Immortality Around the Corner?
Well, we just had a bit of a horror story about what can go wrong with an operation. But now for some good medical news. Seems they can now “grow” our very own replacement organs:
Surgeons replaced the damaged windpipe of Claudia Castillo, a 30-year-old mother of two, with one created from stem cells grown in a laboratory at Bristol University.
Because the new windpipe was made from cells taken from Ms Castillo’s own body, using a process called “tissue engineering”, she has not needed powerful drugs to prevent her body rejecting the organ.
Avoiding the use of these drugs means she will not be an increased risk of cancer and other diseases unlike other transplant patients - another significant advance.
Five months after the operation was carried out she is now living normally and is able to look after her children again.
Stem cells are “master cells” which can be manipulated in a laboratory to become any other cell in the body.Scientists hailed the procedure as a breakthrough and predicted surgeons could be regularly replacing hearts with laboratory-grown organs within 20 years.
The technique would “revolutionise” surgery, they claimed, and has the potential to save thousands of lives.
Maybe if we can just eke our way through the next two decades or so, they’ll be able to replace bits of us when the fail, sort of like having the fuel pump on your Corolla replaced. Keyser can see two problems right off the bat.
First off, a philosophical issue. Anybody remember the ancient contention about the boat of Theseus? According to Plutarch (in his Life of Theseus), the Athenians had a ship they revered as having belonged to Theseus. Over the course of time, they replaced the fabric of the ship one bit at a time as the planking etc. rotted and decayed, so that eventually none of the original material was left. This raised issues of identity. Was it still “the same” ship if none of the original material remained? Some philosophers said it was, some said it wasn’t. Mutatis mutandis, if we start replacing our organs, will we reach a point when we cease to be us? (For extra credit, how much of the atomic material that you consisted of when you were born is “still there,” and what bearing does this have on your being ‘the same” person as you were at birth?)
Second, what about that old asshole who lives down the street? Are you now telling Keyser that he’s going to live for ever?
As the ancients could tell us, this immortality thing could have some unexpected side effects. First, without death, the life of the gods was pretty pointless and frivolous (see Iliad. Second, living forever can be a bad idea. Just ask Tithonus. As Trimalchio says in the Satyricon:
Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: “Σίβυλα, τί θέλεις;”, respondebat illa: ἀποθανεῖν θέλω (”At Cumae I once saw the Sibyl with my own eyes as she hung in a jar, and when those boys would say to her, ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’ she would reply, ‘I want to die’.”).
Seems Sibyl had been some babe, and Apollo was totally willing to give her anything for a roll in the hay. She picked up a heap of sand, and said she wanted to live for as many years as there were grains in her hands. Apollo said sure, but then she reneged. Oh, don’t mess with the gods! He was stuck with granting her wish (and he didn’t even go for any of that date-rape stuff that Zeus had a reputation for), but he could take advantage of the fact that she didn’t say anything about youth.
We will get pwned in some similar way if we get our wish to live forever?
h/t to long suffering Keyser reader Protagoras (of Abdera)
[This pellet was recently kicked out of the rabbit warren over at Keyser's Lair.]
