3. Transhumanism. There was a company that made atrial defibrillators. They were bought by Guidant. Guidant was bought by Johnson and Johnson. The stuff I did there has been lost to history, but it looked kind of like this: That's a shock/pace lead for an ICD (Implantable Cardioverter Device). Ours were for atrial defibrillation. This is a thing that connects to a capacitor and zaps your heart when you feel bad so you don't feel bad anymore. They cost about $1500 to make, had fixation helixes made out of 80/20 platinum/iridium alloy and are the last fucking thing you want in your body. There isn't a device made that's better than what your body makes and your body knows it. There is no way to get a port into your body that your body doesn't recognize as a wound. There isn't a thing you can shove under your skin that your body won't pearl over in plaque just to free itself from irritation. And if it can't, it's 'cuz you're huffing steroids like Mark McGwire and we have one word for you, my friend: immunocompromised. My grandfather lived to 94. He outlived two hip replacements. Granted, they're more complicated than false teeth but they're hella simpler than, say, cochlear implants. Don't get me wrong - if you're stone blind a 8x8 light/dark matrix is the shit but the only reason you want something extra under your skin is if the thing you got sucks. Take that bellybutton piercing you still regret. Now put it somewhere you can't get to. Now fill it full of technology. Now figure out a way to get power to it. Now contemplate what happens when something goes wrong with it. Now suppose it grants you the Wisdom of Solomon - is it really worth it? Implants have gotten way better than they used to. As part of my biomedical hazing I had to read a 300-page book on the history of pacemakers. That shit used to be nuclear. But really, that's cybernetics in a nutshell - "sucking marginally less than it used to." There is nothing outside your body that would be better off inside your body other than food, drink and medicine. And, it could be argued, that stuff isn't "inside" your body anyway - anatomically speaking, you are basically a tunnel.
What are we going for? Eugenics is old hat. Liberals have been going after it for generations. The trick of it is that by the time your Wunderkind are ready to breed, you've been out of office for twelve years. People are more of an investment than Drosiphilia melanogaster; it takes time to slide from unter- to ubermensch. What about the slice'n'dice method? in vitro's brutal; most people don't realize that. It sucks for mom and it's hell on eggs. That's just gettin' 'em to cook. Gene targeting is a stone cold bitch and it's low-yield. I don't know the numbers but when your principal method involves bioballistics you're not looking at 100%. There's two forks here: we can screen for failures or we can build for successes. On the screening side, been there, done that. My daughter had a full workup from some lab eager to get my wife's business. We knew she was chromosomally clean 6 weeks into it. There will be more of that. It will get cheaper. Will we get to the point where we abort fetuses with, say, red hair? Mmmmmaybe. I don't see it being common, though. We're already cooking off baby girls to a certain extent and there's a fair amount of horror attached to it. There will always be the lunatic fringe but I expect people are going to continue having normal, healthy babies for the foreseeable future. On the building side, it just ain't that simple. I love GATTACA as much as the next guy; maybe more. It's not my field of expertise and I'm not confident in my answers but what little I know edges me towards the probability portion of the program. If you wanna have 100 kids and expect one standard deviation to be ubermensch, yeah, maybe. But if you wanna have 1 kid the genetic surgery is gonna be tricky for a while to come. Genetics is about probability, not individuality. Besides which, "transhuman" is a bad thing to be in a human race. Scientific American did a workup on what people would look like if you got rid of all the genetic baggage we're carrying; the result was fuggly. Not quite Man After Man fuggly, but close.
Genetic manipulation has gotten better in recent years. Gene therapies for two genetic diseases are already in the clinical trial stage. And that's using methods that are already going out of date. The bigger problem is figuring out where in the DNA to poke, since most diseases / features aren't as simple as a simple base-pair swap.in vitro's brutal; most people don't realize that. It sucks for mom and it's hell on eggs. That's just gettin' 'em to cook. Gene targeting is a stone cold bitch and it's low-yield. I don't know the numbers but when your principal method involves bioballistics you're not looking at 100%.
Whoa. In popular media, sciency types in popular media are always talking about "elegance" and yet, growing up around scientists has largely led me to believe that the elegance in science is often of a more brutal strain than is commonly assumed by laypeople. As for Scientific American article, I hit a paywall, but a PDF of the article is available here. I didn't see what you were talking about though. Did I find the full article? It seems so.The gene gun was originally a Crosman air pistol modified to fire dense tungsten particles.
A physicist friend of mine did some work at CERN a couple of years ago over the summer and he was totally sobered by how much aged equipment and duct tape was used. I think the elegance comes fromwhy your experiment should work, not how you have to do the damn thing. In biology it can get reeeeal messy.
Granted, CERN is an umbrella for a lot of different projects, and it wasn't like they were holding the giant detector in place along with some used gum and shoelaces. His was something on the analysis end, but still it was weird to see. Also, tangentially, some researchers make graphene just by slapping some plain 'ol tape on graphite, so maybe some new incarnations wouldn't be a bad idea.
I think most successful scientists are pragmatic. If you need to launch buckshot into cellular tissue, a "gun" is a great way to do it. I gave you the wrong issue. I just cruised the whole thing; I'm not sure where it was. It was a single-page thing so it may take me a while to find.As for Scientific American article, I hit a paywall, but a PDF of the article is available here.
Ah well, if it's a pain, don't worry about it. A friend's mother is employed by the US Forest Service and though I'm not entirely clear on what her research entails, I know that the recent changes to gun laws in various states has greatly impeded how she collects samples, which of course involves using shotguns to get pieces from the upper branches of trees. Dendrology is a lot more interesting with guns. Walking around measuring tree's DBH could be fun I guess, provided a collaborator with some nice Bs.I think most successful scientists are pragmatic. If you need to launch buckshot into cellular tissue, a "gun" is a great way to do it.