Not a physical bridge, although these guys might be close, I'm talking about a conceptual bridge. A bridge to logevity. The latest news about Organovo indicates they've made some remarkable discoveries regarding the potential of engineering human organ tissue.
My car is getting old. It has a crack in the windshield, it shakes a little at high speeds, and the transmission just doesn't shift like it used to. As it gets older, I can get parts replaced as needed. I could potentially restore it to working order indefinitely. The human body is a more complicated machine than a car, but perhaps we will one day become good enough at working on it that we can restore ourselves indefinitely. We know all the parts, but it seems there are many challenges yet to overcome in understanding how they interact.
The first printed organ tissue to be utilized will likely be parts of an organ. Supplementing an organ doesn't pose some of the challenges of fully replacing an organ. I'm particularly interested in how the nervous system might react to organ replacement. I don't know if we have to worry about anything as mystical as cellular memory, but perhaps there is something inherent to the relationship between our brain and other organs that somehow defines part of us.
The plasticity of our brains allows them to make massive adjustments to changes in the body. A lot of research is focused on discovering the secrets of the interaction between our brain and voluntary muscle movement, but what nuances of the self might be hidden in the nervous systems' interaction with autonomous systems? It seems like it may be a more bufferred system of memory. Since much of the autonomous functions are regulated by chemical releases by the brain which travel to and trigger reactions in the organs, the memory may be in what results come of those releases.
This article is one in a series that does a good job of explaining heart function in an understandable way. That particular article describes the cause of degenerating heart performance with age. This information is promising in that given the degradation occurs in the heart tissue itself rather than the brains ability to send it chemical signals; it stands to reason that partial heart tissue therapies could do wonders for aging hearts. The article prior to that one "Brain Heart Communication Withers with Aging", talks a little about the communication between the brain and heart. While the heart is able to function without the nerves attached to it, perhaps these connections which fine tune the performance of the heart have a devoted memory space in our brains that is the imprint of our hearts upon our minds.
Hopefully as the process of organ tissue printing evolves, we may shift to repairs of our organs when they start to degrade significantly rather than waiting until they fail. While the risks are much lower, most of us seem to have recognized the merit in this approach with our cars. Getting that noisy engine checked out and repaired now is a much better plan than being broken down on the side of the road in a month. The death that can come with a broken down body carries a heavier price than a tow though. It will be interesting to see any effects on the mind though. Any consistent changes might indicate another level of interaction within our bodies that we've totally missed.
My car is getting old. It has a crack in the windshield, it shakes a little at high speeds, and the transmission just doesn't shift like it used to. As it gets older, I can get parts replaced as needed. I could potentially restore it to working order indefinitely. The human body is a more complicated machine than a car, but perhaps we will one day become good enough at working on it that we can restore ourselves indefinitely. We know all the parts, but it seems there are many challenges yet to overcome in understanding how they interact.
The first printed organ tissue to be utilized will likely be parts of an organ. Supplementing an organ doesn't pose some of the challenges of fully replacing an organ. I'm particularly interested in how the nervous system might react to organ replacement. I don't know if we have to worry about anything as mystical as cellular memory, but perhaps there is something inherent to the relationship between our brain and other organs that somehow defines part of us.
The plasticity of our brains allows them to make massive adjustments to changes in the body. A lot of research is focused on discovering the secrets of the interaction between our brain and voluntary muscle movement, but what nuances of the self might be hidden in the nervous systems' interaction with autonomous systems? It seems like it may be a more bufferred system of memory. Since much of the autonomous functions are regulated by chemical releases by the brain which travel to and trigger reactions in the organs, the memory may be in what results come of those releases.
This article is one in a series that does a good job of explaining heart function in an understandable way. That particular article describes the cause of degenerating heart performance with age. This information is promising in that given the degradation occurs in the heart tissue itself rather than the brains ability to send it chemical signals; it stands to reason that partial heart tissue therapies could do wonders for aging hearts. The article prior to that one "Brain Heart Communication Withers with Aging", talks a little about the communication between the brain and heart. While the heart is able to function without the nerves attached to it, perhaps these connections which fine tune the performance of the heart have a devoted memory space in our brains that is the imprint of our hearts upon our minds.
Hopefully as the process of organ tissue printing evolves, we may shift to repairs of our organs when they start to degrade significantly rather than waiting until they fail. While the risks are much lower, most of us seem to have recognized the merit in this approach with our cars. Getting that noisy engine checked out and repaired now is a much better plan than being broken down on the side of the road in a month. The death that can come with a broken down body carries a heavier price than a tow though. It will be interesting to see any effects on the mind though. Any consistent changes might indicate another level of interaction within our bodies that we've totally missed.
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