Day: October 17, 2007

Print your own organs | COSMOS magazine

Body prints! Imagine reduplicating your own body from a high-resolution scan… well it’s not that unlikely given the advances happening in tissue engineering. According to this article: Print your own organs | COSMOS magazine it may be a reality 10-30 years from now.

May be.

Our understanding of the genetics of cell differentiation is advancing rapidly and may well allow our own stem cells to be arranged and activated into whole organs, including blood vessels and nerves. Eventually I think we’ll be able to “print” whole functioning bodies – with sufficient resolution, even reconstituting brains.

However what will the legal/ethical status be of people who are dead and yet still existing as records of their bodies/brains? Alive? Half-life? Or legally dead? Will a “reprint” be legally a person? Or merely a “meat puppet” of a dead-person?

I mean that as pejoratively as the word “sock puppet” is meant on the Web. What rights will reprinted dead people have? If any?

Carbon 14 Dating On Shroud of Turin Were Botched 2005

In 1988 the enigmatic Shroud of Turin was carbon-14 dated to the 13-14th Centuries, roughly its age if it was a fake. However in 2005 chemical evidence arose that suggested the sample area was in fact Medieval, but the rest of the Shroud wasn’t. The samples had come from a patch invisibly rewoven into the Shroud – over the centuries the Shroud has been nearly destroyed several times, with successful repairs masked as the real thing…

Carbon 14 Dating On Shroud of Turin Were Botched 2005

…as Dan Porter explains in this article the Shroud doesn’t show any of the breakdown products that’d be expected from a 700 year old artefact, but plenty that’d be expected from a cloth 2,000 years old.

I believe the Shroud captures the in-situ image of Jesus’s corpse – it may, or may not, tell us something about his putative resurrection too. And more probably it may explain just what the disciples viewed and handled in the wake of that event.