One of my own index fingers has a similarly scarred tip after I stuck it in a saucepan of boiling toffee as a child.

By: woodchopper

woodchopper — Sat, 03 May 2008 06:49:11 +0000

Is there some correlation between all these bollocks stories and a hiolday?

Around the world 1 May is a public holiday. Were all the sensible people at home while the junior hacks were left running the show?

(I know Matthew Price isn’t that junior, but shouldn’t he have had an editor somewhere?).