FUTURE BODIES
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As we've said in other articles on Soul Vibrations Digital Universe, yesterday's science fiction is fast becoming today's medical reality. New gadgets, monitors, implants and replacement organs for the human body are ushering in a new era in which the sometimes ghastly overtones of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and H.G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau are taking on a fresh, entirely benevolent look.
The wild-eyed, mad scientists portrayed in those eerie novels have been transformed into dedicated 21st-century medical scientists working at esteemed institutes like the University of California and the University of Sheffield in England, who are opening up new horizons in research and innovative technology that will influence how our bodies will look and feel as well as how long they last. It's beginning to look like the superhero portrayed by Lee Majors in the old 1970s TV hit The Six Million Dollar Man was not such a stretch of the imagination after all.
The Chicago Tribune
By now most of us are aware of new gadgets that can monitor and record our body's activities and send the information back to our doctors. And since the first successful organ transplant occurred in 1954, we've all heard about artificial replacements for the heart and donor transplants of vital organs such as the lungs, heart or kidney. Even face and hand transplants have become a reality. Now scientists are taking things a step further.
Before a conference called "Bodies in the Making" hosted by the Institute of Advanced Feminist Research convened at USSC in October 2005, the institute's director said, the "conference emerged from the recognition that in the 21st century the body is experienced as less a fixed entity than as a changeable product and a project of technological, medical, and artistic invention."
And a November 2005 Popular Science magazine article entitled "The Future of the Body" claimed that "advances in science may well lead to more-than-human abilities" and asked the question, "Will We Merge With Machines?" Now this may all sound like a scenario from Will Smith's recent sci-fi flick I, Robot, but don't take it too lightly.
"The pattern is familiar," the PS writers argue. "Researchers develop a technology or drug to aid the ailing. Soon thereafter, healthy people co-opt it to make themselves stronger, faster or smarter. Follow this trend far enough, and we reach the augmented human."
Here are a few examples of new technological advances that will literally reshape our futures and our bodies.
- Nonslip Disc - (estimated development time 0 - 5 years)
Usually when you rupture or dislocate a spinal disc, doctors have to fuse nearby vertebrae to prevent them from rubbing against each other. But now there's the Charite, approved by the FDA last fall, a disc of polyethylene and cobalt-chromium alloy that shifts and slides to allow a full 21 degrees of motion. - Heart of Titanium - (estimated development time 0 - 5 years)
Today’s state-of-the-art artificial heart is the Abiocor. Unfortunately, the device fits just 50 percent of the male population. It also quits working after a year or two. The Abiocor II, due out in 2008, will be 30 percent smaller, fitting most men and 50 percent of women, and will last up to five years. - Telekinesis Tech - (estimated development time 11 - 15 yrs)
Researchers at Brown University and Cyberkinetics in Foxborough, Massachusetts, are devising brain implants that will enable us to communicate with machines. A microchip implanted in the motor cortex just beneath your skull will intercept nerve signals and reroute them to a computer, which will then wirelessly send the command to any of various electronic devices, including computers, stereos and electric wheelchairs. - Microchip Memory - (estimated development time 11- 15 yrs)
Neural engineer Ted Berger of the University of Southern California is developing a way to enhance memory. A microchip will send signals from one healthy brain cell to another, bypassing damaged tissue that would otherwise block the message. His artificial hippocampus will first help Alzheimer's patients regain the ability to form memories, then aid the merely forgetful. -
Four-Dimensional Vision - (estimated development time 16+ yrs)
Humans have three color-producing cones in our eyes-red, green and blue. What if we had four? Scientists at the Medical College of Wisconsin hope to give us genes for a fourth cone to enable us to see new hues that we can’t even imagine right now.
Yes, the future of medicine is looking a lot like an H.G. Wells sci-fi novel. Of course, some ethical questions have arisen from new technology involving genetic enhancement, cloning, stem cell research, limb transplants, transplants from animals to humans and other portals opened by the new technology. Scientists are wrestling with these thorny questions.
Still, if the inherent dangers of tinkering with the universe's natural progression can be overcome and only a small percentage of these new advances research is successful, the medical horizon is unlimited.
Meanwhile, the half-century of success with organ transplants has given thousands of people new chances. Chris Klug, a snowboarder and a liver transplant recipient, used his to win an Olympic bronze medal in 2002, and Alonzo Morning returned to a successful career in the National Basketball Association after a kidney transplant.
As Dr. Thomas E. Starzl, a pioneer transplant surgeon, mused: "How much more complete might the world have been if Mozart had been treated with renal transplantation instead of dying of kidney disease at the age of 34?"
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