Imagine if we could cure medical problems at the atomic level versus trying to fix them with traditional medicines.

SnausagesinaBlanket@lemmy.world to Showerthoughts@lemmy.world – 63 points –

Kind of like defragging a hard drive, but instead it realigns all your molecules into a perfect sequence so all disease and defects are instantly eradicated.

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so like, star trek?

"your molecules" is kind of a grey area. i thought i read something about the dna content in humans being mostly bacterial. ie. by weight, theres more bacteria dna inside you than human dna.

I’ve thought about this for teeth.

Man, do you know how freaking cool it would be to have a little microscopic robot that could go into your mouth and really do a deep clean of your teeth and gums? All the little plaque and small bits of excess food left behind, even after brushing and flossing would be next to zero.

Like you go through a teleporter like in The Fly and come out sans junk? I’m down! … (5-10 years after it’s first released.)

Like you go through a teleporter like in The Fly and come out sans junk?

Yes basically!

Woah woah woah, I ain't gettin' in this contraption of yours if I'm leaving it without MY JUNK!

And make everyone attractive so celebs and influencers are all but forgotten.

Most of our medical problems are at the macro level and multifaceted. Some are encoded at the genetic level and inherited. Genetic therapy is being worked on. It is a fact of Life that our body's mechanisms will wear out and eventually cease to work. The only cells that don't die are...cancer cells.

Its a cool idea that I've heard other people express. Like star trek teleporters in sci fi, and the beginnings of it in real life with CRISPR and other gene editing technologies.

Having encountered a few people myself, I'm inclined to think they'll turn it into one or another weapon of mass destruction and try to use it to cease control of other ppl/resources instead

That was the theme of the medical machines in Elysium. They just kinda removed all the defects and bad parts from your body. Of course it was reserved only for the ultra-rich up on the space station. Sigh.

“Looks like your iron has too many neutrons. We’ll get that fixed up for you”

Probably cause eugenics

You're getting downvoted because noble people aren't seeing how closely related "fixing defects" and "eliminating undesirables" due to a loose definition of "defect". Human traits are on sliding scales. Is drawfism a defect? If yes, then how short is too short? There is overlap between the tallest dwarfs and the shortest non-dwarfs. We talk about autism being a spectrum - so where on the scale does that qualify for genetic modification? Who gets to decide these limits? To say it'd be up to the individual could then open it the other way and allow for unethical modification beyond natural traits.

I'm not trying to see cancer deletion tech leads straight to nazis, just that these are real ethical debates that are already raking place. We have the architecture of embryo design in place