Baldness? UCLA's New Molecule Could Revolutionize Hair Growth | Hacker News Reader

Baldness? UCLA's New Molecule Could Revolutionize Hair Growth

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39 pointsJerry252 comments

The amount of charged snark that is all in one particular direction seen in this HN comments thread is really something. You don’t see attitude like this on other potential medical breakthroughs, like the tooth regrowth research that was recently on HN

A deep dive into why this is different sure would be an interesting article to read

It's probably because missing teeth affect your ability to eat, whereas baldness (primarily) affects your appearance.

News of this exact research has been reposted a couple of times and previous threads weren't nearly as bad as this one. Something changed.

I'd certainly appreciate again having long hair to run fingers through while thinking...

Next, let’s regenerate cochlear hair follicles!

I want the opposite. I'm tired of shaving my head + beard and generally just find those hairs annoying to deal with.

This isn’t just good news for the oldies. Gen Z in particular seems at first glance to be balding earlier and at higher rates. I had no idea what the heck “Norwood” meant until some young Zoomer guy clued me in.

Honestly...I blame the internet (overstimulation from games, porn, addictive scrolling).

100% - there were no bald men before the invention of the internet

ya your snark is underwhelming. the comment was about increasing rates of baldness in young men, not whatever point you are trying to make.

Give me! I want. Take my money.

With this and penis pills we’re right on track for Idiocracy.

God forbid men catch a break.

Who catches breaks more than men?

yea, so hard being a man… :)

lol you think its not hard being an ugly bald man? The amount of misogyny and resentment from men towards women would go down quite a lot if baldness had a cure...

As if quant trading is a better use of their time

My wife just finished cancer treatment and has been fighting hair loss the whole time. It's coming back very slowly and it's thin. Losing your hair isn't a men only problem.

My (biological, born female) wife has androgenic alopecia and not even the only woman I know who suffers from it. It's not that rare in women, just less common than in men.

On the one hand, this is obviously nice. I'm seeing more and more thinning as I age.

On the other -- of course they founded a company and got backing from Google. People get to work on what they want to, and they should, but I feel the same way about esteemed cell biologists starting hair startups as I do brilliant computer scientists working on ad placement algorithms. There's a bit of a shame in there somewhere.

But how else do they get the cure to the market?

(Provided it works, there are several such announcements every year but the actual progress is mediocre.)

Actual progress in biopharma is mediocre until it isn’t. Just look at weight loss drugs for an example.

People always say that working on hair growth is vanity and that there are more pressing issues to work on but I disagree.

Burn victims would like to have smooth skin with hair on it. Now I know this specific treatment probably won't help burn victims, but research on hair growth in general does.

Ultimately medicine is working towards a fountain of youth and if R&D can develop a revenue source from people who want their hair to grow back it's a means to further fund that quest for the fountain of youth and a reduction in human suffering.

It's not like people who buy toupees or hair transplants were going to otherwise spend their money on donations for burn victims.

I don't think hair regrowth is an unworthy research topic.

It’s wild to me that hair regrowth could be considered an unworthy goal, when hundreds of millions of people will get an enormous boost to their well-being and all kinds of psych issues. It may actually be more effective a depression treatment than a good portion of anti-depressants.

I don't think it's an unworthy goal.

I think this is a bit of an unfair comparison

We could say better hair leads to better self expression, confidence, etc even if we say its purely an ego/vanity source (which i’d argue, isn’t necessarily the case but for sake of argument lets say it is)

Ad placement algorithms don’t lead to a person’s well being increasing, outside shareholders/business owners which is tied to monetary gain.

perhaps you could say better ad placement for XYZ ad that promotes ABC net positive outcome means the work is positive, but i don’t see the inverse case with hair growth research that has high a magnitude of net negative outcomes on society as ad placement may have beyond:

1. Everyone gets better hair, so a lack of hair means societal pressure to conform

2. The treatment/therapy is patented, and prohibitively expensive where only the elite income brackets can afford it

To say more concisely, theres much more potential for an ad placement algorithm that hyper performs to be net negative on society than a hair treatment that hyper performs to be a net negative on society

Let me take a guess. You aren't bald, are you?

I'm not, and I'm glad that potential new therapies are being discovered.

I don't follow. You're happy that work is being done, but unhappy that ... people are getting paid to work on it? Happy that the work is being done but unhappy that there are people doing the work? Or put differently, what would your ideal situation be here?

Cancer researchers collect public grant money at a public university, discover a therapy, found a private pharmaceutical company to bring hair growth to market, raise millions from tech, are now hair restoration entrepreneurs.

I'm not saying they don't have the right. I just said it's a bit of a shame to me.

The alternative is they capitalize on their IP (they already have provisional patents filed) and continue their work. Maybe they'll do both, who knows, but as many here know companies don't build themselves. Like I said, though, they don't necessarily owe the world anything else.

People like to pretend that baldness is just about men being vain, but in reality, it causes serious mental health problem. If you want to be a feminist ally, find the cure for baldness. Watch the incel population go down 90%. And women will be extremely happy with the lack of baldness in males.

As someone who can speak authoritatively, being bald doesn't make men incels.

Being an unempathetic asshat does.

Work on oneself. Treat other people nicely. Be surprised when they respond favorably.

IOW, they'd just be incels with hair...

Unlikely. The incels would find something else to become unreasonably embittered about so they can continue directing their misplaced ire towards women.

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