Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.