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The Military Plans To Regrow Body Parts
Ponca City, We Love You writes "The Department of Defense has announced the creation of the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine to 'harness stem cell research and technology... to reconstruct new skin, muscles and tendons, and even ears, noses and fingers.' The government is budgeting $250 million in public and private money for the project's first five years, and the NIH and three universities will be on the team. The military has been working on regrowing lost body parts using extracellular matrices and scientists in labs have grown blood vessels, livers, bladders, breast implants, and meat and are already growing a new ear for a badly burned Marine using stem cells from his own body. Army Surgeon General Eric Schoomaker explained that our bodies systematically generate liver cells and bone marrow and that this ability can be redirected through 'the right kind of stimulation.' The general cited animals like salamanders that can regrow lost tails or limbs. 'Why can't a mammal do the same thing?' he asked."
Being able to do something and being willing to pay for it are two seperate things. Just because the military is pioneering this research doesn't mean they are going to make it available for free to the young men and women they are responsible for maiming. They could just try and make a profit from it.
Furthermore, 300,000 soldiers are coming back from Iraq with some kind of mental disorder. You can't grow a new happy mind in a petri dish.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
blood vessels, livers, bladders, breast implants, and meat
Really? I didn't think that people lost breast implants in accidents very often.
...Oh well, time for a trip to the respawning tank...
get shot up, get repaired, get sent back in
:)
good for morale
I can has mah PREHENSILE tail nao?
K, THX!!!
Joke all you want, but lots of women are very upset at the prospect of losing all or part of a breast through cancer.
It's not a particularly big leap to apply such concern to losing part of a breast through injuries sustained in combat. And breasts were invented for reasons other than "To give
In which case, being able to regrow them could prove very helpful for morale amongst injured female soldiers.
Who would want to live forever?
Seems to me a lot of religions are centered around achieving eternal life.
(See Matthew 19:16-17; Mark 10:17-19; Luke 18:18-20 for Christianity, for example.)
While I agree eternal life sounds like more than I'd want, I think I could tolerate living a few hundred or even a few thousand years. After all, I want to play Duke Nukem Forever one day!
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
How can we be expected to believe these contracts will do anything but make some "biotech entrepreneurs" rich, without ever showing any medical benefit to the general population, when Bush's Pentagon won't even fund normal veterans services like healthcare, insurance, education, or even reasonable salary increases?
I know the Pentagon is sending badly wounded soldiers back into fighting in Iraq. But how do they expect people to volunteer to go through the ringer without keeping our promises to these making the ultimate sacrifices, especially if the only medical care they'll get will be to rotate their tires after they get blasted to bits, until there's nothing left to put together and send back?
Although I guess a draft combined with regrowing body parts could do the trick. "Frankenstein's Army" for the 21st Century. I'll be scanning the Pentagon budgets for new funding for zombies, the real cutting edge.
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make install -not war