Jellyfish can heal wounds in minutes. Scientists want their secrets

Join the discussion

• Hacker News
• how does this work, when they just sting
  by piusk
• Nothing in the article mentioned stinging I am confused what you are asking ?
  by 14
• Healing their own wounds, not ours.
  by jagged-chisel
• TL/DR: be made of jelly
  by dspnc
• Have they tried waterboarding them, yet?
  by YeahThisIsMe
• 9 out of 10 doctors…
  by danbots
• At first glance I imagined this was a magic way to heal a wound by rubbing a jellyfish on it. Skin irritation be damned, this is gonna save lives.

  But no. No such joy.

  by karim79
• Just use the terrestrial gelatinous equivalent, Aloe vera. It works wonderfully creating a sort of jellyfish skin over your skin.
  by pvaldes
• Jellyfish, bieng transparent and without a brain, dont have any secrets, and instantainious wound healing might be the compensation for that, or price, but by all accounts they have managed to get by more or less as they are, for 700 million years and so will likely be availible for further observation, for as long as we manage to stick around.
  by metalman
• The title seems like clickbait for a super medical cream.
  by Eleg007
• Doctors hate them.
  by krautsauer
• Agreed. I always hated the 'two part', 'payoff'-based drama of titles like these, even before the LLM era. If it was lazy before (it was), it now comes off as 'one-click' lazy. Sadly, The Guardian has become infested with this style lately.
  by Hard_Space
• Don't they have the advantage of having very simple tissue?
  by UltraSane
• They're not even technically one organism, but colonies of independent but mostly specialized organisms. I'd be willing to bet that has something to do with the articles title
  by packetlost
• Simpler tissue makes it easier to see the core mechanics without blood vessels, inflammation and a lot of other processes happening at the same time
  by KurSix
• What I like about this work is that the jellyfish may be less important as a source of some magical "regeneration gene" and more useful as a system where you can actually see the basic mechanics clearly
  by KurSix
• > The medusa, the free-swimming form most people picture when they hear the term jellyfish, is only one stage of the animal’s life cycle.

  > We tend to think of the flower—or the jellyfish—as the organism, but these are actually reproductive units.

  I'll never look at jellyfish the same.

  by wxw
• I mean, all in all, most life forms are reproductive unit in some stage, or part of i, from the species point of view. Though some individual prove sterile.
  by psychoslave
• Wait, so they’re sea jizz?!
  by Waterluvian
• Same. Somehow "the jellyfish is basically the flower" is the detail that stuck with me more than the wound healing
  by KurSix
• This is a press release from a marine research organization, so the main implication here isn't that they're doing it because it's in any way relevant to humans. They're doing it because it's a cool thing for a marine research organization to research.

  Yes, it's probably not gonna help humans, unless some of your friends are gelatinous blobs with no circulatory or nervous system and with a lifespan measured in months.

  by zerobees
• I think it's the tiny chance they it will help humans that makes it so fascinating.
  by resonious
• > Yes, it's probably not gonna help humans, unless some of your friends are gelatinous blobs with no circulatory or nervous system and with a lifespan measured in months.

  Who knows, maybe we'll have organic suites for people or sealing membranes for mechanisms.

  by yubblegum
• Clytia is not just your normal jellyfish, is an organism that alternates between a jellyfish and a polyp that live in small colonies, not unlike corals but less complex and without hard calcified skeletons.

  Is also in the same group that has the only animals known to be potentially immortal. I'm not joking. This things exist. So the word "heal" here can mean different things than people expects. Imagine that as we grow older and decaying we could decide to grow a new genetic clone of "me" inside and reborn as happy babies, discarding our older shell. Some of this animals can do this to "heal" and the trick can be used an undefined amount of times. Those creatures are really ancient and have a few tricks on their sleeves.

  Relevant for humans, as reef corals are related with jellyfishes and have free larvae that could respond in a similar way to temperature damage. Clytia could thrive when corals will die. This just another clue that some people is being more and more concerned by AMOC, even if it may be too late yet with all the warmongers ruining our last chances

  by pvaldes
• Novo Nordisk might challenge the idea that application follows directly from research objectives
  by heiejdn283
• What about if they exhibit three out of four of those symptoms?
  by hsbauauvhabzb
• The article is pretty explicit that the interesting part is that some of the underlying epithelial repair mechanisms appear to be conserved across animals, including mammals
  by KurSix