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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.
Mmmmm, I thought I had already killed that one...
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
I'm wondering if they're going to be getting that million dollars from PETA.
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
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.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
get shot up, get repaired, get sent back in
:)
good for morale
So, the US military is looking to fund a project to re-grow body parts, including meat, and PETA is offering money to someone who can create artificial meat. That sounds like a match made in Soylent Heaven to me; "It's your *own* meat; how could it not be ethical to eat it? You didn't suffer did you?"
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Recall that: that was not a human ear (the cartilage cells were from a cow) and it was in the shape of an ear because it was molded that way, not because any genes in the structure were expressing for "human ear".
It is a neat way to grow cartilaginous body shapes, and isn't a bad starting point.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I can see it now... an Iraqi dissident is hiding in a ditch near Baghdad, determined to ambush the next American patrol, then reconsiders because he's distracted by the sergeant's spectacular breasts....that might just work. Hooraay! Fake Tits for everyone!
I wonder how much it will cost the general public once the technology matures. An arm and a leg?
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
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.
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?
Accidents will get you, eventually. Someone (I forget who) calculated a few years ago that perfect long-term medical care and a total absence of disease just raises the Average Life Expectancy to about 400 years. Less if cancer cannot be cured, just treated (especially brain cancers).
Anyway, you could always refuse extraordinary measures, even when they have become as ordinary as hydration and intravenous feeding is now.
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."