Infinity and Beyond

A new surgery performed by four European universities to transplant a human windpipe using the patients own stem cells has marked a ‘new age in surgical care.’ The patient was Claudia Castillo who was suffering from a decreased airway after severe tuberculosis. Stem cells from her bone marrow were grown and were used to “seed” a donated windpipe from a 51-year old donor who died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Because the organ was ‘her own’ it was not rejected by her immune system as is the case in many transplant surgeries.  “Two months after the surgery, lung function tests on Ms. Castillo ‘were all at the better end of the normal range for a young woman’.”

The surgery itself took place in Barcelona but preparation took place in Bristol, England, Padua, and Milan. This international cooperation has brought forth the dawn of a new era of humankind. It changes the fundamentals of what humans can become. The near future isn’t a battle between humans and mechanized robots its going to be over the God factor and the limits of humankind. This procedure opens the door for huge potential even in the US (even if president-elect Obama reverses the ban on embryonic stem cell research), as this procedure was performed with all adult stem cells. The potential to take used parts from deceased donors and grow them as our own for any purpose walks a thin line. For now the procedure is new and the first of its kind, but the precedent it sets is where the ‘new age of surgical care’ comes into play. Your kidney’s are failing? No problem, we’ll have you grow a new pair and live 10 years longer than you would have. I’m not saying that humankind’s life-span just increased 20 years because of this, but give it another 10 years and who knows where this will lead.

The difficulty with medical advancement is where to draw the line. Even if we can keep creating new parts for you when your old ones stop working, is that a future we want to see? Is it a future we’d even see during our lifetimes? Hard to say, but one thing is certain, the dawn of a new era for mankind is underway.

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The people of the world, specifically Europe, have been given 6 more months to live. The Large Hadron Collider underneath Switzerland and France has been shut down until early spring 2009. This news comes soon after the announcement that a transformer had malfunctioned and wasn’t cooling the internal temperature of the collider to it’s absolute zero freezing point. The transformer had been malfunctioning for a week before it was reported which assures me that the scientists working at the facility are keeping everything on track.

Then a new problem occured. This new problem was caused “after an electrical glitch sparked a large helium leak inside the machine’s tunnels.” Now, I wonder if this one was reported after people walking the tunnels began to sound like munchkins, or if they were a little bit more proactive about it than they were with the transformer.

While the repairs might only take a few months to fix the Officials with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) have decided to save costs during the winter months and wait until next spring to fire up the collider. So, everyone can return to giving their full freak out attention to the American financial crisis.

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