> the titanium heart is only meant to keep a patient alive while they wait for a heart transplant, which has always been the goal of fully mechanical heart development at this stage of the game.
Why are we not aiming higher?
Why are we not aiming higher?
From the outside, it looks like a race between figuring out the biocompatibility and power issues for total artificial hearts vs. figuring out the immunological issues for xenografts (pig hearts, mostly).
If I had to put money on it, I’d bet that the xenografts win. It doesn’t seem like we’ve made huge strides toward solving the power and durability requirements of total artificial hearts, while immunology advances are happening rapidly. Exciting times, nonetheless.
Amazing times indeed, we are seeing xenografts and artificial organs in use.
Your best bet would probably be in advocating for the pigs to be engineered to prevent cortical development, ensuring they don’t become anything beyond twitching, unconscious organ bags. In many ways I think people would find this more disturbing, though.
It sounds high even for India. About 40% of Indians are vegetarian, a third if we exclude those who eat eggs [1]. The part of the country where vegetarianism is most rampant, the North, is also the highest dairy-consuming part of the country [2].
In any case, while medical veganism is something to think about, it's not worth prioritising until after we have reliable artificial organs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country#India
[2] https://theprint.in/pageturner/excerpt/there-is-a-scientific...
That's probably not a good move if we want to achieve a pragmatic reduction in meat consumption to help reduce related CO2 emissions. A smaller step is a much easier sell.
Which you should not, since eating eggs does not make a person a non-vegetarian. The only thing that makes a person a vegetarian is not eating animal flesh. Eggs and dairy are fair game; it's only vegans who push it farther and forbid those. This is basic stuff; has someone been trying to redefine "vegetarianism" recently?
> This is basic stuff; has someone been trying to redefine "vegetarianism" recently?
Oddly enough, when the word was introduced to popular use in English (though note that similar _concepts_ predated it), it usually meant something closer to what ‘vegan’ does today. The current use of the word is a 20th century thing. Words get redefined, all the time; that’s how languages work. Deal with it. In this case, the word has generally tended to be defined in _more_ permissive terms, not less.
https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/news/2023/mini-hearts-dish-big-win...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25329-5
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2022/03/building-heart-one...
Something a bacon lover never said ever . . .
I was raised as a pork lover but did stop as a teenager on my own a couple years before I quit beef. I think that did have a positive effect on my young health in the interim, but eventually everything was replaced by more comprehensive plant-based alternatives.
Still love the smell of bacon though.
We've been aiming higher explicitly for at 70+ years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_heart). I've been following it for 50. Artificial hearts were 5 years away since at least 1972 or so when I first learned about this field. The problems (mechanical, surgical, electrical, biological) are endless and it's an astoundingly hostile environment for machinery. We have enough problems getting pacemakers to work without severe problems.
I think the 6-million-dollar man thing is a weird goal.
Better to regrow, implant, perhaps supplement.
Full-on replacement isn’t just a “when” but a “why” and a “how do you expect to do better than evolution”.
Titanium is cool! That doesn’t make it better than muscle.
Go for a run if you want a better heart
Because our goal is aligned with our actual problem (survival of individual human beings), as opposed to the merely partially-aligned goal of "statistical survival up to reproduction age"? Natural evolution is an unaligned AI, in a sense: powerful, but not helpful.
Eventually humanity will defeat this problem, and we won't even need computational parity with natural evolution to do that. Most of that computation is wasted.
And the computation has to be done even in simulation. Just better to shortcut the suffering.
I think bioengineering is a good goal. I think cyborgs are a bad goal.
If our bodies were peak, we wouldn't need to use hundred(s) of hours of exercise per year to force muscular and cardiovascular improvements, it would just happen. Muscles wouldn't shrink away in an aggressive attempt to conserve calories, especially not regardless of BMI.
Then what would be the point of living if you had nothing to do but wait for updates? How boring.
Even a self-improving machine is spending time, not exercising but “designing a better version of itself”. Which is an “exercise”.
I hate to say this but I think your comment misunderstands the beauty of life and the challenge behind the struggle to improve. It is a blessed journey.
I personally think being fallable and not having full control of my destiny, while scary, is a feature and not a bug. It seems to make existence exciting.
> Which is an “exercise”.
You're arguing against a strawman. I'm not complaining about working for self-improvement, I'm complaining about how muscles shrink away so rapidly when not in use. Look at what happens when people are bedridden for a few weeks, that is not good design!
And I'm not saying people should automatically look like body builders, I'm saying the baseline should be a healthy level.
Interestingly, when you undergo a period of strength training, you see an increase in the number of myonuclei within your muscle fibres.
And this increase is permanent.
[1] https://foreverfitscience.com/exercise-science/is-muscle-mem...
I had a child, took a year off lifting, or basically doing anything but walking, I didn't lose much mass or strength and it hasn't taken me long to get back where I was, I'm pretty happy with the current design, maybe you should train more so you actually have some muscle in case you do need to spend a few weeks in bed?
Some people manage to do both at the same time.
The main issue here is the combination of biological tissue/conditions and artificial ones without either giving out.
It was developed with long-term implantation in mind. You can read about it here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/...
The use of inductive power transfer meant that no transdermal cabling was needed.
Sadly, it sounds like for various reasons the dream was not achievable at the time.
It was not designed with long term implantation in mind.
It was designed to get funding and keep the company alive. The device itself was very crude, not statenof the art at the time, and much of it was hand dip-molded with basic materials. It was a hand made research device that in all reality would have never been expected to be reliable and long lasting.
The Bivacor, Heartmate III, these things are in a different class.
https://abc13.com/post/artificial-heart-procedure-performed-...
>Why are we not aiming higher?
The final trajectory is not fully known but it looks like they have been preparing for a moon shot from the beginning anyway.
You've got to get there from here.
The higher the integrity, the more you under-promise and over-deliver :)
not my downvote btw, corrective upvote to compensate