In a story almost too strange to report, scientists feel that they are on the verge of finding a cure for baldness.
About half of men over the age of 50 go bald or develop male pattern baldness. Some of us(ahem), don't make it to fifty years of age before we begin to reap tremendous savings on hair products and combs. To this point, there are very few remedies that can address the problem. There are medications which can slow the loss. There are transplant procedures which move hair growing skin from other parts of the body to your noggin. But there are no real solutions to the issue of hair loss.
In new research which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists at the Columbia University Medical Center took their testing to a new level. Previously, most of the research being done involved transplanting hair follicles and attempting to make them grow. This yielded varying results which merited no real acclaim. So they decided to cultivate not just the follicles but the surrounding cells as well. Rather than transplanting singular follicles they cultured three dimensional spheres of cells and transplanted them upside down in human skin tissues.
This is where is gets a little bit weird.
They then grafted the human skin cells onto the backs of mice and were dazzled to see 5 of the 7 grafts produce hair that lasted at least six weeks. "The hairs were still small, but the researchers are encouraged because they used human skin that normally is completely hairless — the foreskins from circumcised babies. Essentially, they generated hair growth in cells that normally have no capacity for sprouting hair."
Yes, you read it right. I can't make this stuff up.
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