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Researchers Create Beating Heart In Lab
Sunday Scientist writes "Minnesota researchers have created a beating heart in the laboratory. In a process called whole organ decellularization, they grew functioning heart tissue by using dead rat and pig hearts as a sort of flesh matrix, and reseeding them with a mixture of live cells. The goal is to grow replacement parts, using their own stem cells, for people born with defective tickers or experiencing heart failure."
Tin Man will be so pleased.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
With the advances in biotechnology, it's amusing to think that Larry Niven in his Gil "The Arm" Hamilton stories (collected in Flatlander ) foresaw a future where you'd get the death penalty for just about anything just so that the state could rip out your organs for donation into someone needing it. In Niven's future history, the use of organ transplants ends only hundreds of years in the future when alloplasty ("gadgets instead of organs") is developed. Now, in just 2007, we're getting close to synthesizing real organs instead of transplanting or making little machines.
This presents a long-term opportunity for the next phase in body modification. Who says that a "replacement" organ must be identical to the original equipment? Perhaps athletes will opt for an enlarged six-chambered heart or an abdominal booster-heart to improve endurance.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
This is positively Final Fantasy 7-esque!
Grammar Nazi
While on the surface this is very exciting and welcome news, understand that this: development still has a very long way to go before it will be truly useful. It will be a very long time until an engineered heart will be placed in a human chest saving someone's life. It may or may not happen in our lifetime (or ever for that matter).
Now the big question is, do I go for the replacement legs that give me more speed and let me jump higher, or do I become more stealthy. Choices, choices...
This is a big step for biotech, and I'm glad to see it, improving longevity and quality of life is a noble goal in science. I wonder when the development is complete, a machine organ replacements, or cellular organ replacements are the ones that better/more popular.
If you can grow replacement hears, then you can grow more than one.
Think of the gains of installing 2 in parallel, or even 4.
Though it would probably be nice to get their beating synchronized.
...it's pronounced "Fronkensteen".
I'm firmly in Kurzweil's camp with developments like this. I intend to live just long enough (naturally) that I can live forever (engineered).
Shh.
...Of Your Heart.
...
It Goes Boom Boody-Boom Boody-Boom Boody-Boom, Boody-Boom Boody-Boom Boody-Boom-Boom-Boom
Well, Goodness Gracious Me!
Next up on OldTyme Radio overnight, Dr. Hanny Lector and the Cannibals with their top hit, Liver & Chianti. Hope you like it...
If I'm reading this right, they didn't so much create a new heart as bring a dead one back to life.
Which is possibly even cooler, and I'm sure you can find 50k hearts a year in the US that wouldn't normally be donatable because of time constraints. (A heart is (normally!) only good for 4 hours after death or removal iirc). And even beyond saved lives, we can hopefully get a better quality of life too, since there should be less time waiting for a transplant with a half dead body.
Hmm, do modern artificial hearts last 8 days reliably? And would a diseased heart be practical?
What about organ rejection issues, will those be causes by the dead heart, the stem cells, both?
if i read the article and the similar one on the BBC correctly then there was a shell of a heart they laced with stem cells that regrew into a heart functionality- but after 8 days operating at 2% so longer growth term is needed to by functional. this would go part way to solving rejection issue obviously, but if i am correct there is one slight problem you cannot take the patients heart, decellularize it and regrow it with stem cells because (1) bad as he heart is he needs it and (2) you still need to manufacture stem cells in sufficient quantity.
so there are a few options I see...
1. one use a dead donor heart as a shell and recellularize (that cannot be the correct term) with the patients stem cells assuming you can get them while he survives on what is left of his old heart and then transplant and hope there is no rejection
2. transplant the patient with an artificial heart until his old one can be repaired in the lab
3. find some way to create a fake heart "shell"? maybe extract some tissue from his current heart but not enough to kill him and create a template that the stem cells can be used to grow him a new heart over a few months.
of course they still need to manufacture a sufficient source of patient stem cells. does this sound reasonable?
of course in the UK, we have just got a new source of donors... http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7186007.stm our prime minister has just decided to add the entire country onto the donor list unless we explicitly opt out. Gill the Arm would be amused...
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I intend to live just long enough (naturally) that I can live forever (engineered).
If you're a boomer, forget it.
