We have reached a point in our technology where we now have a chance to improve the human life span and eliminate some of the suffering. I am not talking about the extension of human life in most cases, although by curing disease and such, this might be a direct result. There are all sorts of pills on the market that supposedly promise to lengthen one's life, but this remains an unfulfilled promise. I don't think that you can read a magazine, except About Facts of course, that doesn't carry an advertisement for these things. In print magazines they usually appear in the back pages. We know that some things are good for you however, but there is no guarantee that these things will do anything for any individual person. I am talking about antioxidants, certain vitamins and things like fish oil. It is like saying that you should take a cholesterol lowering drug and then finding out that a lot of people are dying that have low cholesterol, as they are.

The most promising areas for relief of suffering and curing diseases lie in nano engineering, rebuilding organs, growing organs and genetics. There are many hard working scientists and bioengineers around the world that are discovering incredible techniques for assuring us of a better and healthier life. One of the goals of science for about the past twenty years or so, is to make life better for the average person in any way it can. If scientists happen to discover something that will increase our life span, so be it. This is only the goal of a small percentage of the scientific community. We are seeing micro mechanics and biology joining together. If we trace this effort back to ancient times we see people trying different herbs and plants in an attempt to cure disease and as a matter of fact, the American Indians are responsible for many different types of plant derived medicines that we use today. I remember when a medicine man was interviewed about this on television. He was asked how the Indians were able to discover so many helpful drugs. He replied that they would give a medicine to a sick person and if he died, it didn't work. In others it was trial and error.

One of the things that seems to be right on the verge of becoming used, is a technique to refurbish some muscles and organs. It is quite an interesting procedure and has already worked in mice. Picture someone that needs a heart transplant, because their heart is running down and will fail them in the future for any one of a dozen reasons. Scientists are talking about removing the heart, using a bleach type substance to strip away everything except the structure and then using the cells from that person to let the heart rebuild itself. They are then able to get it to beat again and the heart won't be rejected because it was rebuilt by the cells from the body that it is going into. While this technique is very promising, it is felt that it will take about ten years before it can be used on humans. This will have the effect of decreasing the list of people waiting for hearts, maybe to the point where there will not be a wait or the wait will be very short. The only people that will need heart transplants will be those whose hearts are in such bad shape that they can't even be rebuilt.

Growing organs, hearts and tissue from cells is another promising area. Recently a scientist discovered that he could take an ordinary cell and convert it to the type of cell that would be needed for a particular job. No longer are stem cells needed for this task, according to him. These cells can be converted to grow organs, hearts, skin and who knows what else? The beauty part is that they will not be rejected when inserted back into the body, since the person that needed the organ, heart, skin etc. is the same person who donated the cells. Will we all have a bank of spare parts someday like a car dealer has for the autos he sells? This is not such a far off thought and not as impractical as it sounds. It would be like having an insurance policy. You could pay a premium to a company that would store these parts for you until they were needed.

Nanites have been talked about for years and are the stuff of many different science fiction stories. They are also called nanobots, nanoagents and nanorobots. So what exactly are these things? I guess that everybody knows that science is developing smaller and smaller microscopic machines. These can be so small that they are on the atomic scale. The idea is to create tiny machines in this size range that could move through the human body, repairing things without hurting us. An example of this would be tiny machines that would destroy cancer cells. The machines would simply 'eat them'. I am not saying eat them in the literal sense. They might grab them and then leave the body somehow, thus taking these deadly cells with them. Who knows, maybe in the future we won't even require things like CAT scans and such to discover cancer. Things might be a lot simpler. We could just be injected with nanites once a year and they would go through our bodies looking for and destroying cancer cells and then harmlessly passing out. The idea is to get them to work as a team.

Genetics is another field that has really been advancing lately. The Human Genome Project was finished in 2003. The target of the project was to identify all the approximately 25,000 genes in human DNA. The project is finished now, but the analysis of the data will go on for many more years. The project also had other goals and they were to determine the sequences of the three billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA, get the information to a database, develop tools to analyze this data and transfer related technologies to the private sector. They also want to address the ethical, legal and social issues that may arise from the project. Genetics is a field that may produce many beneficial results. There are many people that have genetic related problems that might be able to be avoided in the future by altering the genes and DNA in infants. Some even think that genetics might hold the key to a longer life for all of us.

I haven't even mentioned the new machines that are coming out that will increase the chances of early detection of disease using much less radiation, where a test will be much cheaper. Samsung is coming out with a machine that will replace several machines and only require you to take one diagnostic test that has less radiation than any ONE of the several machines that it replaces. We are on the road to a much healthier human race and in a decade or two we should be reaping the benefits of all these advances.