Humans 2.0 — Replaceable Parts
Meetings with Remakeable Men Department (for those of you who enjoy Gurdjieff references)…
Live Science has a nice, if brief, overview of replacements in bionics and lab-grown body parts. Included are limbs, heart, liver, skin, muscle, bone, blood, eyeballs, the brain, and a sex chip…
Quoth Live Science: "Recent breakthroughs in bionics and lab-grown body parts — along with news last month that a Swiss research team aims to recreate the intricacies of the human brain within a decade — show science is rapidly creating many of the parts needed to build a fully functional human almost from scratch."
The researchers in question are Blue Brain, who we covered a few months back.
" ‘It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years,. Henry Markram, who leads the Blue Brain project, told the BBC."
And a superior, and very techno-progressive minded piece in the Sunday NY Times Book Review section by William Saletan, which emphasized biotech (but not exclusively) and covers longevity and performance drugs (with an emphasis on a reduction of the need to sleep) and raises complex political and ethical questions about ownership of organs and implants.
Quotes:
"The most powerful revolutions of our age aren’t happening in Washington, the Muslim world or the global economy. They’re happening in science and technology. At a pace our ancestors couldn’t have imagined, we’re decoding, replicating and transforming the human body."…
and this:
"To the reader of 2009, some of these changes may sound freaky or unsettling. But a century from now, they’ll seem as normal as pacemakers, hip replacements and in vitro fertilization have become today. Our descendants, like us, won’t just be technology’s judges. They’ll be its products, too"