From: den Otter (otter@globalxs.nl)
Date: Tue Oct 21 1997 - 03:02:23 MDT
> John S. Novak, III jsn@cris.com, The Humblest Man on the Net
wrote:
----------
> While the possibility of brain transplants, raised elsewhere, is quite
> attractive, we _do_ need to wait for the technology to actually
> perform a brain transplant.
Apart from that, transplanting your brain is only useful if you're not too
old, and have a healthy brain. The elderly, people with brain tumors,
Altzheimer's and the like wouldn't be helped much by brain transplants.
If such transplants became standard, the no 1 killers would be strokes
and cancers/degenerative diseases in the brain (instead of heart attacks
lung cancer and the like).
Then again, the technology needed to perform a brain transplant
could probably also cure at least *some* of the (brain)diseases mentioned
above. Any doctor in the house to verify this?
> Another downside is the need to wait 18
> to 20 odd years for any clone bodies grown _right now_ to reach any
> reasonable form of physical maturity.
I've once heard on some Discovery Channel program that you could
grow (human) tissues at an astronomical rate under the right conditions.
A small patch of cells could fill the floor of a football stadium in a
matter
of weeks or so, if cultivated under the right conditions. At least _some_
organs could be grown in vitro on a skeleton of some kind of stuff that
dissolves with time, maybe even whole bodies. This would only take
a month or so(?).
> I don't know about the rest of
> you, but even if it were possible to cram an adult human brain into a
> three year old body, it doesn't sound like a lot of fun.
Hey, you could have a body the size of a football field, if so desired.
How's that for fun ;)
> Talk about an industry, though-- the care and feeding of decerebrated
> clones. How much per day do you figure it would cost to care for a
> decerebrated clone? To make sure it is properly fed by whatever >means?
> Can't have a clone come out of the tank malnourished.
The in vitro fluid is also the cells' optimal food, this is not a problem.
In later stages this fluid (or something better?) could be circulated
through the body via an artificial umbilical cord (attached to the belly,
not the neck like in _Space, above and beyond_)
> To make sure it
> is exercised by some means?
> Don't want an emaciated, atrophied clone
> stumbling out of the tank.
You could pump up the clones' body with stereoids of some kind, and/
or exercise muscle groups with electric currents. That should do it.
DdO
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Hodi mihi, cras tibi
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