More Delights and Disdains . . .

of a diminutive nature of late . . . Number 21

Disdains:

Noticing a great big roundish floater in my left eye. I did a little research and sure enough, Parkinson’s can lower the level of dopamine in the retina and cause retinal thinning and disturbances. I guess that a floater would be considered a disturbance. I should make an appointment with an ophthalmologist but I don’t like the thought of a needle in my eye.

Reading this brain-teasing article published in the MIT Technology Review about brain tissue replacement and regeneration. Apparently back in 2022, President Joe Biden created the US Advanced Projects Agency for Health and committed $110 million¹ to research “functional brain tissue replacement”. Being personally familiar with brainy things (such as Deep Brain Stimulation), this piqued my curiosity until I read that the newly hired program director, Dr. Jean Herbert, has a reputation as an immortalist. He wants to develop procedures beyond tissue regeneration to those that might prevent death from aging. He and his biotech startup supporters envision a future where we can live forever by having our brains and other organs replaced when needed from non-sentient human clones.

From the article:

For instance, Hebert recently said on a podcast with Hamalainen that human fetuses might be used as a potential source of life-extending parts for elderly people. That would be ethical to do, Hébert said during the program, if the fetus is young enough that there “are no neurons, no sentience, and no person.” And according to a meeting agenda viewed by MIT Technology Review, Hébert was also a featured speaker at an online pitch session held last year on full “body replacement,” which included biohackers and an expert in primate cloning.

Hébert declined to describe the session, which he said was not recorded “out of respect for those who preferred discretion.” But he’s in favor of growing non-sentient human bodies. “I am in conversation with all these groups because, you know, not only is my brain slowly deteriorating, but so is the rest of my body,” says Hébert. “I'm going to need other body parts as well.”

I can imagine Herbert’s deathless bio-industrial state future, where the immortal rich have eternal access to certified organically grown body parts and “ethically” harvested 8 week old fetuses, while the rest of us mere mortals make due with ultra-processed GMO tissue replacements.

More from the article:

To design the youthful bits of neocortex, Hébert has been studying brains of aborted human fetuses 5 to 8 weeks of age. He’s been measuring what cells are present, and in what numbers and locations, to try to guide the manufacture of similar structures in the lab.

“What we're engineering is a fetal-like neocortical tissue that has all the cell types and structure needed to develop into normal tissue on its own,” says Hébert.

Sweet suffering fetuses, why do these later-day Molochians always require aborted baby parts to jump start their utopian nightmares?

Delights:

Celebrating my son’s 19th birthday this past week as wisps of Fall angle through the wind and shadows. This is the same week that he moves back to college to start his sophomore year. Yeah, he is a little young to be in his second year but he skipped the 8th grade at my suggestion. He reminds me of this fact whenever he feels the need to complain about not having friends his exact age. I remember the difference between being 19 versus 21, but I respond by asking him if he would trade his hard work from last year to go back to being a mere freshman this year. Just think of what is possible by having that extra year, I tell him. Maybe I expect too much out of him, but then I never bought into the idea that everyone reaches the same maturity level at the same age. This point was argued very well by Alice Loxton in a recent BBC HistoryExtra podcast review of her new book Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 young lives. From the Venerable Bede to Vivienne Westwood she shows that there’s more to being in your teens than just being a teenager.

Hearing my son’s enthusiasm about his first Shakespeare class with a notoriously hard English Lit professor - so hard that all but four students dropped this particular class. I pointed out that he should take advantage of the educational opportunity with such a low student to professor ratio. My son, being ambitious and hardworking, had already figured that out. And told me so. Typical sophomore.

Finished reading Demon Copperhead, a 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner by Barbara Kingsolver. The book recounts the adventures of Damon Fields as he navigates growing up in a meth and oxy-laced Appalachia. I didn’t read this book when it first came out mainly because I had already watched the series Dopesick on the same subject. Then came J. D. Vance’s tale of rising above all of that and I remembered the book. Though not strictly a Southern Gothic novel (it lacks the humor and irony found in that genre), the subject of addiction hit close to home up here in the Blue Ridge foothills.

1. Now for some numbers. The annual cost of Parkinson’s in the United States is $52 billion. This new agency’s annual budget is $3.8 billion. The NIH spent $259 million on Parkinson’s research for 2022. This new agency will spend $110 million on finding the Fountain of Youth.