What Is Regeneration?

Jane Maienschein is University Professor, Regents Professor, and President’s Professor at Arizona State University, where she also directs the Center for Biology and Society. She also serves as fellow and director of the History and Philosophy of Science Project at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. She is coeditor of Why Study Biology by the Sea?, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Maienschein is the 2024 recipient of the Sarton Medal, the most prestigious award of the History of Science Society, presented annually to an outstanding historian of science to honor a lifetime of scholarly achievement. Kate MacCord is an instructor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University and the program administrator of the McDonnell Initiative at the Marine Biological Laboratory, where she also serves as the McDonnell Fellow.

"From hydras to humans, this short book by two marine biologists explores the peculiar process of regeneration. . . . So here is the problem: if the mechanisms of regeneration can’t be distinguished from those of growth and development, what is to stop everything ceaselessly regenerating? What dictates the process of regrowth and why does it happen only in some tissues, in some species and only some of the time? Maienschein and MacCord argue that, to fully understand this, we need to see regeneration as a window into the world of biology in general, and the complex feedback loops that decide what grows, divides and dies, where and when. Far from being an interesting curio, then, studying regeneration can tell us much about life in general, from a cellular level right up to the level of ecosystems, and inform everything from regenerative therapies using stem cells to ecosystem protection and recovery. Seen through this lens, regeneration is a far bigger subject than it might at first seem."