Adumbration

Among the recent news is a report in Nature Materials out of Charles Lieber's lab at Harvard, describing what they call "nanoelectronic scaffolds for synthetic tissues."  This sort of topic is liable for all sorts of hyperbolic rambling, so I'll try to restrain myself.  Even so, the subject promises to become of increasing relevance; this is not my first post on the prospects for human technology to enhance human physiology, and I expect others.

It was from exposure to the works of Robert Anton Wilson (especially Illuminatus!, with Robert Shea) that I started thinking about the prospects for radical life extension - the SMIILE paradigm appealed to my predelictions - Space Migration, Increased Intelligence, Life Extension, still seem like a great combination (the notation credited to Wilson and Timothy Leary).

This work by Lieber, et al, represents another step along the path towards improving the performance of our bodily tissues, with the prospects of allowing them to last far longer, require less energy to operate and maintain, and add new features that could increase resistance to disease, repair traumatized organs and birth defects, enable us to tolerate a greater range of environmental conditions, and increase our range of sensible detection.  Lieber and his colleagues rank among the most productive contributors to developments on this path (check out 25 years of publications), but many others have been working along this path for decades.

Someone at work brought my attention to the somewhat snarky conclusion to this post on SLATE, that this work represents "another tiny step in our ill-advised quest for immortality."   I say that improved health and increased life span is an unequivocal good.