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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."
I will say this about the military, and I would know as I was deployed to Iraq twice in the Army. The medical care is not bad and you don't pay for it while you're in the military. There are a lot of amputees out there with top notch prosthesis and they didn't pay a dime for them. Yes, there are a lot of horror stories about how bad the military can treat its wounded, and yes most of those are pretty true. The thing is though that they are actually a small percentage. Another thing that's cool about the military is that they are really good about pushing state of the art in medicine. Anything to keep wounded troops alive. Fake blood? Tested in the military. High speed care? Military. So on so forth. Oh and no they can't make you happy. I know, I have to live with that every damn day.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
I bet they are after the $1 million prize mentioned here yesterday:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/21/126253
The Times reports that PETA is to announce plans on Monday for a $1 million prize to the "first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012."
I wonder if this can be used to grow certain bodyparts that transexuals for a very obvious reason are missing.. Not entirely sure whether you can mess around enough to be able to do that, but it would be very interesting to see if it's possible.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
Sorry, that should have read ...basically free....
For example, when people lose their personality due to Alzheimer's disease, the location to where their personality is stored isnt damaged per-say, they end up losing synaptic connections between the neurons and neurofibrillary tangles start to develop. If these were restored through stem cells, the personality is restored.
So I guess what I'm saying is that as long as where personality is stored isn't physically destroyed, and studies in neuron restoration improve, it can be possible to give their personalities back.
There is plenty of research that is paid for by the military (through taxes) and then comes around to benefit civilians in the long run.
I can think of a few off the top of my head...
1) The internet (ARPA)
2) Jet power and most anything involving aviation
3) Many types of cold weather gear
4) Alot of medical research was done to save people in uniform
5) Satellite technology
If it wasn't for the military alot of these things just would not have gotten the funding they deserved because they wouldn't have been needed at the time.
Too true. My father (a vietnam vet) makes extensive use of the VA facilities and army hospitals. I have know these many army hospitals and VA facilities to try their best but they are seriously understaffed and at times underpowered or even worse. By 'even worse' I mean that prior to my dad's liver transplant he was ejecting blood from both ends (sorry for the mental image), I had taken him to a army hospital and it was THREE HOURS in a barely packed ER room (there were perhaps 2 other patients to be seen when we got there and none arriving for the time during) before he was even admitted! Meanwhile I'm thinking the worst case scenario and trying to keep the poor man comforted as he becomes a macabre fountain. I just started yelling my head off, berating the nurses and doctors. I know this was inappropriate, but I mean you sit there thinking you're watching your father die, and meanwhile nothing happens, you raise hell.
He was on a transplant list at the time. I had lucked out because he was caught 'just in time' after they finally admitted him. If it had been any longer we would have had his funeral a decade ago.
Fast forward to now. He's got a liver transplant, a glacostomy *sp?* bag, blood transfusions, pneumonia, colon cancer... I could go on but the list is quite large. He goes to a VA facility for his treatments, and for the most part it is better than it was a decade ago. There are still issues however. Conflicting doctor's assessments, slow medication, misplaced medical files. He has 100% disability due to the transplant, replaced discs/fused vertebra (5,6,7) and for several other things related to duty related injury. He has had to fight almost yearly now to keep it at 100% as they keep wanting to drop it to 40% or lower. It's a nightmare each time. Once after some prolonged court action, they gave him 100% and admitted they had gotten his records mixed up with another persons!
As a military brat, I got to use their hospitals for free. I had surgery on my hand at one. It was the only time I have ever heard a doctor say 'oops' during a surgery. As a result I couldn't lower my hand below shoulder level or blood would drain into my fingertips and become very painful. I looked like a friggen bandaged hitler youth most the time.
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
There is in fact research into regrowth of fatty breast tissue from stem cells. There are a number of reasons for pursuing "natural" materials for reconstruction. For total reconstructions due to mastectomy, birth defect or injury the man-made implants are not cosmetically convincing. Some women are allergic or otherwise do not tolerate silcone in the implant envelope. Many women are not excited about having foreign material implanted in their bodies and especially for mastectomies would prefer to be reconstructed with their "own" tissues. It's a prosthetic versus regrowth issue... just like it is for the rest of the article.
How about an analogy: If you lost your pecker, would you like to have prosthetic replacement implanted under grafted skin or a regrown, fully functioning "member" from your own stem cells just like the original.
I would. There's too much to do in this world for one lifetime. Especially when you're a procrastinator from the start. Plus, I want to see the future ... the first manned Mars landing. The first interstellar probe. The singularity. Who knows what else. Just because you're happy with a handful of years and a geological instant, doesn't mean everyone else is.
Go, speak for yourself.
Just because *you* are bored with your current existence and don't know how to fill another livespan doesn't mean others will feel the same.
I'd definitely welcome a society of eternal life, because that means that people will need to drive away from current quarter-based, short-term oriented thinking. Instead, the long-term perspective becomes focus again, therefore potentially leading to real breakthrough as opposed to "look, this mobile phone now comes in fluff and it even has a camera attached!" kind of technological advantages.
Also, we then *desperately* need to find a way to (a) optimize our resource use (harvesting e=mc^2 instead of just burning oil) and (b) spread to other planets, at least spread over our solar system. Both things I've been told as a kid to be lucky to experience by Y2K -- still, I await that badly to happen.
They probably don't fit into a quarter-based revenue plan...
Plus, by not aging conventionally, I may be able to decide to learn something entirely new every 20, 30 years when my previous occupation starts to bore me.
So why again do you think somewhat eternal life will become dull? There's so much to see.
Besides, you'll always have the option of riding the Suicide Booth.
The military can often push the boundaries of technology far more rapidly than those inspired purely by curiosity. The military sees only an objective and plans to achieve it. It pushes ahead toward that objective regardless of any failures or problems unless and until it becomes obvious that said objective is either impossible to reach or is not worth the effort.
There's something to be said for military-inspired scientific work. Look at how quickly the Manhattan Project took some then-wild and crazy scientific speculation and turned it into a functional technology. If you'd told scientific spectators what they were planning to do at the start of the project and the timeframe for completion, they'd be laughing at the author as some sort of ignorant fool who had no idea of the kinds of technical and scientific challenges that lay ahead. Of course, the beauty of the military was that it didn't give a damn about the challenges - it wanted its bomb.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Why is it that this is just surprising everyone all of a sudden? Growing body parts has been on the agenda for years and years and years. That was the original intent in the beginning of stem cell research. This is obviously a first step in getting the acceptance of the public.
While people are vocal about saying no to stem cell research, they are also saying yes to re-growing their body parts. I find this hypocritical, to say the least of this.
I'm thinking of the future, here, and I wonder when I will hear someone say "well, we regrow arms and livers and legs... why not a whole body? Why not stay alive forever?" I personally do NOT want to see George W. Bush live for another 100 years, when my yet-unborn-grandkids will be having their own kids, and will have to witness the destruction of our environment and of democracy altogether when W. takes power for a 3rd term. It's like Dr Evil all over again.
Before the military start using this, shouldn't there be a universal law passed for the entire planet, saying that we will not misuse this stuff? I see moral, religious, political, military, and more, implications in this kind of technology, and that this kind of thing is important cannot be ignored just by saying "Hey, what about my penis implant?"
Sébastien Ferland couzin2000@gmail.com freedom | liberté | libertad | freiheit | libertà libertade |
Sounds a lot like the Cylons to me.
As Athena says, referring to the Cylon raiders, "Death then becomes a learning experience."