It was alligators that first drew Mark Fer-guson to study human scarring, but not for the reasons you might expect. In the late 1970s, he had become fascinated by cleft palate. Alligators were the obvious research subject: their embryos have palates, and develop in easily accessible eggs. But when Ferguson performed surgery on alligator embryos to mimic cleft palates, the creatures hatched with completely normal, unscarred mouths. "As a surgical model of cleft palate it was perfectly useless," says Ferguson. "As an observation of scar-free healing, it was of great scientific and clinical interest." Ferguson, who now researches wound healing at the University of Manchester, UK, was not the first to stumble across this phenomenon. As early as 1960 there were anecdotal reports that wounds made early in gestation in embryos of many species, including humans, heal rapidly and perfectly. Over the past 20 years, researchers have been probing the mysteries of this process in the hope of improving adult wound healing and perhaps even making scarless healing a reality. It's no trivial point: delayed wound healing in the US elderly, for instance, is estimated to cost more than $9 billion each year.
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