I love the both the subjects of Nanotech and Genetic Engineering. Maybe not in the real world, especially the genenging part, which may turn out to be a flippen nightmare in the near future. I don’t think we will start giving people superpowers like the X-men, though we may make a species of superior human that makes the rest of us obsolete, not something I look forward to. Conversely we may rid our species of many medical ailments and genetic disabilities which cause much misery, and that is a good thing. I have also heard that nanotech has been called the potential greatest gift and greatest danger to mankind. I think the danger has been exaggerated (see my post on why nanotech is not the danger it is portrayed in science fiction). Nanobots are just too small and fragile to handle a full scale attack by human science. However, the benefits are difficult to exaggerate.
Now modern Genetic Engineering is done by using a retrovirus or other chemical means to snip out a bit of the human gene while another inserts a different bit(the same process used by viruses to turn our cells into virus manufactories). This works with single bits of DNA, and possibly with more than a few at a time. We mostly do it with single or just a few cells, which means we can make changes to the small collection of cells that will become a human being. And while many people may be against those changes, I would work them in a heartbeat on a child that is destined to become Downs, or Autistic, or be cursed with Spina Bifida. Sorry if you don’t agree for religious or moralistic reasons. I would do it to prevent the suffering that is to come. Unfortunately we don’t always know that we have a problems until the future human is more than a small collection of cells. Sometimes we don’t know until the baby is born, or even further into development with some disorders. So we might have to do retroactive Genetic Engineering and also let surgery and advanced nutrition help the solution to the problem along. And while it might be possible to insert genetic material into every one of the trillion cells that make up a human, it still looks like a holy bitch to do with retroviruses or other chemicals. And then we would have to reconstruct, in some cases, entire Chromosomes made up of thousands of genes in order to make the necessary changes.
This is where nanotech would be the perfect complement to this kind of retroactive genetic engineering. Literally trillions of nanoscale robots could be introduced into the body of the person in need of changes, making their way into each individual cell and constructing genes, then cutting and splicing as necessary. One nanobot could accomplish the task of multiple retroviruses, and within a short period of time the genetic structures would be repaired. I don’t know if that would be enough to cure the person. In the case of disorders like Diabetes or other metabolic disorders I am pretty sure it would. In other cases the nanobots might have to make further structural changes. But I’m pretty sure we will work around whatever needs doing. There may be mistakes and problems, but I am sure the benefits will greatly outweigh the harm.
In my science fiction novel Diamonds in the Sand I use nanotech to retroactively engineer adults to give them animal like abilities. That may have been a simplistic approach, beyond the abilities of a single scientist or small group of them. But I found the idea intriguing, and in fiction we can explore those possibilities without having to delve to deeply into the problems that might have to be circumvented. And I believe the future truth will be much stranger than any fiction we might be writing today.
Genetic Disorders
All posts tagged Genetic Disorders
Several years ago I went back to school to study nursing, after dissatisfaction with my job with DCF and the whole mental health field as a whole. I had studied psychology and biology as an undergrad at FSU, majoring in the first while minoring in the second. This is besides the coursework in physics and chemistry that has also helped me in my writing about the fantastic. Anyway, I was amazed at how much biology and human anatomy had advanced in the twenty years since I had taken it as an undergrad. I excelled in the Anatomy and Physiology classes. And while I was there I was constantly thinking about how I could take this new knowledge and use it to produce stories and characters. And while the instructor kept stating how amazing the human body was, I kept thinking about the parts that were so poorly designed (though they really weren’t if you believe in evolution like I do). There were so many things that could have been done better with some forethought. And soon, I thought, humanity will have the means to make those changes. We may not be in agreement over whether or not those changes should be made. But as we don’t live under one unified Government that can make things illegal world wide, or police that which is made illegal, it will happen. Like it or not. So here are just a few of the changes in people that I can see forthcoming.
