I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Organs Zone. It has scientists studying health and disease in various parts of our bodies. Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
We’re still in the early days, but we are beginning to create very usable prosthetic limbs that people can control using other muscles. We are learning more and more about how messages travel from the brain and how signaling between the brain and body works. This means that with some more advances in technology, we should be able to create working artificial hands, limbs etc.
As far as replacing the whole body, we’ve got a pretty long way to go. We have only just managed to create artificial blood that we can use for emergency transfusions, but it isn’t as good as the real thing. We have kidney dialysis machines that can do some of the work of a real kidney, but they’re about the size of a fridge. Heart-lung machines can keep people alive without a heart or lungs for a few hours during heart transplant surgery but they can’t be moved around and the blood cells are damaged more and more the longer the machine is used. As simple as it seems, the human body is incredibly complicated and does its job so incredibly well. It will be a long time before we can replace it all.
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Well said Carina!
The complexity of the human body still baffles us to this day. As technology advances, so do prosthetics; so it’s possible. Just not sure if it’d happen in our lifetime (!)
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Great answer, Carina!
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Well put Carina!
Transhumanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism is the collective term for the culture for trying to go beyond our physical bodies and creating something more powerful with technology- thereby transcending being humans!
Lots of research and some pretty wild ideas too- but a very interesting emerging area of research!
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