dream cells

In exchange for making each of us original, genes are unfair.  Michael Jackson was born black when he wanted to be white.  So technology and plastic surgery helped him get what his genes couldn't.  Once when he was still alive, I heard someone joke that he had a set of noses and ears in his closet and would pick one every morning to wear for the day.  What if we could do something similar with our organs?

Tissue engineering (or regenerative medicine) seems to be a huge trend these days.  In the future, human bodies might be repairable like cars.  If your kidney fails, you get a new one made from your own somatic cell.  If you need a new liver, you will never have to wait for a doner.  If your son is born with a heart disease, you will never have to hope (even for a second) that another child will be brain dead so that he can provide a new heart for your son.  One day, you may never have to watch your loved ones die.  At least, no nation would have to pay billions of money for dialysis, and therefore, the money can be used to enhance our lives in other ways.  It's a technology no one could ever have imagined 100 years ago; it's full of dreams.  It's exciting.

And yet, I wonder if we're really heading the right way.

A young Japanese researcher recently published her discovery of a revolutional way of making stems cells from somatic cells by merely exposing them to low-pH (the link is below**).  When she first submitted her paper, however, the editor told her that she had mocked the long history of cellular biology.  The reason is obvious -- the editor had been soaked in preconception he had formed over many years of editing and researching; he could not believe, or accept that a cell could be reprogrammed with such a simple method.

Steve Jobs said in his famous speech that death was nature's best invention.  I agree.  Altertion of generations is essential to the progress of human society.  The only way the old can give way to the new is to die, or get a new brain with no preconception -- every couple decades, you get a set of new organs along with a new brain for your birthday.  Except then, it's not really you.  It's just a human with the same set of genes as you.  So rather than getting a new brain in a "100 year old" body (with organs of various ages), you might as well be born as a different being with a different set of genes.  Then it's called evolution.

Either way, you don't really want a brand new brain.  The realistic scenario is probably that you get a set of new neurons that would work along with your old ones so that you can still be you.  By the time you reach seventy, you have a brain that still works like when you were twenty (with a lot of unwanted preconception but also with more wisdom) and since you have a twenty year old ovary (and uterus) you have two more babies.  But we would never have enough food to feed that many humans, so we would have to set a law saying no more babies after age fifty.  And maybe no more organ repairment after age eighty.

Of course, I say all this because I am not in fear of death at this moment.  I respect the wishes of people who are dying or suffering from illness.  How could I ever blame humans of their ego in such a situation?  It's indeed unfair that some people get to live a healthy life up till hundred while some die before reaching twenty.  Genes are unfair.  Life is unfair.  And tissue engineering has the possibility to grant all dreams of people who wish to live a long fulfilling life just like everyone else.


*In case anyone's wondering, it is apparently possible to treat genetic diseases by tissue engineering.  As far as I understand, the very basic idea is that you make iPS cells and replace the abnormal genes (that's causing the disease) with normal ones and then transplant them.  You can read more about it in papers like:
Science. 2007 Dec 21;318(5858):1920-3
Treatment of sickle cell anemia mouse model with iPS cells generated from autologous skin.
Hanna J, Wernig M, Markoulaki S, Sun CW, Meissner A, Cassady JP, Beard C, Brambrink T, Wu LC, Townes TM, Jaenisch R.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18063756?ordinalpos=4&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

**Nature 505, 641–647 (30 January 2014) doi:10.1038/nature12968
Received 10 March 2013 Accepted 20 December 2013 Published online 29 January 2014
Stimulus-triggered fate conversion of somatic cells into pluripotency
Haruko Obokata, Teruhiko Wakayama, Yoshiki Sasai, Koji Kojima, Martin P. Vacanti, Hitoshi Niwa, Masayuki Yamato & Charles A. Vacanti
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v505/n7485/full/nature12968.html
(update: this paper is now being considered of retraction by some co-authors for various reasons)