That Guy: Of mice and men and strange brown mousy hair

Balding mice have been cured. Photo / Thinkstock

Opinion

In breaking news, scientists in America have been able to re-grow hair on balding mice by blocking a stress-related hormone in the stomach linked with hair loss.

"Almost 100 per cent of the mice responded. The hair grows back fully. It is a very dramatic effect," Million Mulugeta of the University of California at Los Angeles, who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview.

The telephone interview wasn't actually with me but I was able to quote him verbatim by copy and pasting it from an online source that I regularly use, especially when short on time.

Mulugeta said the findings could open new areas of research on hair-loss in humans, especially in people whose hair loss is caused by stress and ageing.

So what is the potential for humans? Could the mouse experiment offer a remedy for balding in humans, specifically men?

One expert believes it can, and that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

"In the short term - within a matter of months - we will be able to skin these mice and attach their unbalding pelts to human heads making a mouse skin toupee if you like," says toupee manufacturer and hot-rod enthusiast Wayne Gordon.

A range of colours will be available but because of supply they will be mainly white and brown, and the process will certainly give new meaning to the term "mousy hair".

This is not the first time Hastings-born Wayne Gordon has dabbled in the animal toupee business. In the mid-1990s he launched a range of cat skin toupees.

These skins were obviously thicker and more luxuriant than the proposed mouse skin variety that may soon be on offer, and the cat skins were available in many colours and styles.

Customers could order products as diverse as The Bufont Burmese, Elvis Black, James Coburn White, The Ginga Rogers and the wild-looking Feral Fantastic. Cat-paw sideburns were also an option.

Wayne and his band the Wayne Gordon Experience will be appearing at the Whangamata Beach Hop Rock 'n' Roll festival in a few weeks and he will be sporting one of his Elvis Black wigs.

He is happy to do interviews about their upcoming album, but is not willing to talk about the reasons his cat-skin toupee company went under, nor the claims that he was crate-farming cats to service his operation. He has always maintained that his cats were free range.

The company also claimed that "no cats were harmed in the 'wigging' process" but many people, especially animal rights groups, questioned how this was possible as the cat was skinned and then cremated.

The New Zealand Cat Skin Toupee company went into receivership just two weeks after it opened. An expensive research study was later conducted to ascertain why the company did so poorly.

The findings were inconclusive but three main factors are said to have contributed: A cheap ineffective brochure campaign; launching the product during the moulting season for cats; and a poor economic environment.

A number of high-profile incidents that resulted in people's heads being attacked by wild tomcats on heat didn't help the launch of the product either.

So is the timing better this time for a new toupee product harvested from domestic pets? Or is attaching mice skins to our bald patches playing God?

It's an age-old question and one I couldn't hope to discuss in depth within the confines of this column.

Perhaps it is a question you, the reader, can ponder for the rest of the day once you finish reading this.

Get back to me online or by writing to the editor and let me know your thoughts as I really want to know.