THE TRANSHUMANISM SCRAPBOOK: FIRST TINY HUMAN HEART GROWN
The transhumanism scrapbook just became a bit thicker in the past few days, as scientists have now apparently been successful in growing a very small human heart from human stem cells, by telling those cells how to grow, in this article that was shared by many regular readers here:
Tiny working 3D human hearts grown from nothing — and other organs could be coming
As the article itself notes, what can be done today with small hearts, could be done tomorrow with other organs: livers, pancreas, kidneys, eyes, and so on:
The hearts have been grown using only stem cells, for the very first time, the New Scientist reports. As such, it mimics the processes that happen when humans hearts’ grow for the first time — except it happens in a lab, at the prompting of researchers.
The new hearts were created using stems cells that were made by reversing human skill cells, so that they turned back to something like an embryo. Once that was done, the scientists encouraged the cells to grow into the right formation, changing their shape and then eventually forming first into the cells that help hearts beat, then into those that connect the heart up and after that into tiny ventricles.
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The same technique might also be used to create other parts of the human body. It has long been difficult to encourage lab-created organs to grow into the right thing — but the new research gives a new insight into how stem cells turn into the right cells. (Emphasis added)
What interests me here is the implication of that last, italicized statement, for it goes far beyond the obvious implications. Those obvious implications,I imagine, we can all rehearse for ourselves: a whole new "industry" might be in the making, with "stem cell databanks" available to store one's stem cell DNA against the potentiality that one might need an organ to be grown and transplanted for the future. Indeed, should such techniques become widespread, then one can also imagine a whole new debate over medical insurance and public "healthcare": will this or that policy fund such a procedure? Will public health care pay for it? will religious communities tjhhat might have objection to such procedures be required to fund it in other people, and so on. In other words, think of the current nightmare of "health care" in this country and imagine it on steroids.
All this I find profoundly disturbing, to say the least. But it's the implications of that italicized sentence that I find to be the most disturbing, for what all this really implies is a total control over the processes of life and growth itself. Perfected,such technologies would potentially allow one to "grow" whatever type of human one wanted to grow, and indeed, given science's ability to twist and mangle almost any technological advance it creates into something monstrous, one is looking at a Frankenstein future, not only from the scientist themselves, but from government regulators, who will of course be "asked" to step in and "regulate" what is and is not rising up to the "standard" for humanity. And here, of course, I imagine the reader can speculate just as easily as I on the inherent dangers this will pose. If, say, during the process of "engineering" a particular human into existence, the process goes wrong, what is to be done with him or her? And who has the right to determine that, since, if grown completely as the result of such technologies, it could be argued that this person is not individually sovereign, but someone else's property, as Dr. deHart and I indicated in our exploration of this topic in Transhumanism: A grimoire of Alchemical Agendas? Additionally, one might be confronted with a "life choice": accept our technology for the repair of such-and-such and organ, but then, because it was grown with a patented technology, pay a royalty or lisence or annuity fee for its continued use. And if you don't pay, well... repossession? Believe it or not, there is already a movie out with Jude Law based on precisely this premise.
Conversely there is, of course,the temptation to view such specially engineered humans as perhaps having "enhanced abilities", tempting the technocrats, corporate cronies, and politicians behind them to view the rest of "ordinary humanity" as somehow "sub-human" and "less equal" than their specially engineered products. We've been down this road before. What is evident, though, from this story, is that the time for confronting such issues is approaching faster than anyone realizes. But that future is, I suspect, a bit artificial: is this a future that the vast majority of humanity wants? All my intuition says no. It is, rather, a future that we can easily imagine corporate leadership and financial and technocratic oligarchs want. And we've seen their hellish visions in other areas.
That's what disturbs.
See you on the flip side...
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Am I the only one who read about these “tiny hearts” and couldn’t help but think of the “Grinch who Stole Christmas” ?
