ANDRZEJ KRAUZE
The humble newt has fascinated biologists for more than two hundred years. These amphibians, with their amazing and oft-cited ability to regrow lost body parts, have attracted the attention of regeneration researchers: cut off a newt’s tail or a leg, or remove a lens from its eye, and it grows back. However, whether newts can continue to do this throughout their lives, or lose the ability as they get older, has remained a mystery. Now, in an experiment spanning 16 years, Goro Eguchi of the Shokei Educational Institution, Japan, and Panagiotis Tsonis at the University of Dayton, Ohio, have discovered that newts can regenerate missing parts well into old age.
Newts do not thrive in laboratories over long periods of time; some species do ...
