Yesterday, out of a clear blue sky, my old pal, Mike (Jagger) Hatcherson decided he would enter the funhouse known as Facebook, posting a large photo of his current self (no, not the one above). Jagger, is that YOU? What happened to that jolly mop of hair you sported, that pageboy do which had weak women swooning and clever ones running their fingers through it. Say it isn’t so, Jagger!
When we were kids, we never thought much about hair depletion. If anything, we had too much hair, necessitating constant trips to the barber shop where we had to sit around reading Field & Stream magazines while we waited for Gino the Barber to finish discussing antipasto choices with the guy in the chair. If we were lucky, the customer wasn’t also getting a shave, which involved immense amounts of hot towels, lather and a very scary razor, which Gino deftly maneuvered up and down soft, vulnerable necks without so much as a tiny abrasion. When I finally got up into the big padded chair, Gino always asked me the same question: “Wanna try something different this time, Billy?” Like what, I used to wonder. “No, Gino—same old thing.” You had to be careful with those barbers. You could end up looking like a Parris Island Marine if you weren’t careful.
The only bald guy we knew about was Elmer Fudd. Oh, there were our fathers, of course, but for some reason we never made the association that we might be looking at our futures. My own father had little hair by the time he was 29 but my maternal grandfather, whom I resembled, had a full head of hair well into his fifties and so did I. After that, it began a slow, methodical abandonment of the ship, which didn’t bother me too much until all my photographs started to show up compromised by the reflection of sunbeams off the front of my head. I resorted to hats, the safety nets of the hair-challenged, but I missed my hair. I am not one to incorporate hair plugs or wear toupees or utilize the largely ineffective Rogaines of the world but I definitely expected some help from the scientific community by now. Come on, guys. You can land a man on Pluto but you can’t grow a little hair? Can we please get our priorities in order here?
There may be hope on the horizon, though, as we all know, that horizon has a way of falling back further and further as we approach it. Anyway, there appears to finally be a better understanding of hair biology, including new knowledge of how cells communicate with the hair follicle. A study led by George Cotsarelis, M.D., chair of the Department of Dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and published last year in the Journal of Clinical Investigation found that a bald scalp and one with hair both have the same number of stem cells, but in the bald scalp the stems are just laying out, cool by the pool, instead of going to work repairing and replenishing hair follicles and fibers. You’ve seen these guys before—always hanging out at the water cooler shooting the breeze while their more responsible colleagues plug away; apparently, it’s the same in the stem cell world. Cotsarelis tells us if we can get the lazy bastards working again, the hair comes back.
What to do? How do you bribe a stem cell? You can’t offer him a spiffy raise, a better parking space or a paid vacation in Tristan da Cunha. It’s a dilemma. Specifically, it’s Dr. George Cotsarelis’ dilemma and he wants everybody to know he’s working on it day and night, sacrificing weekends at the dog track, neglecting his wife and children, drinking heavily. In the process, he has found out this: mice with skin wounds regrew hair at the injured site in a process that mimicked embryonic development. This means that activated stem cells can grow new hair follicles. A company named Follica is using this technology to develop a new balding treatment formula, likely including a drug compound and some sort of wounding of the skin akin to what the mice went through. Another outfit, San Diego-based Histogen, headed by Gail Naughton, Ph.D., an expert in tissue engineering, views Cotsarelis’ work, along with studies at Rockefeller University by Elaine Fuchs and the University of Southern California by Cheng-Ming Chuong as the foundation of current biotech progress in hair restoration.
“Our approach is to take cells that are normally found in the scalp and grow them under embryonic conditions of very low oxygen and suspension culture to trick the cells into thinking they’re back in the embryonic environment,” says that clever Naughton. “Within a couple of days, they start acting like multipotent stem cells and secreting the growth factors that are necessary to stimulate stem cells in the body, including stem cells of the human hair follicle. We’ve basically learned how to manufacture a complex physiological group of growth factors that are normally responsible for stimulating stem cells to create new hairs. We simply mimic nature by figuring out how to create what the body makes to grow a new hair.” Those growth factors, chemical signals produced by cells that induce more cell growth and maturation or differentiation, are what go into Histogen’s Hair Stimulating Complex (HSC), an injectable liquid formula currently in trial in Manila, Philippines, which I, for one, am flying to tomorrow, subscribing to the old belief that the early bird gets the hair. If it works, I’ll call you from the airport.
Seriously, folks, Histogen aims to have a product on the market in Asia sometime this year and in the U.S. by 2016. The final procedure involves a one or two time set of injections in the scalp with a very fine 32-gauge needle, taking only several minutes rather than the hours required for a nasty hair transplant. After that, you’ll be back in action, hitting those bars, hustling supermodels. In the interests of multiculturalism, I’m thinking of developing a fine afro, something on the order of Angela Davis’ historic creation. The possibilities are endless. After we get this one figured out, we’ll start working on Dr. Bill’s Loose Skin Elixir or maybe The Flying Pie Abdomen Depressor. Before long, everybody will be nineteen again. Where do we find a pot dealer around here?
