Fundamentals of Regeneration Biology

How do cells know what to build, where, when, and when to stop? An embryo answers this question once. A regenerating animal must answer it again in an adult body, starting from a wound. Each topic in the course takes on one part of the problem: how position is specified, how new cells are supplied, how growth is timed and coordinated, and why some organs and species lose the ability to regenerate at all. These principles are the foundation of stem cell therapy and regenerative medicine, and the same pathways, when they go wrong, drive cancer and fibrosis. If you are heading toward engineering, living tissue is the best example we have of a system that builds, measures and repairs itself. Understanding how it does so informs tissue engineering, organoids and synthetic biology, and offers design principles such as feedback, robustness and self-organization. In this class, we will trace how we know what we know, and how we should ask questions for the future. We will work together to search for important questions in the field by reconstructing historical and controversial ideas, dissecting classic literature, formulating our own questions, and debating to test our answers.