(At the age of about 11, back in the late 1950s, I was expecting medical technology to be able to stimulate the growth of a "third set" of replacement teeth - tooth-by-tooth as necessary, by the time my adult teeth might be worn out or destroyed by decay or misadventure. More than half a century later where's THAT flying car?)
The FDA approval process takes long enough (currently a minimum of 10 years) that even if a treatment useful for your program is perfected TODAY it won't be available in time to be of use. If it's not in the pipe now, it won't be out of the pipe while you're around to benefit.
And since aging is "a natural process" rather than a "disease", don't expect treatments to reduce it to be considered at all - except piecemeal for parts of aging that can be construed as a specific pathology.
Interestingly, the congressional debates that led to the creation of the FDA considered the issue - and declared that if the new agency delayed the introduction of a useful drug by more tha 6 months it was counterproductive. How things have evolved...
For instance, decades ago the FDA (no doubt traumatized by the worldwide problems with Thalidomide babies, which the US had missed due to their foot-dragging), refused to accept tests done in other countries and delayed the approval of beta blockers for years - to the tune of 100,000 extra deaths from preventable secondary heart attacks.
Unfortunately the lesson was not learned. Delaying a drug that saves lives doesn't affect the carreer of the bureaucrat, while approving one that causes damage can destroy it.
And (short of electing Ron Paul and a congressful of people like) him don't expect the FDA to be streamlined, dismantled, or their approval process to be reduced from a roadblock to an advisory status.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"Nearly every sport has a doping and non-doping league already."
There are doping leagues for baseball, basketball, and football? I've never heard of that. Are you talking about a European thing?
"The problem is, people will only pay to see the non-doping leagues at the moment."
In the one sport I know of that does have doping and non-doping, bodybuilding, the doping league is where the money is overwhelmingly made. Maybe this is just a US thing, don't know.
Patriot - A fan of expanding government power and spending while not wanting to pay higher taxes.
Wow, I mean just wow. To think that most of the organs can be re-grown or replaced would provide a limited form of immortality, just replace an organ when it wears out and not to fear rejection.
In a process called whole organ decellularization, they grew functioning heart tissue by using dead rat and pig hearts as a sort of flesh matrix, and reseeding them with a mixture of live cells. The goal is to grow replacement parts, using their own stem cells, for people born with defective tickers or experiencing heart failure.
Given that another project also underway is "writing" synthetic organs using a rapid prototyping system (3D plotter) loaded with live cells, structural proteins, and growth factors, the salvaged-and-decellularlized organ should be rendered unnecessary in short order.
The fact that a substrate with the right chemical markers can be repopulated into a working organ means the process can proceed in two steps. This may make it easier to accomplish - especially by reducing the need for functioning blood-supply plumbing to provide nutrition and oxygenation in the eary stages of construction.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I mean, really. The stinkin' rich will have their hearts replicated and grown one after another just in case, while you and me will just drop down, carried to a hospital, and die. Somehow that's *not* the future I was thinking of when I was young. The bits and pieces (hah!) are there meanwhile, but our society isn't there at all.
A friend of mine was working in a hospital when some old and ill VIP had a heart failure and he not only got a replacement right away (while others died waiting for a replacement for months), no, he also got a second heart when the first one was rejected by his immune system within a day. Well, he died anyway from unrelated causes soon after, but I can't get over the vision of two otherwise perfectly healthy normal guys dying just because two hearts were *wasted* this way. I want to vomit each time I have to think of that event.
In A Gift from Earth, a colony world uses organ harvesting to punish criminals and dissidents, and rewards loyalty to the regime with spare parts.
In the course of the novel, a slower-than-light starship arrives with a how-to guide for a brand-new technology: Custom-grown organs. The protagonist sees grown-from-seed organs developing in a tank, and assumes that they are from children! Actually, they spell the end of the local tyranny.
That was in 1968, just a year or two after the first "Gil the Arm" story.
Don't go abusing your body assuming you'll be able to get a new heart any time soon.
Of course, as late as the mid 1950s reputable engineers scoffed at the ideas of flights to the moon. This could come together faster than you can imagine.
I hope they have adequate containment measures. We wouldn't want it to just keep growing and growing...
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
It has escaped from the laboratory, and is heading for your house.
