State of the Art

Few people realize the full width of the advances in medical and biological science in recent years. So let me bring you up to speed, and tell you about some of them.

DNA and stem cell triggering

Your basic organic cell, called a stem cell, has no idea of what he’ll be - an eye, a fingernail, a heart or a brain cell, whatever. There’s a profile package of DNA in it, which contains instructions on how to become any of those. When a human body grows normally, the cell gets triggered from the outside to become the thing applicable to the place he’s in - a nail if he happens to be on the tip of a finger, for example, or a clit, when it finds itself in the vagina region.

It wasn’t until the 2000’s that scientists started to understand the triggers for the cell to make that decision, by a mechanism called epigenetics, which is partly biochemical, partly neuro-electric, and partly RNA-based. The groundbreaking study of Long-Hwang in 2015 not only identified the relationship between these factors and the resulting “choice” of the cell, but also described the necessary conditions to control these factors in a laboratory environment. Their most famous experiment a bunch of stem cells in a test tube to develop into heart muscle cells. The scientific community jumped on their study, and the triggers for “manufacturing” any particular cell type have today been identified and tested in laboratories.

Transplantation

Transplantations have been around for decades now - allowing someone with a failing kidney to get a new one, for example. Awesome, obviously. The first heart transplant, the most complicated organ to transplant, was in 1967, allowing the patient to live for 18 days afterwards. 50 years in science is an awfully long time though, and technology has advanced entire levels from there. As hip or knee transplants became a regular commodity in any regional hospital, scientists started transplanting anything - and, anywhere. An Indian man received a perfectly functioning extra arm in 2012, even though there were neurological problems in the brain about actually controlling it. In 2016, Korean scientist made a transplant of a new heart to a patient - located right underneath the stomach, bioengineering the entire artery system inside the torso to make it work. The patient, a woman in her thirties, gave birth to her second child last year. Transplants are no longer crude, primitive operations where the new organ is stitched with needle and thread - surgical advances make the transplanted organ integrate seamlessly in the new body these days, as if it had always been there.

Psycho Engineering

While still in its infancy, good progress is made in this field as well. The neurological wiring inside the brain is obviously one of the most complicated subjects around in science, but basic emotions like fear, joy, grief, and lust can be described in neural terms nowadays - which means, they can also be triggered and engineered in living people. A carefully designed mix of neuro-linguistic programming, medicines, low-voltage precision electricity currents, and common training can produce amazing results. A facility in Australia, which used these techniques in the treatment of suicidal patients, reported a 70% drop in actual suicide attempts as compared to worldwide averages over a period of five years, and treatment of PTSS patients has shown promising results as well.

All of these techniques are more or less controversial. The general public is scared of tampering with the human body like this. They don’t want lab engineers to create superheroes, supersoldiers, superbrains, or they will feel left out themselves. Associations with nazism, eugenics, and social darwinism are obvious. As a result, governments around the world have heavily regulated these fields of research, banning many aspects of it altogether. You cannot just go cloning a human; you’ll end up in jail.

Yet many laboratories are out of view for governments. People like Gates, Bezos and Musk (not to mention all their less well-known super-rich mates) can easily set up facilities outside the view of any government at all - and apparently, they do. For example, in 2019, Musk spent about 20% of his research grants on space flight - yielding headlines around the world. Yet scrutiny of his financial records showed that 45% was spent on biological research of all kinds, listed under euphemistic and vague descriptions - no one knows on what exactly. And he’s not the only one; talented scientists in these fields get top salaries working for private research centres, and their contracts contain the strictest non-disclosure clauses around. There is a deadly silence on any kind of results, yet these investments continue and increase year-on-year… so it is likely that they are producing something, at least?

One thing is certain though: the ethical boundaries in this shadowland are significantly lower than those in general society...