LIFESCIENCE: Re: LIFESCI: Death Science

[Eugene Thacker <maldoror@eden.rutgers.edu>]

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ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL 99
LIFESCIENCE
Linz, Austria, September 04 - 09
http://www.aec.at/lifescience
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Sean Cubitt wrote:
>
> In this way death helps provide life sciences with their conception of
> time, a double conception. As end, death gives a life the linear structure
> of a narrative, with an Aristotelian beginning, middle and end. Without
> death, an individual life has no structure. 
>
>Is there a way in which, especially, we can
> remove from death the stigma of finality, and give back to cultural life an
> ecological  understanding of death's necessity, its place as a mid-point
> rather than an end? 

Or, another question which this brings up is asking how the lifesciences
are already dealing w/ this question, not so much through theoretical
discussion as through practical research & clinical trials. For example:
- Biotech researchers are currently doing work on "telomeres" which are
the ends of chromosomes, which naturally degrade over time, and which
scientists believe are centrally responsible for natural cell
degradation (which means, on a macro-scale, the natural degradation of
the biological body itself). The researchers make no effort to hide the
fact that there is, behind this, a quest for "immortal cells" thru
cellular engineering. This is not Moravec's dream of extropianism, nor
Chardin's noosphere, but a re-programming of the body on the cellular
level - immortality _within_ the body.
- One of the big so-called promises of "tissue engineering" is that, one
day, medicine will be able to simply regenerate tissues, organs, and
even entire limbs by re-programming cells to grow and differentiate a
particular way in the lab. This is already being selectively implemented
for skin (e.g., burn victims, body ulcers) & several companies have
patented "off-the-shelf" products (Organogenesis). Slightly different,
this is a regenerative body, which, like certain reptiles, simply
regenerates or grows back whatever is damaged. It's not clear whether
these examples are simply another form of transcendence, another step in
the progress of Western technological biomedicine, or a fantasy about
having a body that is not a body (terminal regenerative health without
the "messy" markers of mortality or disease).

eugene

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