Luria's work suggested that the act of recovering one's own story was itself healing. He called the sort of writing he had done in The Mind of a Mnemonist and The Man With a Shattered World "romantic science." The two books had a profound impact on Sacks. They suggested a new form of writing that combined the clinical precision of 20th-century neurology with both the humane observations of the great Victorian physicians and the explorations of the psyche that Freud undertook in his own case histories.
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Infant rats are being decapitated and their heads grafted onto the thighs of adults by researchers in Japan.
If kept cool while the blood flow is stopped, a transplanted brain can develop as normal for at least three weeks, and the mouth of the head will move, as if it is trying to drink milk, the team reports.
The grafted heads could be "excellent models" for investigating brain function in human babies after periods of no blood flow, known as ischemia, they claim.
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Arguing against patenting the Harvard cancer mouse, federal lawyers warned that such a move could send Canada down a slippery slope toward patenting human beings.
"If you start treating a living organism as a mere composition of matter, there's nothing to stop us from treating all life forms in that way," said Graham Garton, representing the Commissioner of Patents.
"The danger is that we treat everyone and everything like a product."
{notice how these satanic horrors are always followed immediately by the wonderful healing possibilities they lead toward. and that's the end of the debate. "we're draining the blood out of third-world children, but it's ok, because that blood can potentially be used to save the lives of Americans", or no, everyone, the lives of everyone, the lives of everyone else. everyone but the rats in the cages, the dogs in the cages, the monkeys in the cages, the chimpanzees in the cages, the cats the rabbits, the prisoners, the small brown men and women and their children in the shrinking cage of the green world. and of course it's a mark of strength the way the young men can absorb this nightmare image without flinching, so brave, and just get past it and go on because of course we have to go on, we need to do this we have to do this there is no other way now. we need the images of infant rat heads speaking from the legs of their elders, making nursing movements before they die, before their hosts die, before their necks are snapped by 'research assistants', and it's only a first step, soon we'll be able to graft the brains and skulls of the decrepit rich to the bodies of the, to the serial bodies of the, to serial bodies of the cloned young. bodies no one owns but the laboratories because they were created in laboratories. they're not really people. so it's not wrong.}
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{there's the debate all lined out except for one other proposition. I had this vision thing once, it was around the time of Mel Gibson's Braveheart. I never saw that but it was in the air, and my genes have a strong Scots/Gaelic component. it was a vignette. me and a bunch of highland lads were moving through the steep hills, at war or fighting, coming back from a skirmish of some kind, everything still very much in conflict, not over yet, trees and brush, and rocks and steep hills and we were headed back to where we lived which was like a village only not maybe quite that big and as we came over this ridge above where we lived it kind of opened out down below where the little huts of our families were and here comes the enemy fierce and strong and tied to their shields as they advance to meet us are the youngest of our children, screaming in fear.
so. fight that. move through that moment in a way that doesn't lessen you. doesn't make you small. come on do it. because that's what I'm talking about here. they stand there with quadraplegics lashed to their shields with all kinds of innocent suffering held out in front of them, and that's supposed to be the whole debate, whether it's ok to do these satanic experiments if it's going to have a therapeutic benefit for these innocent suffering people. and not a goddamned word about the rest of it. the prospect of human slime like the men who currently run the world attaining physical immortality through this same research? well hey, that's a mere by-product of our attempts to bring healing to the poor invalids. that's why the rest of the 'health care' profession is so filled with charitable works, and why 'health care' itself is truly a right, and that's why... well I'm working on not giving in to the bitter temptation of sarcasm anymore.}
