Organ Printing.
Apparently, by means of the technology utilized in your average household laser-jet printer and some medical magic, human FLESH (currently tissues) can be engineered. That's what they're calling the process, really. Bio-engineering. So ultimately, the medical community would love to be able to fabricate whole human organs. Now, here's the real genius of this: each organ would carry your own perfectly tailored blue-prints! This is because doctors would take you-samples and use the appropriate stem cells in order to construct custom-made kidneys, livers, hearts, you name it.
WHAT?!
On the plus side, if you need an organ for whatever reason, you'd have less time to wait. Since you could have someone grow a spare organ for you, you wouldn't really have to wait on a list for a compatible organ someone else donated. Many donated organs, even if they are compatible with your body, are rejected by your immune system. They are treated as foreign intruders. Using your very own (albeit Frankenstein-ian) back-up would minimize the number of rejected organs.
It is also a plain enough fact that the ratio of people who need organ transplants and the number of available organs is incredibly high. A clinician quoted in the Impact Lab article below states, “I just had to watch them die... Clinical doctors can’t give them treatment that isn’t in textbooks. I clung to the hope that medicine will make progress and save more lives in the future.”
Here's the flip side...
(*Note: This might make me sound incredibly insensitive. Granted, I am not a doctor; I have never had to stand there and watch when someone close to me could be saved by future medical advances but died anyway... besides my grandma Gerri, but we all accepted that. I've never needed an organ. I've never faced vaguely certain death because the wait list was too damn long for a kidney.)
I almost wonder if this is something we just shouldn't dabble in. The world population is such that we can't take care of everyone. One could argue that we just WON'T take care of each other. However, in all honesty, I highly doubt that the powerful, the politicians, the war mongers and the wealthy (or one of all of the above), are going to want to slacken their hold on those they could be construed as being responsible for: their fellow (hu)man(ity). Given our undeniable construction of worldwide hierarchies of resource distribution, the number of people on the the planet is unsustainable.
Not only that, but who is to afford such a procedure? I would wish it not so, but yet another means of stratifying life's resources would be set in place. The wealthy could literally be read, fed, and stitched back together til the world's end...
Additionally (and this is more of a Western (at LEAST) cultural issue) I think that the focus on youth as more highly valued than old-age is causing issues like this. Old age doesn't necessarily stand for wisdom and experience... it speaks upon the out-of-touch, the traditional (which should be castrated to make room for "progress"), and the senile. If I may speak as (some) women here, aging can be considered shameful. Our most desirable features are related to our physical youthfulness. Here's what I'm getting at here. Our all too credulous search for the "fountain of youth" as it were, that age-old (ironically) chase after never-ending life, is exemplified in the rigor of the development of organ printing.
What it comes down to is this: at this moment in history, too many of us are haunted by the unwillingness to accept death as a natural part of life.
http://organprint.missouri.edu/talks.php
http://www.impactlab.com/2008/11/09/emerging-field-of-organ-printing/
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=1603783&page=1
BLAH!
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