Why can’t we clone hair?

Am I the only person questioning why there isn’t a big market for this? Scientists all around the world are cloning hearts, lungs, and other organs in a glass box without a body.  Yet these scientists cant just clone your hair follicles and transplant them or something – and just “cure” baldness?  Or is this once again just the trillion dollar hair corporations refusing to let this become a thing because they will lose millions on selling imaginary hairy growth products to the gullible masses?

Good questions. Cloning was done in the late 19802 when Jahoda cloned hair from he and his wife. They were only a few hairs and it has never been something can can be done commercially. In the 1990s, hair cloning was successfully done on mice, but the the hair which was cloned in a petri dish, when transplanted into mice, killed them because the hair grew wild in every direction causing massive infections.  What most people don’t realize is that a hair is a complete organ system and each follicular unit, as an independent organ, has be be developed that it grows like a complete organ, in the correct position and direction.  For this reason, most people have tried to work with stem cells to grow the organ from scratch, which would then have a direction and each stem cell might produce a hair organ (follicular unit).  We have not gotten there despite now almost 30 years after the first hair was cloned.

 

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