You should consider smearing Jello on your kitchen floor and setting fire to your sofa.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
Life is already way different than when I was a child - Toffler's Future Shock has come to pass at least. Mapping the human genome in circa 2000 and now working on the protein foldings that those base pairs encode will absolutely lead to the ability to build a human (or so) machine out of meat. That is going to happen. Period. The only thing that is unsure is how long it will be held back for primarily religious hallucinations, how available it will be to the populace in general, and whether or not we bomb ourselves back to where Fire is state of the art in the mean time.
The Internet alone used to be complete fantasy now it's taken for granted in only 15 short years. Computing or Information Technology is the enabler for our current Biological Science. Now that we can just let the computers crunch 4 billion or so base pairs on their own connected to each other through a global network we're gonna see some Unicorns well within 50 years. I shit you not, accept it.
Shh.
Are you that guy with the sign; "Will code HTML for food"?
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
...for my ex-girlfriend?
I don't think she ever had one.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Like growing new arteries for transplant within 24 hrs.
First heart attack might do a little damage to the heart but provided he survives the first year he should have another 25 years before he clogs up the new ones and by then he'll be having regular checkups.
We've gone from mapping the human genome in 2000 to offering basic genomic sequencing, creation of artificial lifeforms, and rudimentary bioengineering in less than ten years. That's pretty damn impressive considering the skeptics of the HGP said the exact same things; it was a "pipe dream", "too expensive", would take thousands of years to complete... ...and look at how utterly wrong they were. Genetic sequencing is offering insights in to untold numbers of conditions, diseases, and human attributes and it is making its way in to medicine. In 15, hell in the past 5 years we've developed so much in thousands of different fields that it is impossible to even remotely argue that progress is not moving forward at a blinding pace. Today, a cancer patient or similar victim of a serious illness has more tools at their disposal to ensure they will survive than ever before, and it is paying off in saving lives from the horribly painful and prolonged deaths that would have been inevitable only a short time ago.
The world is changing faster and faster whether people like it or not. The only "pipe dream" here is pseudoskepticism, the willingness to doubt things not out of evidence (which is clearly supporting rapid change) but out of fear and misunderstanding. They've been proven wrong again, again, and again and there's no reason to believe they will ever be right.
but i remember details from high school biology, where you could put heart cells next to each other on a petri dish, and they would synch their beats
so the announcement seems like there is this major advance, heart cells beating in tandem, shaped like a heart. but it doesn't seem to take that much more technical acumen than what has been around for a while, as heart cells will naturally synch up
so they put the cells and grew them in a heart shaped matrix. then biorhythms and mother nature took over
they've been doing that with skin cells for awhile
again, not to rain on the parade, but i think the technical leap implied here is being overstated. it's good news nonetheless, and i cheer it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Maybe they'll be able to grow a brain so I can replace this one I got from "A. B. Normal".
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Couldn't they do the same thing with a monster horse cock - rebuild it using your own stem cells and transplant it onto you? It'd sure as hell surprise the wife.
From the article:
Taylor said. "It opens a door to this notion that you can make any organ: kidney, liver, lung, pancreas - you name it and we hope we can make it,
Great, now I'm going to get even more emails about making my friends envious of my "mannishness". No, wait, she means 'internal organs'. Whew!
are you finding that you are needing something biggger to please your female partner? Act nows to re-engineer your manhood! In two weeks you too can be experiencing a new life whit our home growing kit. Act now and post attachment enl;argement pillls will be thwon in for free!
The singularity is not meant to happen in 10 years. At best, it would be happening three decades from now; however, that concept itself is hardly my focus or the focus of many other people. I look at the time between now and then, when advances will Technology is obviously not linear, especially in hindsight, or else we would be advancing at the same rate throughout history. Technology would be advancing at the same rate now as it did 500 or 5000 years ago. The most obvious proof is in medicine and computing; we would not have been able to achieve decoding the Human Genome in a little more than a decade when the technology at its initiation was, thanks to its linear perspective, expecting it to take far, far longer. Not everything is advancing exponentially, either due to economics or practicality; some technologies are mature and there simply isn't much left to improve, but the technologies that allow accelerating progress are the ones advancing exponentially. Even so, who knows? We doubled life expectancy in 160 years the first time around, and it had not changed appreciably prior to that for all of human history, so I'm not inclined to believe that it's implausible that it will double again in a similar timeframe. Even if it did, that would still mean living to 170 would be average for most people in the year 2167, and that's pretty damn good no matter what way you look at it. I'm not going to worry about it either way, that's for sure.
