Day: October 12, 2004

If only to ensure that Face/Off does not become a standard teaching tool in our nation’s hospitals, I agree that we should tread carefully here:

Now we are confronting the imminent possibility that human faces will be transplanted. This month in The American Journal of Bioethics, a team of transplant surgeons at the University of Louisville announced their intention to pursue the transplantation of faces. Last year, a task force at the Royal College of Surgeons of England cautioned against them.

There’s also this:

How many people can we reasonably expect to give up one of their – or their loved one’s – most symbolic body parts? Many funerals call for open caskets, and people typically request that the undertaker preserve the face. Before we find face donors, we may first have to reform our death rituals to ease the discomfort that removing faces will generate.

We already keep donors’ names confidential in order to ensure that their families and the transplant recipients never actually cross paths. Can you imagine a world where you could see someone walking around with a loved one’s face, even after that person has died?

When deep space exploration ramps up, it’ll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks. – Fight Club

From The New York Times comes this story about the marketing of space:

“If we can connect the desire of space with the desire of private companies to have their brand associated with heroes and speed and technology, everybody wins,” [Peter H. Diamandis, the founder of the X Prize Foundation,] said.

I’m not so sure he’s wrong. I think it’s vitally important that we go to the stars, and somebody has got to foot the bill.

On the other hand, I’d sort of hate for our first ambassadors to another planet to be McDonald’s.