Making new lifeforms in utero is easy in the 22nd century. Illegal, but easy. How do you change an adult human being into something else?
Well, take a lesson from the caterpillar and butterfly. Put the person in a chrysalis, have them turn into a pupa. It’s in the genes of the caterpillar; we can borrow that for use in humans. Then tweak the body any way you like. Bone can turn into osteoplasts and undergo resorption. The organs turn into a stem cell soup, then re-emerge into something new. What breaks out of the chrysalis doesn’t have to look like what went in.
But I think Fumiaki explains it best in his own exuberant style. He better; I can’t fit much more exposition on this page. 🙂
↓ Transcript
Fumiaki: There, see? The fluoroscope shows that Ulrich is handsome too. In stage one, he was given a preparatory virus...which encoded the ability to enter stage two; a chrysalis state. Within this life support pod, the body becomes a living soup. Only the brain remains undifferentiated.
Jacob: For God's sake, why?
Fumiaki: Because in this state, I can completely rewrite the patient's DNA. I can reverse aging! Add organs! Invent new forms! Perform gross anatomical changes! I offer nothing less than complete morphological freedom!
Girii: Jacob, you promised!
Jacob: Nngh-- I...he...
Fumiaki: Ha -- hahaha! But Jacob, this is the natural response to the Genocide Project...
Jacob: For God's sake, why?
Fumiaki: Because in this state, I can completely rewrite the patient's DNA. I can reverse aging! Add organs! Invent new forms! Perform gross anatomical changes! I offer nothing less than complete morphological freedom!
Girii: Jacob, you promised!
Jacob: Nngh-- I...he...
Fumiaki: Ha -- hahaha! But Jacob, this is the natural response to the Genocide Project...
That is both horrifying and ingenious! I’d still worry about an autoimmune response. The new form’s immune system would have to be tolerant of both the original DNA from the nervous system and the new form’s potentially very different DNA..
We actually have found a partial solution to that for kidney transplants already. Turns out if you mostly kill off the immune system, when it grows back it’ll be okay with the new organ. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21014-kidney-recipients-freed-from-lifelong-drugs.html#.U0anlFeAR_I
Love the comic! But as a biology geek, I don’t think that’s how caterpillar/butterfly metamorphosis works (which doesn’t detract from the story – I’m willing to suspend disbelief). A caterpillar actually contains within itself what is essentially an embryonic butterfly. The surrounding caterpillar body and its compulsive feeding behavior is really just a way to hoard nutrients for that embryo. When there is enough, it pupates, and during the process the outer caterpillar is consumed by the growing inner butterfly.
At least that’s what they taught me as an undergrad. Any entomologists or lepidopterists who want to weigh in?
The classic “Why!?” and “Because its freaking awesome” response in obsessive scientists. Love it!
Azeldan — nope, the caterpillar transforms into the butterfly, with new organs appearing and some old caterpillar structures being reabsorbed. Here’s some CT scans of the process.
As for the immune system, it shouldn’t be a consideration. The preparatory virus is cloaked, and alters the patient’s DNA; at that point you’re able to tell the immune system what to do. We do remember the discussion on viral protein cloaks, don’t we? Technology defeated the immune system way back in the 1990s.
Cool link! I guess either my information was out-of-date, or the professor who taught me that was a hack. 😛
Getting there:
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/04/10/in-medical-first-scientists-implant-lab-grown-vaginas-in-human-patients
Still 75% have complications…
Who’s he fooling? He’s been melting and remorphing brains a-plenty.
So, how long’s his waiting list?
Bored billionairesses who want eagle wings,
guys who want ‘horse bits’,
cosplayers who want fox tails, viper fangs, tiger stripes,
wannabe mermaids, werewolves, sphinxes,
I bet the Doc’s books have no red.
Cheers for those links and Remus, but could you clarify one last thing? Are you suggesting that one or other set of organs are cloaked rather than adjusting an immune system to accept a kind of symbiosis?
Also Darls, forget horse bits. People are probably queuing up for the elephant’s prehensile ability with the same organ.
… is he related to a certain “Desty Nova”?
Because I get the same vibe from both of them and that is NOT a good thing O.o
I like this. It’s the best of science fiction inventions, something that, while incredible and currently impossible, is still scientifically plausible.
After all, we grew from a ball of undifferentiated cells. It’s not too implausible to develop a way to send the body back to that malleable state for a few improvements.
Of course, if it doesn’t affect the brain, it can’t stop the gradual decline of mental function that humans suffer, which would explain a lot about Doctor Fukami’s eccentricity.
Although technically, in the biological sense of the word, the brain seems to be the only organ that remains DIFFERENTIATED, as in, not made of stem cells. Unchanged would perhaps be a more accurate time, but I know what it means, I’m just being pedantic.
A protein cloak makes a virus invisible to the immune system. When tested on mice who had been immunized against mousepox, an IL-4 cloaked mousepox killed 100% of the immunized mice, and 50% of the mice who received supportive treatment. It doesn’t do anything to organs, it just makes viruses impossible to defend against. And once you use a cloaked gene therapy virus to change a patient’s DNA, you can make the immune system do whatever you want it to.
That’s my theory, anyway. 🙂 (The mousepox and protein cloak is real; the gene therapy bits are speculative.)
LOL, exactly what Jake was recruited to stop. It’s the opposite political ideology! And of course no matter how logical it is for an old man to cure old age, the good Doctor probably decided “hey if I can go that far… why not a little more?”. 😉