Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Sci-Fi and Medicine

http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/05/26/regrowing.body.parts/index.html

Today's science fiction is tomorrow's science.

This is, as far as I know, the first step in moving medicine past science and into engineering. If you have a defective part and can't fix it, you replace it. If spares aren't available, you build a new one. For a long, long time medicine could only fix things in place. With organ transplants and blood transfusions they moved up to replacement. Now we're finally getting into rebuilding.

This is very exciting to me, as I see here the chance to massively improve the overall health of the population. Of course, that's a long ways down the road, but that they've moved into human testing means this procedure is pretty far along.

'I think you should live, and come up with a way to give someone a new heart without anyone needing to die. I think that's much cooler than Santa Claus.' - roughly quoted from memory, Christina Yang, Grey's Anatomy.

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