Cell Repair Machines example essay topic

In Pursuit of Forever Although it is certainly an important operative factor, the commonly-interpreted explanation of aging and death, a sort of simple degeneration of the body's mechanical and chemical systems through time and usage, does not apply very well to the truth. The human body replaces every constituent atom naturally every seven years. Unlike machines, our bodies are in a constant state of self-repair and regulation, and it is the breakdown of the systems that govern these activities which concern gerontologists. The presently debated basic theories of aging center around explanations of this point. Although these theories are many, and some quite technical, they can be lumped, in layman's terms into three basic categories. Firstly, simple 'wear and usage' which encompasses such ideas as catastrophic accumulation of DNA transcription errors and radiation damage, cell / organ waste accumulation, and genetic cross linkage.

Also, most believe a sort of genetic and / or natural 'clock' is responsible for communicating to or interfering with the maintenance systems. Ideas like a built in limit on the number of cell divisions, systematic shortening strands, mitochondrial free radical mis function, and the slow release of the 'death hormone,' DECO, fall into this category. The remaining category, and the most nebulous, is the 'mysterious time limit' theories. They deal with assertions that there is some kind of existential regulatory device, perhaps a spiritual force, or a cosmic principle, which operates to end our lives when the time is right. The search for a method of delaying or preventing the onset of old age is itself age-old. At present, or course, no such technique is reliably known.

We can however, explore the various theoretical ways such an procedure could come to be. In the same way that foresighted engineers of the twenties thirties and forties, as the principles of rocketry were just being laid out, realistically and reliably predicted the methods and tools that people would use to explore space until present day, we can envision, with reasonable expectations of reliability, the techniques of the future, even though they layout side our present technical ability. Physicians now rely chiefly on surgery and drugs to treat illness. Surgeons have advanced from stitching wounds and amputating limbs to repairing hearts and re-attaching limbs. Using microscopes and fine tools, they join delicate blood vessels and nerves. Yet even the best micro-surgeon cannot cut and stitch finer tissue structures.

Modern scalpels and sutures are simply too coarse for repairing capillaries, cells, and molecules. Consider " delicate's surgery from a cell's perspective: a huge blade sweeps down, chopping blindly past and through the molecular machinery of a crowd of cells, slaughtering thousands. Later, a great obelisk plunges through the divided crowd, dragging a cable as wide as a freight train behind it to rope the crowd together again. From a cell's perspective, even the most delicate surgery, performed with exquisite knives and great skill, is still a butcher job. Only the ability of cells to abandon their dead, regroup, and multiply makes healing possible. Yet as many paralyzed accident victims know too well, not all tissues heal.

One of the simplest solutions to the problem of mortality relies in simply constructing sufficiently fine mechanical systems to take over where our own bodies fail, such micro mechanical systems are known as nanotechnology. Cell repair will be comparable in size to bacteria and viruses, but their more-compact parts will allow them to be more complex. They will travel through tissue as white blood cells do, and enter cells as viruses do - or they could open and close cell membranes with a surgeon's care. Inside a cell, a repair machine will first size up the situation by examining the cell's contents and activity, and then take action. Early cell repair machines will be highly specialized, able to recognize and correct only a single type of molecular disorder, such as an enzyme deficiency or a form of DNA damage. Later machines (but not much later, with advanced technical AI systems doing the design work) will be programmed with more general abilities.

Complex repair machines will need to guide them. A micron-wide mechanical computer will fit in 1/1000 of the volume of a typical cell, yet will hold more information than does the cell's DNA. In a repair system, such computers will direct smaller, simpler computers, which will in turn direct machines to examine, take apart, and rebuild damaged molecular structures. By working along molecule by molecule and structure by structure, repair machines will be able to repair whole cells. By working along cell by cell and tissue by tissue, they (aided by larger devices, where need be) will be able to repair whole organs.

By working through a person organ by organ, they will restore health. Because molecular machines will be able to build molecules and cells from scratch, they will be able to repair even cells damaged to the point of complete inactivity. Thus, cell repair machines will bring a fundamental breakthrough: they will free medicine from reliance on self-repair as the only path to healing. In a very real sense, not only will advanced be able to reset whatever biological clocks we may find, and repair any damage to our own self-maintenance machinery, they will in all likelihood be so much faster, better and more effective in healing our bodies as to render it essentially unnecessary. See the book Engines of Creation by K. Eric Drexler for an exhaustive exploration of the veracity and implication of the ideas of nanotechnology. Complex and advanced nanotechnology will remake not just our bodies, but our world, and there are certain social and human concerns which may prevent its evolution.

An alternate, and far less complex, but perhaps even more controversial method which is frequently discussed is to simply clone the body, suspending the brain function naturally or artificially, and in twenty years transplanting the brain into the new, twenty year old body. At present, little effective prediction concerning this subject is really possible. The details of human brain function remain elusive. And unlike the development of, the exploration of this field relies on new science, which can be assisted little by technical AI systems or industrial design and production scales. There are simple variants on this idea, which could succeed for a variety of technical reasons, and they mostly entail synthesizing new blood or other vital tissues.

The last promising branch of pursuit involves a collection of experimental and hypothetical complicated biochemical processes intended to be used collectively as -gerontological treatment. They will, for example use the DNA replacing abilities of certain micro lifeforms to repair entire DNA strands perfectly and properly, and use chain reaction process to rebuild the chains, and other procedures which thoroughly defy description here. These are but a sample. Our scientists are today laying the groundwork for a host of ways to extend the human lifespan from lengths measured in the centuries to... as long as one may wish. As a certain professional theoretician observed, the longer one lives, the longer medical science is able to extend one's life, and thus, the longer one lives.