must undergo kidney transplant of a live organ, or stay on renal dialysis on
a regular basis. At present, a hemodialysis machine is about four feet high
and resembles a small heart lung machine with its tubing and rotating
cylinders. One wonders how small these machines will become in the
decades before none are needed. Will the artificial kidney ever be small
enough to be implanted? I wouldn’t bet against it. But as artificial organs
continue to get more minuscule, the march toward disease cure will get
more effective, obviating their use.
With the advent of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic
repeats (CRISPR) technology, there can be little doubt that every human
will have complete decoding of their DNA, and more importantly,
correction of genetic flaws. All diseases that have a genetic basis (genetic
susceptibilities or chromosomal damage) will become a thing of the past,
including rheumatoid arthritis, heart failure, and skin cancer.
Traumatic injuries (including spleen and liver lacerations, collapsed
lungs, fractured bones, and contused brain matter), seem like the one
constant that will always attend the human existence. Protective sporting
equipment and enhanced vehicular safety systems will likely decrease the
severity of injuries, but can trauma be eliminated in a science fiction
future? I would guess “no,” but could anyone have guessed a few decades
ago that tremors could be eliminated with a brain implant?
If life is the most sacred thing in the universe, and if the “right to life is
humanity’s most fundamental value,”^2 then death is a crime against
humanity. The stakes in health care will become even larger once we start
to lengthen humankind’s days, and if we are fated to live for hundreds of
years, will we all become terrified of trauma and a senseless death? It’s
one thing to be in a car accident and suffer an untimely death in middle
age, it’s quite another when a forty-year-old is in the same car accident
and is expecting to live another several centuries. We could actually end
up fearing death more.
Will we ever conquer our bacterial foes? The microbial warriors may be
our most formidable challenge, but once we truly harness the power of
genetic manipulation, how can we wager that we won’t eliminate the
threat? Perhaps a bigger threat to humanity will be an extraterrestrial
microbe brought back from an interplanetary spaceship that has evolved
over billions of years on another planet. Call me crazy.