Thinking About Technocracy

Nerve cells can now be set down in sequence on chips…making human to semiconductor links increasingly feasible.  Care to plug into a database?  The BBC reports…

Michel Bauwens has another great article.  This time on the future technologies of freedom: here.

Not Exactly Rocket Science blog covers new MIT science that allows for recovery of some lost memory functions.

Cyberocracy?  See iRevolution’s article here.

I found this of interest today:

Canadian researchers, for the first time, have developed an organic substance (scaffold) that attracts and supports cells necessary for tissue repair and can be directly injected into problem areas.Find Me A Cure, Jan 2009

In a similarly telling story, Johns Hopkins (my alma mater) is reporting dust-sized robotic specs that can clean various types of cells from the body.

This research offers future prospects of saving many thousands who now die of heart failure with a relatively simple stem-cell related technology. It is increasingly important to begin the process of thinking about governance as major disease vectors or aging begin to be radically addressed in the near term.  This will change all manner of social calculations and will, most likely, require very different resource allocation paradigms.

This from New Scientist on directing the bodies cells by injecting new substances in that “command” various actions…can be anti-cancer, etc:

[The] breakthrough involves implanting cylinders of an FDA-approved biodegradable polymer into the body. The implants release a particular variety of the cell-signalling molecules called cytokines – a sort of molecular perfume that is irresistible to a certain kind of immune-system messenger cell.

These dendritic cells are attracted into the pores of Mooney’s implant, where they are exposed to antigens – the molecular signatures of the cancer, bacterium or virus being treated – and a danger-signal chemical derived from bacterial DNA.

This alert signal makes the dendritic cells flee to the nearest lymph node, where they meet up with the immune system’s “killer” T-cells and program them to hunt down the invading cells.

Clearly a number of labs are playing with transhumanist projects.  We are totally unready for the governance of these tools outside a few medical ethics reviews.

HT BreakthroughAlert.com

Mark’s Daily Apple is one of my favorite health blogs.  Mark Sisson is careful and I find he more than mostly gets it right when I look further into the details…at least as they apply to my world.

Today he has a bit on shaping your own genetic destiny.  This is a big new part of the medicine to come, and for those for whom this is news, Mark has a great place to start.