THE TRANSHUMANIST SCRAPBOOK: REGENERATED RAT LIMB SUCCESSFULLY GROWN, ...
Here's another story for your transhumanism scrapbook (in this case, shared by Mr. M.N.); the U.K.'s Daily Mail is reporting in a very interesting article, that scientists have now successfully "reanimated" a dead rat limb, transplanted it onto a rat, which was then able to use the resuscitated limb in a limited way:
Here's the crux of the story:
Hands, arms and even legs, can be transplanted, but the operations are complex and patients have to take powerful immunosuppressant drugs - which weaken the immune system to prevent the rejection of a transplant - for life.
In contrast, a lab-grown arm or leg should look and move more naturally.
And because it is made out of the person's own cells, no immunosuppression would be needed.
Dr Ott, who has previously made kidneys, livers, lungs and even beating hearts in the lab, began by taking a forearm from a dead rat.
He then washed it in detergent to stop its cells, leaving only a framework behind.
The frame was then placed in an incubator-type jar, injected with healthy blood vessel and muscle cells, and fed nutrients and oxygen.
In just two to three weeks, the blood vessels and muscles had rebuilt, this week's New Scientist reports.
When the limb was attached to a living rat, blood quickly flowed through it.
The creature was even able to flex its new paw.
A new limb would then be created using the framework of a donated limb and the patient's own cells.
9 Comments
Help the Community Grow
Please understand a donation is a gift and does not confer membership or license to audiobooks. To become a paid member, visit member registration.
FAMILY DOCTOR: Hello
ME: Hi ya Doc
FAMILY DOCTOR: What can I do for you today?
ME: Please cancel my Viagra prescription and set me up with an appointment to have a horses **** grafted on instead. Much appreciated.
FAMILY DOC: No problem, just one thing, are your vaccinations up to date?
ME: Of course! And on second thought, make it two!
Can anyone say: blue-eyed Chinaman? Wait until that fad takes off. And to think, I once thought blue-eyed people would have to take the woods like bigfoot in order to preserve this genetic trait inherited from our martian ancestors.
When I was younger, I had this recurring nightmare where I lived in apost-apocolyptic world and had to arm wrestle a rat with a giant limb in order to save my Amish village from destruction by the local warlord who went by the name of Chelsea Clinton and wore an eye patch. It was terrifying and I would usually wake up in a cold sweat, never knowing if I had won and the my village had been saved. My mother told me the nightmare was the result of eating too much cheese before I went to bed. Later in college, with the scary dreams only strengthening in intensity, I visited the school psychiatrist, Dr. Trudy Feinberg, and she informed me the nightmares were the result of a desire to have intercourse with my mother which, due to my feelings of powerlessness in my relationship with my mother, then turned into a desire to have intercourse with small animals. After months of electric shock therapy, she put me on powerful psychotropic drugs and publicly shamed me by having me banned from admittance to the local zoo. She also had me visit a sex therapist, her grandmother, a holocaust survivor who had experience treating many returning German war veterans in Weimar Germany who also suffered from this perverse penchant. (Of course, in those heady post-war days, with lasciviousness on the rise and homeopathy just starting to emerge on the medical scene, it was believed by many of Berlin’s newer and more innovative psychiatrists that treating the disease involved total emersion in the perverse fantasies which became hellish for defenseless small animals but a boon to the many out of work farmers and husbandmen who had flocked to Berlin after the Great War to find work).
But now, after reading this article, I am wondering if these nightmares of mine aren’t actually the result of seem deep seated mental ailment, but instead a prophecy of the dystopia to come.
New limbs, probably for the wealthy… but in the meantime chemical poisoning from plastics for all and sundry. And if “The Times” says it we can probably believe it:
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/health/news/article4473064.ece
The videogame Deus-Ex is a good story about a security agent that nearly gets killed and the company he works for saves his life making him into a cyborg. As the character must come to terms with this the story plays out differently if he rejects his new features or accepts them.
The dream:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UG_oThcYsn0
The reality:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq5KWLqUewc
Serendipity.
Today’s Max Keiser Report starts with a man cutting off his right arm with intent…
http://rt.com/shows/keiser-report/267826-episode-772-max-keiser/
Yesterday I read this:
“Doctors in the Netherlands report that they have for the first time successfully replaced most of a human’s skull with a 3-D printed plastic one — and likely saved a woman’s life in the process.
The 23-hour surgery took place three months ago at University Medical Center Utrecht. The hospital announced details of the groundbreaking operation this week and said the patient, a 22-year-old woman, is doing just fine.”
So, if someone is missing a leg, why couldn’t they 3-D print the bone, and then attach the muscle by the process you outlined? The implications of this are rather staggering, for good or ill.
Oh, and about the cost of those eyeballs, if I order 2 different colors will it cost more? One green and one blue might be nice.
It will probably cost an arm & a leg!
…and then some!
[couldn’t resist]
This great news if this technology is used for good ends. The problem will be when want to be Victor Frankenstein get their hands on this. And one shutters what the military and our god obsess oligarchs plan uses for this technology are not good is what cross my mind.
But of course, it won’t be long before people will be asking for that “something else.” I want to win Olympic gold so give me the legs of a cheetah, please. Or maybe wings instead of arms? Could we make that happen for an angel like me?