All Things Considered, May 17, 2007 · Researchers have found a way to encourage new hair growth in mice, and they’re hoping something similar can be done with humans. Hair comes from a complex mini-organ in the skin called a hair follicle. According to traditional thinking, new hair follicles only form in junior mammals. Once you’re an adult, and you lose some hair follicles, you’re out of luck in the hair department. Now it’s a funny thing about dogma, it tends to color the way you look at the world. Jonathan Vogel is a dermatologist at the National Institutes of Health. He says scientists who study how wounds heal relied on dogma to explain something they always see. ‘We know when we make wounds in mice that eventually that area is replaced with hair,’ Vogel says. ‘It’s not like the mice typically go round with large patches of skin without hair. But I guess we assumed that that was not new hair.’ Instead, it was thought that areas that previously had hair migrated in as the wound healed. But as George Cotsarelis reports in the current issue of Nature, that explanation appears to be wrong. Cotsarelis […]