Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Manipulating the body

I am no scientist, but I play one on this blog. I read this article, or one similar to it, sometime this week from somewhere, it could have been a blog or a news site, I have no idea (I seem to forgotten...), so if you posted about it tell me and I will cite you.

Source: "A new vaccine against Alzheimer's disease will be tested on 60 Swedish patients at initial or moderate stages of degenerative neurological dementia, Swedish media reported on Sunday."

This sounds absolutely amazing and a little scary. I know the immune system is one wacked out bodily system. It is basically a biological machine that can "learn" to attack certain cells. These cells can be good or bad.

The only thing that concerns me about the ability to teach he immune system is the current lack of a off switch. It seems that if we are able to "train" the immune system to attack certain cells, it might be possible to make the system unlearn what it has learned. I know in the computer world, all I would have to do to delete what a computer learned was remove a few rows from a table some where. If we can control what the immune system learns or does not learn, we can solve many illnesses and bodily annoyances.

If we are not able to make the immune system unlearn what it learned, then it is possible that something else in the body could be unexpectedly attacked and you would not be able to jack about it. Where as, in nano machines, robot prosthetics, and biological mechanical interfaces, you always have an off switch.

cube

2 comments:

Dave Justus said...

That's a good portion of what testing vacines is all about, making sure that you are attacking what you want to attack and nothing else.

Man of Issachar said...

uhhh...go to you own site to utter that scientific nonsense....

Just kidding.

Yea, i forgot about that.

I am think that in general i would prefer a mechanical solution to a bioglical, if possible.

Plus you could clear out the little mechanical bots in your body with a electo magnetic pulse.