Gone today, hair tomorrow

OIL of wormwood.

Dog urine.

Equal parts Abyssinian greyhound's heel, date blossoms and ass hoof, boiled in oil.

Being licked by a cow.

Through the centuries, men losing their hair have resorted to desperate measures to recover the luxurious tresses of their youth -- but happily, their options have expanded substantially beyond dog urine. Now there are sophisticated transplant techniques and drugs shown by science to be more than mere snake oil.

And more is still to come. Higher-tech remedies are being cooked up in the clinic -- ones that may solve the shortcomings of today's solutions, which for the most part just save hairs that already exist or move them around on the scalp.

Researchers are beginning to understand the biological nuts and bolts of why hair grows and stops growing. They're looking forward to the day when they can remove a few hairs, multiply them in a lab and completely fill in a bald spot -- or slap on creams that can stop and start hair growth whenever and wherever they like.

"I think, ultimately, we will find a way to take a single follicle and clone it, to re-create it in a petri dish -- and that solves all of our problems," says Dr. Claire Haycox, a clinical associate professor of medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle.

A deeper function

Hair serves no fundamental biological purpose. It doesn't keep us warm, pad our heads particularly well or shield us effectively from the sun. But prosaic mechanics can't encapsulate the huge role hair plays in the human psyche. From ancient times, hair has symbolized strength and beauty.

"Golden-haired Achilles" was the greatest warrior in Homer's "Iliad."

Samson's long hair made him invincible. "If I be shaven," he says in Judges 16:17, "then my strength will go from me, and I shall become weak, and be like any other man."

And in Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice," Bassanio describes the hair of his love, Portia, as "A golden mesh to entrap the hearts of men/Faster than gnats in cobwebs."

Shakespeare and Homer understood a subtle biological truth: When we look for a mate, we unconsciously seek signals of that person's health, the better to produce robust offspring. A full head of lustrous hair, in man or woman, is a reliable sign of vigor and good nutrition -- in evolutionary terms, of a better mate. So when hair starts disappearing, it's not surprising that the loss can be traumatic.