Everyone is familiar with the story of Frankenstein. When the story came out it had an effect on people. People began to believe there was a chance dead people could be revived using electricity and some sideshows would haul around corpses and hook them up to batteries, causing the muscles to contract which in turn caused the corpses to move, frightening people. Well those days are gone forever, thank goodness, but the thought of reviving dead people still exists. I am not talking about taking a rotting corpse and reviving it, I am talking about bringing brain dead people back to life. These are people who are only breathing, because a machine is keeping them alive. A biotech company in the United States was granted permission to recruit 20 brain dead people to test if their central nervous systems can be brought back to life. While this is not quite the same thing as Frankenstein, it is a huge step if it works. The medical team thinks stem cells may be the answer. We are finding out stem cells are the new miracle “drug” of the 21st century. We know they have many uses and now the most incredible one might be reviving the brain dead. Only time will tell.

Our bodies are not as cut and dry as one would think. They are a lot more miraculous than we have ever believed. It is turning out the cells in our bodies are not set in stone and can be manipulated to change into other cells and even other things. An example of what I am talking about was just accomplished by scientists in Spain. They managed to take ordinary skin cells and turn them into germ cells. One might ask why this is important and that is a valid question. Germ cells can be developed into sperm cells and maybe eliminate the need for donated sperm or even eggs to conceive. The couple would use the man’s skin cells instead for the creation of sperm. Along with this is progress which is being made in artificial wombs. Japanese scientists have been able to maintain goat fetuses for weeks in one which contained amniotic fluid and progress is being made on creating permanent wombs which would be able to maintain a fetus for the entire period. Will we be at a point someday where a skin sample is taken from each one of a couple, turned into sperm and eggs and inserted into an artificial womb which will grow a baby to full term without the mother ever having to carry it inside her?

Scientists are finding out our moods are often influenced by light. The amount of concentration we can muster is also influenced in the same way. Research has been conducted to find out what type of light is more conducive to increasing academic performance and it turns out it is cool light. If we want to relax yellow or warm light is the most relaxing. Before artificial light much of the light humans were in was from the sun. Yes there were candles and lamps, but most people either couldn’t afford such luxuries or just went to bed when it got dark. If you were a surf or peasant the choice might have been buying a candle or eating.

Humans have a problem and it is a big one. We get sick and hurt and sometimes need an emergency operation. In this country over 3,000,000 people have emergency surgery every year. Aside from the cost of such surgery soaring out of control there are seven types of surgery which are the most dangerous and cause the most deaths. Prior to this study it was not known about these surgeries, because so many different types are carried out each year, but thanks to the study we have been given data on the most dangerous ones. Seven surgeries account for about 80 percent of all emergency operations. They are not only the most dangerous operations, but also the most expensive. They are mostly related to the organs of the digestive system and are removing part of the colon, small-bowel resection, removing the gallbladder, operations related to peptic ulcer disease, removing abdominal adhesions, appendectomy and other operations to open the abdomen.

I hate to have to tell people this, but the third leading cause of death in the United States is medical errors. Most of us tend to accept the word of a doctor without question, but if we go to buy a car we are hesitant to believe much of what the sales person tells us. What is more important to us? This is why second opinions are so important just as it is very important to make sure our doctors have good reputations. Medical errors in hospitals are common and are not always caused by doctors. Every year about 251,000 people die from medical errors and that is more than from strokes, accidents and respiratory disease. A professor of surgery added that the category includes everything from bad doctors to systemic issues such as a communication breakdown when patients are handed off from one department to another.

Being paralyzed may not be a lifelong condition anymore. For the very first time in history medical researchers restored the finger movement for a paralyzed man. The researchers are hoping in the future they might be able to restore movement in the limbs of paralyzed people all over the world. When we look at the amount of paralyzed people we realize in is an epidemic. In the United States alone a study completed in 2009 stated there were 5.6 million people who were paralyzed to some extent. This means that somewhere around one person in every fifty is paralyzed to some extent. When researchers saw these numbers they were surprised, because no one believed there were so many.

A new study has come out pertaining to the HIV virus. Unfortunately it shows a promising technique for fighting HIV called CRISPR not only doesn’t work, but it seem to make the virus stronger. CRISPR is a therapy which involved editing genes.