Biotech

A ler, hoje no ireportagem, o artigo de Jane E. Brody (N.Y. Times), reproduzido nas páginas 20-21.

A propósito deste tema, recomendo a leitura do artigo de Leon Kass, Ageless Bodies, Happy Souls (2003), onde a questão em debate é bem sintetizada, e muito bem discutida.

«With respect to the pursuit of “ageless bodies,” we can replace worn out parts, we can improve upon normal and healthy parts, and, more radically, we can try to retard or stop the entire process of biological senescence. With respect to the first biotechnical possibility, we must keep in mind organ transplantation and the prospect of regenerative medicine, where decayed tissues are replaced with new ones produced from stem cells. With respect to the second possibility, we must consider precise genetic modifications of muscles, through a single injection of a growth factor gene, that keep the transformed muscles whole, vigorous, and free of age-related decline (a practice already used to produce mighty mouse and super rat, and soon to be available for treatment of muscular dystrophy and muscle weakness in the elderly, but also of interest to football coaches and to the hordes of people who spend two hours daily pumping iron and sculpting their “abs”). And with respect to the last possibility, we need to keep in mind recent discoveries in the genetics of aging that have shown how the maximum lifespan of worms and flies can be increased two- and three-fold by alterations in a single gene, a gene now known to be present also in mammals.»