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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • Yeah, or if it’s at all targeted, or affects the entire mouth. If they can get a missing tooth or two to regrow, that would help a lot of people. If you start getting teeth sprouting up everywhere that need to be surgically removed, that would be a lot less universally applicable.

    Same for whether it only works once, or if it develops new buds. Gotta say, it would be nice to make it to grave with a full set of teeth, since people losing their teeth has a huge impact on their quality of life.


  • While that’s true, this isn’t a specific engineering problem. You need to grab a single cell from each relevant subcluster of neurons in the spinal cord, spatially record the exact positioning, send it off to have RNA seq. done, sample all of the subclusters of the target area, spatially record exact positioning, send it off to have RNA seq done, resample based off of RNA seq data, begin axon regrowth of a single subcluster, and then repeat after every growth cycle to ensure the targeting is holding.

    You can improve RNA sequencing machines to reduce runtime, improve spatial tracking to make it easier to keep track of the anatomy, but without sci-fi advances in implant technology you can’t get around the sheer amount of procedural time requiring MD-PhDs and post docs to be involved in every visit.

    One of the issues with medical technology is that we know far more about how the human body operates than we can control, so compared to biological structures our manipulation of biology at the cell specific level is relatively crude. I’m not saying tech won’t catch up, but it’s going to be ruinously involved for a very long time.




  • The difference though is that this treatment would require hundreds of hours of ongoing work from medical professionals for each treatment. What they did was use single cell RNA sequencing to determine which subpopulations of cells are supposed to connect and where, before stimulating cell growth and guiding each RNA mapped subpopulation to where it’s roughly supposed to go. That’s one thing for anatomically complete sub-millimeter spinal cord injuries in mice, but a massive endeavor for human spinal cords.

    If you’ve seen the bioengineered cancer treatments where researchers grow immune cells to target a single individual’s tumor, the amount of specialized work that goes into that pales to what current technology would require for this sort of spinal regeneration, and that’s for relatively simple small scale lesions. Multiple lesions or large scale cell death could result in attempting to selectively guide millions of microscopic axons in neat clusters for over a foot.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if insurance companies refused to pay for cell regrowth, and instead went for implants that are comparatively much simpler to install and modify in brain-computer interfaces that skip over the damage. This is a great advancement and does open the door for recovering from spinal cord damage, but this is one of those treatments that people are going to get because they need to fill FDA trials and won’t charge, or because the patient is filthy rich.





  • Well, I mean we kinda are, capitalism and all that. There are thousands of authors of Patreon, Kofi, and the like that you can pay to write you the fanfiction you want. Further, if you don’t know the provenance of a fanfic, how do you tell which ones are the copyright violation? The only way to do so is if you have records of its birth, especially as generative AI improves.

    I’m not blind to the plight of creators here, but isn’t the issue that a machine can, in theory, out compete the authors at their own style? If a random human can write Stephen King’s style better than Stephen King, it’s forgiven because that took time, effort, and talent, where a machine doing it alarms us. No author has ever been sued because they read a book and were influenced in their writing, unless they outright plagiarized without attributing. I just think that there needs to be a significant frame shift, since artificially limiting generative AI to protect the current business model instead of allowing it to reshape how people produce and consume media isn’t realistic. The issue is figuring out how creators are still compensated for their work.

    People are already building small generative AI projects, so there’s no containing it, and it’s only going to grow.