Be still my heart
I'm not even optimistic about it the only thing I *am* sure of is that humanity as an entity will have the capability to do these things. Humanity is accelerating faster than ever before with each new development increasing the speed. Now what actually makes it into the hands of an individual is the only part thats open for debate.
Shh.
This is wonderful news. I've always wanted my own Triceratops, ever since I was a young child. And if these benefits work, and I get one, I could even go on to get more and more kinds of dinosaurs! I figure I can set up some kind of biological preserve somewhere off the cost of Costa Rica(I've heard the island rental rates there are awesome). Then I just have to invite a few paleontologists, for science, a mathematician, for more science, a lawyer, for legal issues, and some kids, to see if it is fun. What could possibly go wrong?
I don't like Linux. This doesn't make me a troll.
Was the head doctor's name Herbert West?
(ba-dump-bump. Bump-bump. Bump-bump...)
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
And, of course, pretty much every business forecaster is listing the facts: product adoption cycles are accelerating and companies that do not plan for this will be badly hurt. Obviosuly, in medicine, some factors such as FDA regulation remain, but even that is not enough to slow down advances to the point where they are not hitting the market at a faster rate. However, it's certain that the regulatory process, as well as the additional more tools with which to more quickly assess the safety of these technologies, will be reformed to better suit the new direction of medicine. It will happen whether people like it or not, and I'd rather us as a society be prepared for it rather than have the rug pulled out from under us because other nations adopted a more progressive stance.
I knew there was a reason for the term "Minnesota nice".
If you don't agree with what they are doing (Religious bastards)...well...have a lil' heart
I'd be happy to live 600 years before I'm archived into Mother Brain.
Shh.
Click h33r f0r y0ur |33+ 6 chambered tr0us3r sn4ke!
Reminds me of the game Syndicate. For those who haven't played it, you play as the head of a corporation in a future in which corporations battle each other for world domination using cyborg agents. One of the objects of the game is to research more advanced body parts for your agents. One possible upgrade is a new, more advanced heart. I remember this being a really fun game when it was released, wish I could find the CD...
If something was totally unthinkable in the past and now approaches reality, this can mean only two things: either people don't have imagination or the technological advancement is increasing a lot, perhaps even exponentially. If you can predict clearly where the state of the art will be 50 or 100 years from now then the advancement is probably linear, but if you cannot predict anything then the advancement is probably nonlinear.
Wake me up when they invent the beating mouth.. ZzzzZzz
*THUMPTHUMP* *THUMPTHUMP*
Sadly, this hilarious joke will be too old a reference for most of you kids. *sigh*
Sweet! Dune comes to life. It's a Ghola.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
If we could modify this technology, it will become possible to literally give your girlfriend an artificial dick in a box. Er, on second thought, I don't like where this is vangoghing.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
... then come on, football is a doping league. As another poster put it, you don't get that many lightening fast 300lb people naturally.
But seriously, they only use steroids accidentally in the MLB:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmDKsAuHooo
Patriot - A fan of expanding government power and spending while not wanting to pay higher taxes.
Ah. The optimism of the young. Talk to me in 30 years when we *still* have no flying cars, or HAL9000 computers, or fusion power, or affordable moon and outer planet tourism, let alone immortality. Of course you can't reason with an optimist. What saddens me is just how similar our world is to the one of the 1950s. So much of our basic tech is the same. Souped up and improved, but there haven't been many completely new concepts. I guess the biggest difference is from improved computer tech and the birth of the internet (although that wasn't until the late 90s). As far as immortality in your lifetime: I wouldn't hold your breath.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Currently we use a de-cellularized pig heart valve as an implant. The patient's own cells invade the matrix and set up housekeeping, very much the way the fetal cells did in this demonstration.
One other advantage would be that the new organ would be 'young', not whatever age the donor might have been.
