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2003-02-06 - 1:37 a.m.
Archimedes Lochs took a sniff, and his fifth auxiliary brain kicked in. Nothing like the simulated cyborganic olfactory lobes of a gypsy moth to help catch a few errant airborne molecules, Archimedes' primus inter pares self thought.
In the dim blue light of the dead nihilist's loft, he spun on a heel. The scent wasn't in his brain's chemical library, but Archimedes knew what it was. Just a matter of providing the law some proof.
A few dutiful calculations to account for Brownian drift later, and the scent's trail glimmered like Vegas in his mind's eye. Even after nearly a decade with the lobes, Archie couldn't help but smile. Give yourself a circuit web spun by a few illegal designer microbes and detective work seems like magic.
He punched neatly through the wall and pried it off. Now the scent of biodegradable gel was clear, and in front of him was all the evidence he needed to send the D.A. into spasms. You'd never think it -- take a desktop inkjet, clean out the ink cartridges, write up new print drivers and refurbish the feed mechanism, and you can spray three-dimensional arrays of cells onto gel layers. Organ printing -- Gutenberg squared.
Archimedes leaned over, dipped his forefinger in the gel and rubbed it against his thumb under his nose. Hmm... the metabolites smell right... liver. Those entrails forensics discovered splayed under the bullet train were the forgeries as he thought. The nihilist was still active. Embracing death never seems to mean your own, does it? Well, if you need help walking the walk...
The door in the foyer creaked open below, and to his surprise, without thinking Archie found his left hand grab the glass plate the liver was printed on and break it with two quiet taps, forming a clean sliver with a molecular edge. Ah, so you're the ninth brain, Archie thought. Welcome to consciousness. The black market oncologist triggered hyperbenign brain tumor growth a few months ago, but after the smart cancer metastasized down his spinal column two weeks ago its development had been hard to follow.
He looked admiringly at the glass knife his new reflexes carved. Hmm... it must have taken all the Jackie Chan memories with it. Was curious where they went. Archie smirked.
*
Hello all. Just sitting here, eating brie on crackers with some cut-up soppressatta, drinking my Ribena. The annoying thing from a blog p.o.v. about becoming a journalist whose stories are finally widely read is that I can't really share them here without violating my facade of pseudonymity. But I did write a story about organ printing a few weeks ago -- fascinating stuff. The researchers aren't printing kidneys or anything yet, but it's promising, and they really are just refurbishing off-the-shelf devices. If you dig hard enough, you can find some of the articles if you want -- just don't want to go outta my way to broadcast my identity is all. The above story's my way of mentioning it by slant. I'm no Actionhero, but it's not too shabby, I hope.
As an added treat, here are quotes that never made it into my original story, which I find a genuine shame, although perhaps for the best. See if you can figure out why these were cut.
It may be eventually possible to not only help face lethal shortages in organs for transplantation but to also invent new organs and even print humans.
"In the long term maybe this is the best solution for colonization of space," he said. Instead of launching spaceships where you freeze astronauts or have colonies live generations during travel, he explained “you could send a blueprint and a printer and cells and after 1,000 years of travel, build someone on the other end."
While the notion of printing a human would prove very difficult, “I could not say when, but eventually human printing will be a reality,” he said. “Imagine what will happen. You don’t need sex. You don’t need to have people of different gender. You don’t need to have pregnancy. You don’t need to raise children. You don’t need to die, you just change your body. The most important question will be of identity – who are you? I don’t know what kind of society it will be. It will be 1,000 times more complicated than cloning.”
There's a hilarious story about my romantic life I'll tell in the next entry (that is, as far as I know, completely unrelated to organ printing). Just wanted to get some creativity off my chest and post an update or two. Neat discovery -- ever since the Columbia disaster, journalists have discovered the primer I wrote on space journalism for graduate school and it's receiving national attention, pictures of me up and everything. Which is genuinely cool, although this is very far in terms of intention from how I hoped it'd find use.
Anyhow, I'm off to bed. Tomorrow's my last SCUBA lesson, and I want to get rest.
Best -- M.
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