What is regeneration?

Historically, philosophers, naturalists and biologists alike have referred to the restoration of missing body parts after traumatic injury as regeneration. While still valid today, the concept of regeneration has expanded through the years to include a diverse set of phenomena. For instance, August Weisman considered physiological cell renewal to be regeneration and wrote so in a chapter dedicated to regeneration in his seminal 1893 book The Germ Plasm: ‘the functions of certain organs depend on the fact that their parts continually undergo destruction, and are then correspondingly renewed. In this case it is the process of life itself, and not an external enemy, that destroys the life of a cell ’ [1]. Soon after, TH Morgan would also attempt to refine the precision of the concept of regeneration by coining terms that distinguish betwee