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Growing A New Skull

Posted 10/07/2009 11:15 am by Ron Hogan

regrowing-broken-skull.jpg

Broken bones usually recover over time.  That’s nothing spectacular.  Break your arm?  The doctor puts it in a cast and, eventually, it comes back as good as new.  However, what 72-year-old Gordon Moore accomplished is nothing short of a medical miracle.  He didn’t just heal a broken skull, he grew a second skull.  That’s like breaking your arm, losing a foot of bone, and then having the forearm bone grow back spontaneously.

After an accident in 1955, Gordon was fitted with a titanium (rather than iron) plate to cover a missing piece of his skull.  The plate ran from just above his eye to the crown of his head, and extended to his ear on one side.  Basically, he lost half his skull and somehow, miraculously, it has grown back in the shape of the skull plate.  It’s a bit flat, because Moore dented the plate in a second crash in 1958, but it’s a miracle that the skull bone is even there!

The cheeky senior provided the quote of the day, too:  “They said bone does grow through time - but never half a skull. I’ve asked to keep the plate as a souvenir.”

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