I was thinking more of Dick Cheney, but that’s just me. 😉
Reading Joseph’s quotes from the article, I got a distinct feeling that this ‘growing’ process would be a 1%-er extravaganza:
I could see an industry springing-up where an entire ‘factory’ was dedicated to growing one VIP’s various important body parts – to be ready when some organ was needed. As ‘live’ parts, they probably would have a shelf life. So, a slow-moving ‘assembly line’ would be in-place.
Obviously, the cost of this ‘personal’ organ bank would be astronomical. So, only the ultra-ultra-rich would be solicited. A form of personal immortality. (The ‘factory’ capability would probably have to be secret, to avoid the 5%-ers demanding a version and thus revealing the industry to the mobs.) Macabre, but right in line with current mindsets…
(Kind of reminds me of the “2012” movie, where the ultra-ultra-rich had to pre-pay a billion dollars to get a reserved-seat on the secret, hidden Arks.)
A thought: If you substituted space-going Arks for water-going Arks, that might explain a lot of what’s going-on on planet Earth…
And, as happens when they announce “breakthroughs”, this might well have been under way for some time.
My guess is a lot of cloning / organ printing tech has come from Off World Intelligences, aka the Greys. Those same “intelligent” beings screwed up their own DNA so terribly that they had to harvest ours to keep their line going or so the story goes. So, if a First Order Civ can destroy themselves via genetic manipulation, do we really want to trod that same path? Of all the alleged Off World types, the Greys are the ones that concern me the most. They may be First Order Civ technology. But, morally they are human equivalent or worse.
Headlines like these make you feel as though you woke up in a comic book.
Since healthcare is for-profit and a proprietary business whose stem cell is the “Copyright/Trademark” model. It’s good to see that having a heart is dependent upon monetary policy and not health. After all, the health of the bottom line is what we’re really concerned about in “our” society; putting money where our hearts lie.
The science behind it is extremely secret and not taught in our fake schools, nor publicized in our fake medical text books or other commercialized journals, due to trademark & proprietary concerns. Once a potential de-humanized research scientist has been debriefed & vetted w/correct authorized versions or “real” science, the real research begins. The “public” or consumers[those that have been selected by the monopoly money manufactures to participate] will be informed by the controlled press.
Yes the problem is how the arrogant know it all’s will put this technology to use. It can be used to help humanity or more likely to create some stupid bio-slaves to use for our dumb masters childlike fantasies of omnipotence the later is more likely.
Stem cells can be made, they do NOT require aborted fetuses. The process suggests much wrong with physics and the biology of genes only.
Anyhow there are all sorts of religious objections to things done with US tax dollars, oh like invading Iraq, and supporting genocide against Mayan Indian types in Guatemala in the 1980s–I can think of others–including the bible as science in schools.
So yes, if it’s possible to regrow healthy organs, and then transplant them those procedures should be paid for by the government. But anyhow, there are probably even better understandings of matter and biology that allow for the reversion of a failing heart into a much healthier one, while still in the body.
“As in the days of Noah, so shall it be at the end of days” comes to mind. The story of the “Watchers” and their offspring. The “gods” of high antiquity and their meddling with the human genome. A story told in more than one ancient text.
It would appear we are heading down a similar path and we already know where that path leads and what the end result may be.
If that should be the case, that ‘humans’ with manipulated DNA begin walking among us, what happens when they start killing off the real humans, either literally or interbreeding with them so that the DNA of humanity becomes destroyed in the process? Then the question is, does humanity fight back and begin to kill these altered ones? Isn’t that the question the Israelites faced when they entered Canaan with Moses? What would we do?
As we are racing toward our own extinction with the same reckless abandon and apathy we were then, it appears we will do nothing in the face of it.
We face that extinction on many fronts, this is just one of them.
The Israelites were ordered by their God to eliminate these beings. I don’t see that happening again in todays “politically correct” world. It will not be in our hands this time around.
The arrival of whatever, or whoever, the elite seem to be preparing for may be imminent given the rate of acceleration they are pushing for their new world order. As in high antiquity, it will be the elite who survive on this earth, if any do; and that will just start the process over again as we seem to learn little from history.