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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 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.
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.
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."