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Comment by brianbreslin | Hacker News Reader

Do you think we'll start seeing people with bad livers/kidneys/organs pre-ordering new ones and having them frozen/stored? if i'm some rich 80 year old tycoon with a bum heart, i could see myself having new versions of all my parts stored for me at a lab for when i need them.

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Then other parts of your body would start failing in interesting ways. Interesting from a scientific perspective, but I'd imagine pretty horrible from a human one. Your heart and kidneys don't fail by themselves, your entire body suffers cumulative damage from mistreatment and it's just those parts that fail in a terminal way first.

Well, once we can solve the problem of the first things to fail, we can work on solving the problem of the next set of things that fail, etc.

I wonder how far you need to go before a brain transplant is cheaper / safer than replacing it. I can see replacing major veins as being doable but capillary's are far less so.

Or perhaps, when our time comes, we can simply die, leaving the world to the next generation as it has been for billions of years.

Sure, we can; but if we'd thought that way before we would never have developed medicine. For some reason in every generation there are people who seem to think that using the medical science they are familiar with (or just slightly less) is okay and normal, but using anything more is somehow contrary to nature. But using our mind to develop new ways to overcome the limitations of our bodies is our nature just as much as the failures of our bodies are.

I don't want to and you can't make me.

For farther comments on the issue, read up on the element of hubris in Greek mythology.

Right, but oftentimes (but not always) the "cumulative damage" is causally linked to a single source. For example, when your kidneys fail, the rest of your body suffers crazy loads, since the kidneys are tasked with maintaining electrolytic balances in your blood, which other organs depend on. For example, failing kidneys don't clean out potassium from your bloodstream, which causes your heart to come under increased load and usually results in sudden cardiac death.

So replacing a failing kidney early on will keep your heart in a much better shape. Of course, in the long run, you'd need to replace everything, and in the very long run there's always cancer...

That is not necessarily true. There are lots of instances where a specific organ is experiencing failure and could be replaced and the rest of you is pretty normal functioning. Especially in kidney failures or injuries, liver failures or injuries, and hearts as well. Think about all the people on dialysis. Lots of them are awaiting a new kidney from a donor. What if, instead of waiting 2 years for a match they grow you a new one in a few months? Same thing with the incredibly regenerative liver. Hearts might be another story, not sure there. We'd probably need to be able to grow those completely outside the body first.

I haven't seen The Island, but another really good book that I remember from my teens which featured this concept was "The House of the Scropion". Instead of using laboratory organs as replacements though, they use real people.

Have you seen "The Island"? If not, I think you'll really enjoy that film. It's a great look into the ethics of that idea and one possible scenario that could play out in a utopian/dystopian future. Don't read any more about it unless you don't want to watch it. It's better with "fresh eyes".

"If only you could see the things I've seen with your eyes"

I have seen it. There was also a movie with arnold schwartzenneger in it the 6th day where they clone people to replace them when they die, or before they die. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0216216/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_19

I'm counting on it:) I think we can see something like this in our life time the way that information is moving.

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