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" When will it end?  For most of their well-known time in the universe, men have faced a common battle transcending cultural or socioeconomic barriers. It&amp;#039;s the same fight faced by your father, and your father&amp;#039;s father, and every other man who ever made it past 40. Caesar, Shakespeare, and Churchill all fought it. Chances are, you will too.  For the broad majority of men, baldness still remains the scourge of our vanities. Maybe it gets to us because, on a psychological level, aging represents a loss of virility, symbolized by hair loss. Or maybe it&amp;#039;s simply because \u2014 like aging \u2014 we can only control it so much.  The fear of balding continues to persist in an age increasingly obsessed with youth (see: the supposedly Samson-esque follicles of everyone from Tom Brady to Justin Bieber) and the preservation of vitality (see: patriarch of the Kardashian clan, &amp;amp;lt; target=&amp;quot;_blank&amp;quot;&amp;amp;gt;Bruce Jenner). Baldness continues to represent some fundamental, inescapable, awful truths for men: You will get old. It will not be pretty. People will think differently of you. One day you will wilt, and eventually, die. Baldness reminds those of us doomed to it that we are masters of our destiny only so much. We are men, and men can do great, impossible, incredible things. But we can&amp;#039;t fight the tide. Or so we&amp;#039;ve thought. Recent news of a promising new breakthrough in remedying baldness has heads buzzing. Thanks to a bunch of mice who demonstrated in a laboratory setting that dormant follicular stem cells can be stimulated to cause the regeneration of hair, there might be hope for you yet. Earlier this year, a group of scientists led by George Costarellis at the University of Pennsylvania discovered that male pattern baldness may arise from a problem with the activation of cells rather than the numbers of cells (or thought-to-be &amp;quot;dead&amp;quot; cells) in the heads of bald men. Basically: Even though it appears as though bald heads have less hair than others, they actually just have less active hair follicles, those ports in your head from which hair grows. Apparently, there is a difference.  The research team found that in male pattern baldness, hair follicles actually shrink; they don&amp;#039;t disappear. The hairs are microscopically tiny on the bald part of the scalp compared to other spots, but they are not gone altogether. And what is more, important progenitor stem cells seems to remain alive and active well after all hope appears lost.  &amp;quot;Basically, we were able to show that there were two types of hair follicle stem cells: a mother stem cell and then her daughter stem cell. We showed that the mother stem cell sticks around in male pattern hair loss but her daughter is lost. The significance of [this discovery] is: Since the mother stem cells are still present, the hope for future medicine is going to be to realize why she&amp;#039;s not multiplying and how we can turn her on, which would eventually probably cure baldness,&amp;quot; said Professor Luis Garza, M.D. recently in a phone interview with Esquire.com. Garza, an Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins Department of Dermatology, was the first author on the Penn study.  But the burning question, of course, is something Garza is used to getting: How close are the eager and anxious men of 2011 to actually seeing the fruits of this breakthrough? After all, what good is science if it isn&amp;#039;t right now? Garza explained: &amp;quot;I think it&amp;#039;s very likely that by the end of your lifetime, there will be a pill or a cream, kind of like there is for Viagra, which your insurance [might not] cover and you might have to apply repeatedly \u2014 but yeah, it&amp;#039;ll keep your hair growing.&amp;quot;  Alternative approaches to the one taken by the UPenn team have, in the past, yielded promising results, along with a mixed bag of terrifying side effects. For example, Garza explains, there is already a quite effective genetic treatment for baldness that has been tested in mice, which activates the (actually-named) Sonic The Hedgehog pathway. The upside: lots of hair. The downside: huge, uncontrollable, ulcerating tumors. &amp;quot;This [other] medication can dramatically turn on hair growth in the mouse,&amp;quot; says Garza, &amp;quot;but the main reason this hasn&amp;#039;t been aggressively commercialized is that is turns out it&amp;#039;s the same pathway used to turn on hair follicle growth that also causes basal cell cancers. Theoretically, if people were given [the treatment] in very high doses and were using it along their scalp, sure: they might grow hair. But there&amp;#039;s also the chance that they&amp;#039;ll grow basal cell cancers. Which nobody would like. Especially if the tumor starts bleeding.&amp;quot; For their part, Garza&amp;#039;s team is confident that their treatment runs no such risk, and they&amp;#039;re going full-steam ahead with their research. But the question remains, even if the treatment is safe and efficacious, is it really necessary? Is a baldness cure-all really just that? Or is it simply a wig of a different color, covering a deeper, less visible problem? Because while a cure for baldness may seem unprecedented \u2014 and indeed, in some very real and very important ways, it is (we&amp;#039;re getting eerily close to being able to control our genes, which is kind of a big deal) \u2014 the process does have an analog.  This has all happened before.  With women. The advent of the silicone breast implant represented to many women the ability to alter their corporeal fate; the hand dealt to them by their genetic coding. In the years since, popular opinion shifted, and now enormous, conspicuous cleavage has fallen distinctly out of the favor it used to enjoy. Fake breasts not only point to the fact of their own inauthenticity \u2014 often with little discretion \u2014 but also to many, a stigmatized, transparent stripe of compensation, which itself can be unattractive enough to offset any cosmetic work done by the implants.  Of course, there are always exceptions \u2014 women who are crippled by profound self-doubt and anxiety because of modest breast size; women who have undergone mastectomy surgery and justifiably want to reclaim their body; transgendered individuals who were born into the wrong bodies \u2014 but the rule today seems to be that a self-possessed, confident, devil-may-care-what-size-my-boobs-are woman is perceived as being more attractive than one who goes out of her way to prove otherwise. So, the question becomes, are men who harvest a new crop of hair setting themselves up for public marginalization, or widespread support? Is the 65 year-old with a mohawk going to seem any different than the 65 year-old woman with Dolly Parton additions? The jury&amp;#039;s still out, because, well, the case hasn&amp;#039;t even really started yet. However, one thing remains crystal clear: Coming to grips with one&amp;#039;s baldness causes no bleeding lesions whatsoever, and it also reduces the risk of looking like an overcompensating buffoon every time you step out of the front door, or more importantly, feeling like one. After all, courage in the face of baldness inherently yield perceptions of confidence and self-security, especially in those who respect bravery, stoicism and the general ability to keep one&amp;#039;s priorities in order (i.e. potential mates). The mere thought of watching a hair piece fly off of a man&amp;#039;s cranium \u2014 or going from hero to zero when chemical hair-loss treatment cessation leaves one with a combover almost overnight \u2014 could take on heavy symbolic weight: This is a man who can&amp;#039;t secure the hair on his head. It&amp;#039;s a high price to pay for a free alternative that offers every man the rare chance to distinguish being resigned to getting old with openly enjoying it, especially considering the alternative: All the hair in the world, bought with just as much money, still won&amp;#039;t give you the freedom (or aero-dynamics) of being hairlessly self-assured. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/style/a9773/cure-for-balding-5430612/>