The Human Hybrid

The Human Hybrid

I guess you never compared a car or airplane to a human body. Neither did I until the other day. Well then a number of people I know started having strokes. Mini, mild, medium strokes seem to be the latest fad in how to get sick. Nobody knows it’s going to happen until after the fact, but you sure get a lot of attention afterwards. One of the people I know has had a number of mini strokes over the last ten or fifteen years without ever even knowing it. But it shows up in the MRI tests he had to do. It seems he wasn’t as invincible as he’d thought.

What does all this have to do with cars? Well, hybrids, that’s what. It’s just a comparison of sorts. I mean, you got these electric cars these days that have got everything hooked up from a GPS system to gauges that give notice when the oil is low and even automatic parking for heaven’s sakes. And it’s all run off a two hundred forty-dollar computer. The only fly in the ointment is the battery. You can only go so far or so fast until you have to charge the blamed thing up again.

Well, that’s the principle. It just happens that the human body already has it’s own operating system: that is to say, it runs all the time. You might say the heart would provide the service of an alternator. In other words, it’s charged up all the time. No need to plug yourself in anywhere. You’re body is always charged up. And the wiring is pretty good too. But sometimes there are surges causing malfunctions or even short circuits from time to time.

What’s needed is a regulator to override such surges like the cause of a stroke or a heart attack. That would be good. You could even install an inhibitor to dull the senses when you have a craving for chocolate or booze.

My God! The possibilities are endless. Just think, with the miniaturization of electronics, it would be possible to implant one of these little regulators into the body of an infant at birth and it would immediately be in control of ensuring that the human wiring is adjusted in conformity of what was originally intended. Thus one would expect to live a normal long and healthy life without the worry of illness, unhealthy cravings or behaviors during the course of it.

Well, you could call this tinkering with the human system – genetic modification, as it were. I don’t think so. I think in fact that the opposite is the case. It’s un-tinkering of the bad habits that civilization has foisted upon us, a correction of all those bad habits to a state of perfection that was the norm in the days before we became civilized.

Just think what this little regulator would do. The medical profession would no longer be necessary. Neither would the drug companies. The whole food industry would adjust itself to healthy eating. And if we were inclined to become peaceful, the arms business would disappear. Imagine that. A little gadget would roll us back five to ten thousand years, and ahead by who knows how much.

It’s not as though nobody has never thought of this before. They have indeed. For a long time people have been tinkering with the electricity of the brain. In fact, one fellow even drew a schematic of the basic wiring system in the brain. But all these people were project specific. Some were concerned with Parkinson’s disease, others with Alzheimer’s, and so on. Nobody has worked on an overall fixer upper gadget though, and that’s what’s needed. At least that’s how it looks from up here on the top shelf.

Just sayin’.