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DARPA Sponsoring Limb Regeneration Research
fragmentate writes "Wired News is reporting: 'In response to the hundreds of soldiers coming home from war with missing arms or legs, Darpa is spending millions of dollars to help scientists learn how people might one day regenerate their own limbs. Prosthetics are getting better all the time, but they will never be as good as the limbs we were born with. So two teams of scientists at 10 institutions across the country are competing to regrow the first mammalian limb ... The researchers' first milestone is to generate a blastema — a mass of cells able to develop into various organs or body parts — in a mammal.' Apparently this is a relatively new area of research, even Wikipedia's stub on blastemas is very terse."
Wasn't the Lizard created from a scientist who was trying to do this very thing?
Here's a radical idea...
I have another radical idea. How about you let us talk about technology on this site, and you take your political rants over to digg where it belongs.
If they can give soldiers the ability to grow amputated limbs, any possibility this technology can be used to produce 100% real enlarged breasts? Forget silicone and saline implants, in ten years time we'll have women who can inject themselves with this serum and grow from a B-cup to DD. I imagine the government will find a way to outlaw that, too, just like they did for silicone "for the saftey of women".
we should have no problem outengineering most of the human body.
Yes and then the batteries in your cyberleg run down and you have to haul the entire 40 kilo hunk of metal across town in the rain... on one leg. Besides that you are forgetting that the limbs aren't seperate components of the body; its all interlinked. Its no good having an arm able to flip over a truck, your torso would compact and tear itself apart if you didn't just rip the thing off, nerve circuits and all. The only real option for enhanced performance cybernetics would be a Ghost in the Shell effort, with full body replacement except for the brain. If you can manage that, without regular maintenance and some sort of 50 year power source, I'll admit you have a point.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Our engineering arrogance is still no competition with the million-year-old blind watch maker. From nanotechnology, to junk DNA, dark matter, and artificial intelligence, we constantly overestimate our understanding. We will get there, but we don't even know what we don't know. I think we will be cribbing engineering notes from cell cultures for millennium to come and still have much left to learn from biology.
Just because we may eventually out-tnature doesn't mean the thousands of injured soliders and civilians want part of their body replaced with robotics if they could have the option of a new, real limb.
There is also no reason both areas of research can't operate simultaneously, nor anything that is restricting them from working coopoeratively.
I doubt there's going to throw someone back into battle that's gone through the psychological trauma of having a limb blown off. You can replace the body part, perhaps, but the mental damage will be there for awhile.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
We tried that one for a while. We were criticised for being xenophobic and isolationist.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
6 million dollar man
Inspector Gadget
Luke Skywalker
Fake limbs can resist bullets. They can have powerful weapons and other tools. If you buy the Dr. Strangelove model, you get to blame the arm's buggy software when it grabs a woman's butt.
hmmm - I bet it is possible to regenerate the body indefinitely, (eventually), but I am doubtful that this is possible with the mind. Even if the brain-tissue could be replaced, could a useful structure be preserved? How would a human mind cope with the increased memory requirements? - It would distort the psychology somewhat to have centuries or millennia of experience.
Perhaps the brain could drop its oldest memories in favour of new ones, but would this seem like immortality to mind of that person?
Immortality may be just not that far off, but all that would lead to is an increase in over population and wealth stratifacation. I'm all for improving the quality of life for amputees but I think a century or so is long enough for any one person.
We are all just people.
FWIW, in the U.S. military you are given an honorable discharge on demand if wounded three times (three purple hearts), so even if something ridiculous like this happened you'd be sent home by the third severed limb :-P
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
If a person lives for 1000 years and their personality continues to evolve, to what extent can the 1000-year-old individual be regarded as "the same person" as, say, the 30-year-old individual? Are you the same person you were 10 years ago, or 20? What would 1000 years of experience, combined with 1000 years of cultural, political and technological change, do to the human personality?