Someone Tell Me Whose Bio-Punk Novel This World Is Turning Out to Be From, Please

Because, you know what, the idea that the best way to get stem cells into the brain might be by snorting them is just plan messed up.

Hat tip: Futurismic

27 Comments on “Someone Tell Me Whose Bio-Punk Novel This World Is Turning Out to Be From, Please”

  1. I can just see the Doonesbury strip;

    Honey: Duke, is that cocaine you’re snorting?

    Duke: (Floating upside down ala Airplane) Of course not! Don’t talk nonsense!

    Honey: It’s just that I….

    Duke: It’s stemcells extracted from the fat of Hunter S. Thompson.

  2. “No, really, officers. It’s my chemo. I just got lipo’d and they made stem cells from it for my schizophrenia.”

    [Voice in head taking over]: Don’t listen to him, man. He’s already messed all of us up after they legalized medical pot.

  3. Officer, put down that sharpened stake. I’m only eating these still-hot human brains in an effort to inject neural stem cells into my own brain, for purely bio-medical reasons. Be grateful that I am not taking them in anally.

  4. Doctor Memory @ #2 beat me to it. That’s got Transmetropolitan written all over it, inside it, around it, in the general vicinity of it, and even on the memory of it.

  5. Rudy Rucker only ingests the brains of Mathematical Logicians, especially those obsessed with Infinity. Purely to enhance his research and university teaching, of course. I say this with the utmost respect. Even though I know who bit him in Göttingen, and also granted undead immortality to the great Emmy Noether. Long story. Can’t tell it properly without equations. Or maybe gnarly fractal graphics.

  6. Well, the membrane that contains the smell nerves are a direct path from inside the nose to the brain.

    That’s how people get Primary amoebic meningoencephalitis. (Well, that and swimming in dirty fresh water.) As far as I know, this (the meningoencephalitis) is still ~97% fatal. (Per a Wikipedia article)

    Great way to get microscopic aliens inside.. provided they don’t cause a fatal infection.

  7. Actually this is directly out of William Gibson’s “Idoru”. The part where Colin Laney is digging up dirt on various celebrities for Slitscan and discovers somebody snorting proscribed fetal tissue.

    I remember this because the part about it being ‘proscribed’ made me think, “um. You mean there’s another kind?!”

  8. The applicator was strictly for tyros; the jaded cognoscenti balanced the implant on the tip of their little finger, and daintily poked it up the nostril of their choice. The implant burrowed into the brain, sent out a swarm of nanomachines to explore, and forge links with, the relevant neural systems, and then went into active mode for the predetermined time …

    “Axiomatic”, Interzone #41, November 1990.

    Before going to bed, I spray the vial’s contents into my right nostril, and a heavily modified version of Endamoeba histolytica — the protozoans responsible for amoebic meningitis, amongst other delights — carry their burden of nanomachines into my brain.

    Quarantine, Century/Legend, London, 1992.

  9. It’s been pointed out already, but this is in common use now for several pharmaceutical therapies. Probably the most likely-encountered is insulin, which (in addition to the well-known glycemic effects) we recently showed to be an obligatory component of hippocampal memory processes – one of the reasons, and perhaps the main one, why type 2 diabetes is associated with impaired cognitive function is reduced brain insulin signalling – and a potent modulator of cerebral metabolism.

    Yeah, it *is* my research field. Why do you ask? :)

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  11. This post wins the internetz for funnest comments.

    Also: holy crap, Greg Egan reads Whatever! ::bowdown::

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