Alternate Possibilities
Just in case Cotsarelis and Naughton let us down, we’ve been researching other hair restoration possibilities. One can’t have too much information. In a remote publication called The Ebers Papyrus, we discovered a baldness cure which requires a mixture of fats from a hippopotamus, crocodile, tomcat, snake and ibex, mixed with porcupine hair boiled in water. Apply to the scalp for four days and—voila—hair. If all the hippos around your place are a little touchy about donating fat or you can’t find an ibex, your alternative would be to rustle up the leg of a female greyhound and saute it in oil with the hoof of a donkey. Sounds a little macabre but it’s a historical fact that those old Egyptians knew from hair.
The ancient Greek physician, Hippocrates, often referred to as the Father of Western Medicine, personally grappled with male pattern baldness. He tried a topical concoction of opium, horseradish, pigeon droppings, beetroot and spices. It didn’t work. Worse yet, when he passed by people would hold their noses and move to the other side of the street. But Hippocrates didn’t give up easily. Eventually, he found a successful cure after noticing that eunuchs never went thin on top. Customers, alas, were few. Candidates of the day decided there were things worse than baldness.
Moving on to the 20th Century, manufacturers scrambled to develop high-tech solutions to this thorny issue. One of them, the Allied Merke Institute, came up with the Thermocap. Customers with thinning locks and busy schedules merely had to sit under this bonnetlike apparatus for 15 minutes a day; the gadget’s heat and blue light would spring into action stimulating dormant hair bulbs. A Popular Mechanics headline screamed out the question: “HAS A REMEDY FOR BALDNESS BEEN DISCOVERED AT LAST?” Short answer: Nope.
In 1936, The Crosley Corporation, a radio and automotive manufacturer, ventured into the “personal care” market with the introduction of the Xervac, a machine which purportedly used suction to spur hair growth. Advertisements for the system, which could be rented for home use or found in barbershops, encouraged businessmen to “Kick back, relax with a cigarette and a newspaper” as the helmet-encased vacuum pump worked its magic. Did it work? See above: Thermocap.
When The Comet Hits Your Eye Like A Big Pizza Pie….
Okay, here we go again. The internet is filled with dire predictions of a comet 2.5 miles wide heading straight for Puerto Rico. Or Brazil. Or Venezuela, take your pick. Supposed to impact sometime between September 15th and the 28th. We know this not because any prominent astronomers have advised the public, only because a bumblebrain named Lyn Leahz was alerted by God. See, Lynn travels in rarefied circles and she kept hearing of threats from the sky so one day she decided to get to the bottom of all this and, during prayer, asked her friend God wassup. God is not one to gossip about these things so he merely put the notion in Lyn’s fevered brain to call a particular old friend, who promptly confirmed the impending catastrophe. Lyn then marched out and made a video to inform the world, much of which was thrilled to discover this was happening. “Show them a light and they’ll follow it anywhere.”
Leahz says the government has purchased and delivered to Puerto Rico an “extraordinary number of body bags,” the better to neaten up after the comet arrives. She is pretty sure the thing will break up when it enters Earth’s atmosphere but still thinks the remaining pieces will be “pretty big.” Tsunamis everywhere. Massive death counts. Not as big a deal as The Rapture, but better than Hurricane Katrina. Oh, and just in case you don’t believe her, Leahz wants you to know the Foreign Minister of France publicly announced at a White House press conference a 500-day countdown to what he called “climate chaos,” ending on September 24. He didn’t mention any comets, of course, not wanting to panic the public. Nudge me if we’ve heard all this before.
On June 8th, a NASA spokesman addressed rumors about the approach of the mystery comet and stated definitively that no such astronomical event had been charted. Just for fun, though, we contacted The Flying Pie’s own Master of the Universe, Stuart Ellison, to find out what would happen if a comet of this magnitude did show up and plow into Earth intact. Says he:
“A 2.5 mile diameter comet is about 4 km in diameter. The dinosaur extinction was caused by a 10 km diameter object. It took 30 million years for Earth to recover. A 5-10 meter object (1/1000 the diameter of the dino-killing object) has about the same destructive power as the Hiroshima bomb “Little Boy,” or 15 kilotons of TNT, 15,000 tons of TNT. Those tend to blow up in the atmosphere. An object of 50 meters diameter will hit the ground and cause an effect like the Tanguska impact of 1908.
Although that comet—or meteor—burst in the air rather than hitting the surface, this event is still referred to as an “impact.” Estimates of the energy of the blast range from 5 megatons of TNT to as high as 30, with 10-15 megatons of TNT being the most likely. This is roughly equal to the U.S.’ Castle Bravo thermonuclear bomb tested on March 1, 1954, about 1000 times as powerful as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and about one-third the power of the Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated. The explosion from that one knocked over an estimated 80 million trees over 2.150 square kilometers (830 sq. mi.). It’s estimated that the shock wave from the blast would have measured 5.0 on the Richter scale.”
Don’t worry, though. Lyn’s comet ain’t coming. Really.
FLYING PIE Logo Forgery Unearthed in Italy
Well, it’s vacation time again. Some of our pals are off to St. Augustine, other showoffs to Rome, and a good thing, too. Just last month, Bruce and Barbara Reissfelder tootled over there for a few weeks of sightseeing and pasta, not necessarily in that order. Fortunately for us, Bruce is an avid photographer, and while at the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel happened to look up….and what to his wondering eyes should appear on the ceiling above but a blatant knockoff of our Flying Pie logo, presented here for evidence. Those Italians have some nerve. While the Vatican work has obvious shortcomings when compared to the original, it is close enough to make us grouchy. We may sue.
That’s all, folks….
