Quote from: Android on February 20, 2018, 02:31:37 AMDifficult to lump together height with cancer and alopecia (hair loss).
Cancer is a heartbreaking disease that can strike anyone, so it has a very strong fear factor. It's cruel in that no one is safe from it, even the rich. There's a big incentive to find a cure since even if you don't get it, you've probably been effected by it through friends and family.
Hair loss gets much more attention as well since it's something that changes our identity later in life. You have one image of yourself, and slowly you start to look like someone else. Sometimes it's sudden, through disease or as a side effect of treatment. This can be very difficult for your mind to process, and it's strongly tied to the definition of youth to have a full head of hair, so there's a lot of research to fix this. It's also quite traumatizing for women to lose hair after menopause as well, especially since baldness is seen as largely a male problem. There are a lot of companies in East Asia trying to find a cure, and it makes sense since shaving your head isn't as widely accepted there.
Height on the other hand, there's less incentive to "fix" it since it's seen as luck of the draw. For many it's just who you are, like the color of your skin, hair, eyes, etc. It's not seen as a problem, so it's not something that's actively being researched. This is why CLL is such a fringe, somewhat taboo procedure.
However, CLL is just an offshoot of LL. There will always be incentive to fix disfigured limbs or limbs of mismatched lengths, so in extension we may see something beneficial for cosmetic use in the future again as well. We take it for granted that there's nothing better now, even though nothing viable existed before Dr. Ilizarov. We would literally just amputate limbs since it was the better option in many cases. The mere existence of devices like Precice is a blessing, it's interesting to think that some categorize external femurs as barbaric when there was not much else before intramedullary nails.
But getting off topic here, new technologies. For adults, I imagine just better versions of devices like Precice with advanced drugs to speed along recovery time. Better pain management. For children, we'll have gene editing, or at least better formulations of HGH that cost much less.
I don't know. I'm kind of surprised there's not more interest in height increase research. I guess it's because the science to do it in any non very intrusive way still seems incredibly far off.