NEWS

Talking Heads, New Bodies — Millennium Predictions for Medicine

Brian Vastag

Methuselah lived 969 years, the Bible says, but he had the benefit of divine intervention. For the rest of us, science fiction has offered a host of other means for near-immortality, ways to cheat even the most refractory of tumors — farming fresh bodies, suspending animation, or uploading our neural patterns into giant databases, brains-on-a-disk.

Trouble is, the National Institutes of Health is not funding many grants in these areas.

But that doesn't mean scientists aren't working on the problem. Immortality, as it were, appears to be a growth industry.

Spare Parts

Somewhere near San Diego at Advanced Tissue Sciences, human skin, cartilage, heart valves, and miniature livers are sprouting inside humming chrome-and-glass bioreactors, awaiting their time in the sun when they will restore burn victims, diabetics, even cancer patients. Further up the coast, a new company reportedly plans to cultivate human bodies without brains, to supply organs for transplants.

Ethically problematic to be sure, but given chronic organ shortages, lengthening life spans, and the also-California-based desire to stay youthful forever, one of these two solutions may one day be the next big Wall Street cash cow.

In Scottsdale, Ariz., whole bodies with brains are in deep freeze at Alcor Life Foundation, in case that someday they might be successfully thawed, revived, and cured. For $120,000 — a life insurance policy will secure a private cryotank where policy holders can be put on liquid ice when the time comes. The discount brain-freeze-only package will cost the insured or their surviving loved ones a mere $50,000.

Whether the deeply frozen dead will ever be their old selves again is a question several experts firmly answered in the negative at the recent NIH lecture "Science Fiction to Science Fact: Predicting the Future of Medicine."

The problem? Too much water in our bodies. As it freezes, jagged crystals puncture cells like so many birthday balloons. Freezing and thawing a few layers of cells is no problem; laboratory technicians do that every day. But for tissue thicker than a couple of millimeters, ice kills. "Cryopreservation is mainly a dehydration process," explained Athena Andreadis, Ph.D., neurology professor at Harvard Medical School and author of To Seek New Life: The Biology of Star Trek. "If it isn't done right, when you come out you'll look either like mush or leather."

But that might not be important in the future, when cloning new bodies as receptacles for old brains may be the foremost method of reproduction. There are two ways to get this job done, one messy and carbon-based, the other clean and silicon.

In 1970, Robert White, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of neurosurgery at Case Western Reserve University, transplanted a rhesus monkey's head to another's body. "When the monkey awakened from anesthesia, it regained full consciousness and complete cranial nerve function." White reported. (The monkey lived 8 days.) Maintaining blood flow during surgery is the biggest hurdle to such a feat in humans, according to White.

Andreadis calls the second method "transhumanism," whereby the brain is uploaded to a computer, then downloaded to a new body. Memory could be a problem, though, because an average human brain might not ever fit on a disk.

And even if every neuron and synaptic junction could be mapped into a computer's memory, would we be the same after passing through the 21st century equivalent of a Powerbook? The reductionist camp says, "Whatever is in our brain is our mind." The more religious and spiritual types argue, "The soul can not be captured."

Whether the soul equals mind equals brain equation ever proves true, Andreadis sees another problem. Brains are used to being connected to bodies; nerves from toe to scalp constantly feed sensory input to cerebral centers. Sever those ties, and as Andreadis put it, "The brain may lose its mind."

One thing is certain: 100 years from now these predictions will seem old-fashioned. Ann Carmichael, Ph.D., history of science professor at Indiana University, Bloomington, summed it thus: "Our imagined futures will likely seem fictitious to those who look back at us."



             
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