A lot of it simply hasn't been economically necessary, removing the need to develop new technologies. It has certainly become more efficient and scalable, but the basic technologies themselves work well enough that there has been no impetus to improve them. I mean, the wheel's been unchanged for pretty much its entire history; there's no reason to reinvent it if it works well enough. But also look at it this way: your computer, your TV and its programming, this website, your internet connection, your MP3 player, your videogame console (if you have one), your cell phone and pretty much all of the medications and medical techniques used by your physician were scarce to nonexistent 15 years ago. That's pretty damn good if you ask me. Of course, you also answer a lot of questions in your own post: the very recent and very rapid growth in computer and internet technology. Those weren't available in the past, making it difficult if not impossible to achieve progress; good luck creating any kind of strong AI using a supercomputer that's barely as powerful as a modern laptop, let alone the engineering work and number crunching necessary for flying cars, modeling particle physics and testing materials for fusion power, or for building space tourism infrastructure. Honestly, the reason why those things weren't available by the time they were predicted was due to the simple fact that they would have needed the technology we have now to have a shot at making them work. I'm going to remain optimistic because, honestly, we've done really damn well on a lot of things, and in some places completely surprised people with our progress. We'll design the technologies and then have the pessimists do the quality control and testing to make sure they're safe.
That's also true and a very good point; I think their definition of a Singularity is based on the idea that AI will take us there, but if things move ahead faster than expected, it ends up pushing that date forward. I honestly think the Singularity is going to be something we only see in hindsight; I mean, to a person from the year 1800 the time we're living in would appear to be a period of blindingly fast technological and social change (even to a person from the 1950's or even the 1970's for that matter), but to us it is not seen as the same kind of rapid change. Since we are by and large acclimated to this development rather than having it suddenly thrust upon us, it's simply not going to be as noticeable as it would if we were to view it in hindsight. I'm personally interested in the ramifications of D-Wave Systems' work on their quantum computer; it is a real, actual quantum computer that has demonstrated its ability to solve problems far faster and far more effectively than a regular PC, and given how fast they plan to scale it up, it may have huge effects on everything else. This kind of computer is effectively 30 years ahead of its time, and that's going to mean a lot going down the road. I don't think we're going to wake up one day and say "We're in the Singularity", but rather it's going to be something we'll look back on 5, 10 however many years later and say "Yeah, that was the turning point."
Yeah...if I don't get it, I die. That's it. Nothing I can do about that one, since that's what would've happened anyways without such an option; there's no reason to worry about such a possibility because if it ends up being the case, it would be no different than if it were never available. At least I'd have the confidence of knowing others would be able to reap that benefit, which is a tad bit better than it being completely unavailable. Of course, that's also why I'd save my money, invest it wisely, take care of myself and work hard to ensure I have the money necessary to pay for it. The best part is, if I do that, I'll still be well off in the event that I can't achieve indefinite lifespan. It will hardly be anywhere near as good, but it's better than nothing.
The only problem is, you can't control it. It's not like a nuclear weapon or a submarine, which are by and large obvious and easy to keep track of; a transhuman could simply conceal much of their potential should it be required, and the actual technology involved, once leaked, would be far easier to accumulate and provide. Given the amount of supposedly classified or restricted technical knowledge that was leaked, and the sheer profit potential of this market, attempting to control it would fail just like every other attempt at containing knowledge has failed. It might take a while, but it will inevitably fall. And, of course, there's the old-fashioned black market...all those AK-47s, tanks, airplanes, and a wide variety of other dangerous technology still manages to get to market even though it's tightly controlled. Why do you think governments are so afraid of dirty bombs, rogue WMDs and other threats? Because every attempt at fully controlling these things does not work and will inevitably fail. Just look at the inability of the world to realistically control nuclear proliferation, the arms trade, or any other illicit venture, and then realize that this technology is so profitable and so powerful that there will be more people trying to get it than there are people trying to protect it. The thing is, it is a lot easier to get transhuman technologies using the precursors without raising any questions; given that all of their predecessors would be generally medical devices used for the impaired, any research group so inclined could proceed in to these fields using the work already accumulated. There are plenty of very wealthy, very powerful people willing to spend a lot of money to get the things they want, and I can guarantee you that many of them will jump on these as soon as they get the chance. A shuttle or submarine costs billions of dollars, a specialized launch facility, specialized crew, and a wide variety of other extremely costly infrastructure to operate. The average person can't get to that. However, a person can achieve limited and fully legal human enhancement right now with LASIK surgery or off-label modafinil, and what follows from here will be similarly inexpensive (relatively speaking), similarly easy to obtain, and similarly difficult to track. Attempts to control it will be a costly, losing battle, one that will make the War on Drugs look like child's play. The question is whether or not you'd rather these technologies be safe, available, and tested or have them fall in to the hands of those who are far more likely to use them to do harm...and the only way to keep them safe is to make them widely available. Otherwise, there won't be anybody to stop some nutjob from using their enhanced abilities to kill huge numbers of people or take something over. The only defense against the dark side of technology is to ensure the people who want to use it for good are one step ahead in the game...otherwise, you're going to lose and you're going to lose painfully.
