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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."
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 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 served in the Navy and I think the military care was terrible. There were never enough doctors, the facilities were old and badly maintained, and the staff had no bedside manner because I guess actually acting like you care about the patient is against military discipline or whatever. FWIW, it's not a problem of "free" medicine. I now live in Finland, where the medical care is also basically, but doctors are actually pleasant to visit.
I think most of the protest is against how the military treats veterans after they have been discharged but who still bear the scars of military experience. VA hospitals are not happy places, and VA benefits can be hard to win.
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!
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.
I get modded troll for making a valid point and this joker gets modded insightful for not knowing what I'm referring to when I say 300,000 troops have mental disorders?
Go educate yourself, fucking moron:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080418/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/troops_mental_healthAfter displaying a horrific ignorance and having that ignorance mistaken as insight by lobotomised moderators, you then go on to accuse me of politicising the issue. Fuck you, twat face. I wasn't talking about people coming back with conservative beliefs, I was talking about people coming back with PTSD.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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.
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."