“Snake oil! Get your snake oil right here! Known to cure all known diseases – rub a little on your head and see that hair grow, baby!” This is, and always has been the marketing strategy of hair-growth products. Even celebrities like Jacques Kallis, Wayne Rooney and Shane Warne can’t manage to bring the growth back properly, despite spending more than the average bald man on hair-growth technology. But now there may be hope for the baldies, as researchers say they have successfully grown hair follicles in human flesh using implanted donor cells. Siff.
Rodents have always had the ability to re-grow their hair,which is why testing on them proved pretty fruitless – so up until now the common technique was to find some functioning hair follicles (say, at the back of the head), and move them to where it matters (a la Rooney).
The guys in the white lab coats took some donated skin cells, cultured them in a lab (presumably by making them watch Downton Abbey), clustered them in a ball, and hey presto! The little balls of skin grew some hair.
To test this out, researchers took some left-over foreskins from infants (because they don’t naturally grow hair), clustered those into balls, cultured them and grafted them onto the backs of lab rats (poor little guys). As gross as that may sound, it proved successful, with five of the seven human skin grafts growing new hair.
What does this mean for South Africa? It means those okes in Durban who wear Oakley’s on their pips can finally have redemption! No longer will they suffer the Oakley tan-lines that zig-zag across their craniums and no longer will they ham-handedly apply sun-cream to their parched skulls.
Go forth and foster re-growth!
[Source : LA Times]
