Somehow, this particular argument against opt-out organ donation doesn't sway me in the least. I can think of a few ones that would, but this sanctity-of-the-body business just doesn't connect with me. I'm left wondering how much of that is just cultural or personal difference, and how much is because I don't have a doctor's understanding of the full ramifications of losing sight of that sanctity.
What are the technical obstacles to growing artificial organs outside the body, perhaps from the patient's own cells so rejection isn't an issue?
Are artificial organs effectively impossible due to some law of biology or design of the human body? Is it so far-fetched that nobody's funding it? Or if it's being worked on, what's the time-frame -- will we see this in 100 years, 30 years, 10 years or 3 years?
This is a well-written essay, and I agree with the ethical concerns raised in the last section. The one thing I don’t understand, though, is the author’s opposition to opt-out organ donation upon death. This does not involve making “a well person sick to make a sick person well” as the author put it, which is the source of the other ethical concerns. It seems out of place.
Eww. I suspect that in the computer age the enduring value of dissecting dead bodies is that it's even more repulsive than cutting open live bodies (which trainee medics will have to do later on).
I had no especial antipathy to the cadaver lab in med school. A preserved cadaver holds very little relationship to a real body, outside of the relationships of anatomical landmarks. I -wish- we had had been able to study from prosections.
But digital cadavers completely fail to capture the three dimensional relationship of the components of a body. I have probably every atlas on the market, paper and digital, and I still occasionally go to our affiliated school’s lab to interrogate a body when I need a refresher.
There is nothing even vaguely approaching a replacement yet, though I’ve been hearing about how we can replace real dissections with simulations for literally decades. I do wish folks who’ve never had to navigate the internal landscape of a body would stop offering their opinions on how one should learn it.
This does seem counterproductive to me as well. I very much scare away from the idea of learning from cadavers myself. But that makes me all the more appreciative of the people who do. If it weren’t for modern medicine I would be crippled or dead. The benefits heavily outweigh the costs.
My gut (non expert) feeling is that when 3D printing can be indistinguishable from natural, and quality assurance can make it reliably indistinguishable, we won’t need humans digging around inside us.
How long that takes I would only embarrass myself by guessing.
A benefit of cadaver disection is the range of anomalies like the penile implant, or finding hair and teeth in a random abdominal nook. Tough to imagine this benefit in 3D printed versions.
There's something about laying hands on flesh that's important. As a medical student at a school that does not practice dissection, I feel envious of my grandfather who learnt his anatomy using a scalpel. We have labs with prosected cadavers, but that leaves much to be wanted.
This technology is insufficiently advanced and does not substitute dead bodies. In fact, I used these digital bodies when I took anatomy and it wasn't enough. Drawn atlases and physical models just weren't real enough for me. Gray's absurdly detailed textual descriptions of the human body only helped me understand things better after I had already memorized the anatomy being discussed.
The best way to learn, at least for me, was in practice. During the year that I took anatomy, I would go to the laboratory almost every single day and spend all day there going over the structures of the human body over a hundred times. I needed to physically manipulate the pieces in order to understand them.
