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January 22, 2040
Former French karate champion Pamela
de Robien lost her left hand in a car accident and saw her
career being shattered. With regeneration her hand has now grown
back and she is heading for the Olympics later this year.
It was a late evening in December 2038 and Pamela was driving
from her home in Aubagne, just outside Marseille in France, to
her parents to celebrate Christmas. A trailer from a truck slid
over to the wrong side of the road and Pamela got away severely
bruised with left hand crushed.
“When I got over the immediate shock from the accident my first
thought was that my career in karate was over. Already in the
emergency at the hospital I was told that it could grow back
again. They even told me that I could go back to karate in the
future, but I didn’t believe them”, Pamela says.
After surgical and medical treatment her left hand has now grown
back and is fully functioning, just 13 months after the
accident. She went back to training after 6 months, with just
the stump with five small bumps. Now all the fingers are in the
same size as on the right hand so she can perform a correct
haito.
Before hand regeneration became common the solution for a person
to get a hand back was a hand transplant. It was a quite
complicated procedure that was first successfully performed in
1998. The patient had to be on post operation drugs for long
time and in some cases it didn’t work out, so the hand had to be
removed. In total 152 hand transplants worldwide were performed
until the last one in year 2023.
Regeneration had been known with animals for a long time, but it
wasn’t until the beginning of this century that breakthroughs
were made in humans. We have always been able to grow
back a fingertip by ourselves, but by copying how some animals
did it, it was transferable to humans.
Pamela is now in full training to fight her way back in to the
French karate team for the Olympics later this year in Abuja,
Nigeria. “I’m so very fortunate to be able to do this when
looking at the pictures of what was left of my hand after the
accident. To be able to step in to an Olympic arena representing
my country would definitely show that everything is possible!”
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