And the question is not WE, but you. How much are you willing to put into saving YOUR life. Don't worry, you are young, there will come a time when you realize just how close death is when you will feel very different. It is called getting old. All of sudden you will think it is a good idea to shovel all the money made into care for the elderly and that those young whippersnappers should just thoughen up and carry the burden you didn't want to carry for your elders (or even yourselve).
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
`That Hideous Strength`, by C. S. Lewis.
there is a very original and artistic anime concerning biophysics and sci-fi myths, along with a complex political plot and inversed archetypes, left alone the eerie japanese ethics. It is quite fucked-up for the layman, and those versed in these sciences might also find it particularely interesting. Here's a wiki link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TexhnolyzeTexhnolyze. I know, the name sounds cheesy, but it is a series of 30 episodes each worth 22 minutes, so it won't be very time consuming, and it is really worth buying\leeching. Hopefully the /. effect won't bring wikipedia to it's knees :)
Instead of already writing the oh-so-obvious i'll let this cartoon do the speaking. The days some of us will have the honour to be "texhnolyzed" may or may not be far off, despite my general lack of credibility in the human race. Of course, the merge between machine and man is only a cliche topic in that anime, but it really stands out as a different philosophy - how far can we go?
Not that i'm against bioengineering, i actually wish to pursue a career in the field and I feel that today's society and mass-media flutter might actually inhibit the developement. As an unproud son of some technofobic parents I really feel this is the case, despite most of you slashdotters would embrace such news, perhaps some of you even researching further for academic papers on the matter.
However, if ethics was such a big issue when they cloned Dolly, imagine what kind of idiotic debates will this subject rise.
- Listen! I can't give it to you now. It says, 'in the event of death'.
- No one who has ever had their liver taken out by us has survived.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Avoid blog spam. Read the actual news release: U of M Researchers Create Beating Heart in Laboratory.
Avoid blog spam. Read the actual news release: U of M Researchers Create Beating Heart in Laboratory.
I don't know what is worse, a blog spam blog Slashvertisement, a huge number of comments by people who have no interest in the subject, or moderators who moderate up off topic comments.
At this point, we have yet to create a mechanical heart that is capable of being a universal replacement. Normal hearts beat, and the human body seems to work fine with that. If you want to reverse engineer a replacement, you may as well rip off what works.
END COMMUNICATION
Edgar Allan Poe would be pleased.
Have gnu, will travel.
10000 years?
How long do you think it could possible take?
If we don't destroy ourselves first, what is there to stop us?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Man, my head is hurting! Are you saying than progress happens only in the mythical decade sized span of time?
Do you mean nothing can happen on 1000 years of scientific progress?
Oh, the smallness of imagination and ambition.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
In Roman times people could not expect to live more than 30 years in average.
In developed countries we are almost tripling that already.
In 2000 years more who is to say that we don't triple this again (to 300 years)?
The lack of ambition and imagination of some people is astounding, specially considering the great scientific leaps we have made in 100 years.
110 years ago we could not even fly. Now we have visited the Moon, are planning on visiting Mars and have sent probes to all planets in the solar system and a couple even beyond that. If you have said this to somebody in 1900 they would hve looked at you as an irreparable idiot.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The government will provide this, unless they want a revolution that will make 1917 in Moscow look like a walk in the park.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Not to argue the point to a finite, or to be a prude but the experiment was only done with a rat's heart. The heart was rinsed with detergent to kill off all living cells in order to create a shell/matrix. When rat stem-cells were introduced to the shell they reciprocated the matrix to it's original function.
The goal is to be able to use a pig's heart and introduce the stem-cells of said person-of-many-ailments so their body will not reject it as has been done in several transplant operations.
The method is still under-going some further tests, but that's the story in a nut-shell.
The fate of mankind is ib the hands of the creativly maladjust...