- Longer Lifespans: So we have gotten the average age up into the high seventies in modern times, with exceptional people living into their nineties and even over a hundred. What a lot of people don’t realize is that there have always been long lived people throughout history. We just have a higher percentage of them now thanks to medical science. Now nature doesn’t really care if we have long lives or not. As soon as we have children we are really superfluous to the natural scheme of things. We can die and other adults can raise the children and everything is fine. We don’t like the idea, but it is real. We would prefer to live far beyond or human spawning years if possible. Of course, I’m not sure if living to ninety is such a sought after goal when we see how many people who reach that age have failing minds and crap in their own pants. But if we can find what causes aging and shut it off people can live forever, or at least for very long time frames. I don’t like the idea of everyone living forever in my stories, because it causes too many changes to family. In a world where everyone lived forever and there was no more room for growth children would become a thing of the past. But a greater life span with continued great health would be wonderful, especially if we do develop the means to gain more space.
- Better metabolisms. Now to me it seems kind of stupid that we store all of our extra calories as fat (though of course this seems like a good idea during lean times). Now I guess that is better than just flushing the calories from the body, when they would seem to be so necessary when there isn’t any food around. But to add insult to injury, when the lean times do come the body does little with all that fat except for the first couple days of starvation. Then it goes to work on protein, you know, the stuff that makes up muscles that we might need to actually do something. While we keep the fat. Now this is very bad design. It would make more sense to store the fat, then use the fat, and leave the flippin muscle tissue alone.
- And what about the way our bodies let fats and sugars cause irreparable damage to our bodies. This really makes a whole lot of sense. Seems like out skin can repair most any damage to it, but our damned veins and arteries can’t. Any scarring is an immediate trap for fats, and sugars cause scarring. So we can be perfectly healthy, even physical specimens, and still die of cardiac arrest or stroke due to this flaw in our system. This also leads to the lack of redundancy in our circulatory system and our tendency to bleed out when one of our much too large arteries is severed. Again, I know this is due to evolution, and the death of any one member of the herd or group is not really that big a deal. It does become a big deal when the species becomes intelligent enough to actually enjoy life, when there is more to living than just surviving long enough to reproduce and then buy the farm.
- Pain. OK, I can see the reason for a pain sense. I mean, it really wouldn’t be good to get something thrust into a tender area and walk around without knowing one was stuck. Or something, like say a hand, is placed on top of a burner and the appendage is burned down to the bone before the owner knows what is happening. But have you ever been scraped up from falling off a bike onto asphalt (good old road rash). Then you spend the entire night with the injured areas throbbing in pulsating agony. Just when you need to sleep the damned pain is keeping you up. Really cool huh. Not. Wouldn’t it be much better if we could turn our nervous system off, or at least the pain response, when we don’t want or need the damned thing to overwhelm us?
- The Central Nervous System itself. Let’s say you get a head injury, or a stroke of infarct or any other damned thing that causes tissue destruction in the brain. Now most people know that brain material won’t grow back. That tissue lost is lost forever. And why is this? Is it because nerve tissue can’t regenerate? Hell no. It’s because of poor design. You see, there are these things called Astrocytes, or Star Cells, in the brain that are the life support system for the nervous tissue. And when there is bleeding damage in the brain they release materials that build scar tissue, and quickly, so the organism doesn’t bleed to death. Now it might not be able to ever use the bathroom without going in its underwear again, but it doesn’t bleed out. Because this scar tissue forms an impenetrable mass in the brain that won’t allow nervous tissue to expand into the area ever again. Sort of like if a car engine’s cylinder died and molten metal was dumped into the space so it could never be repaired. Why isn’t there some kind of cell that can clean this mess up? Good question. Are you listening up there.
All the wonderful genetic disorders out there that basically make our lives miserable, even while they don’t stop us from reproducing and passing them on. Sickle Cell, Diabetes, Down’s Syndrome, you name it, we have problems with it. I will get into this one more in a future post, which will be about how we can use technology in the future to correct some of these problems, as well as some we have not faced, such as a food source that doesn’t provide nourishment or being exposed to environments that would kill us unless we have the proper preparation.