From:	justinf@****.caltech.edu (Justin Fang)
Subject:	Re: New plot
Date:	Mon, 18 Mar 1996 23:38:23 -0800 (PST)

Mike Broadwater writes:
> >Don't remember what book it was - but one of the sourcebooks mentions that
> >growing a human isn't possible with the level of tech availible. They
> >mention they can grow the body but it won't have the spark of life.

> >I'll try and find the ref - I though it was in Shadowtech, but I couldn't
> >find That leaves - Cybertechnologies, Tir Tairngire (lost of loose bits of
> >info) and a few other books.

> No, I believe it was ShadowTech. I think it was in the comments. That
> doesn't mean it's not possible, it could happen. Read _Streets_of_Blood_,
> that had a gengineered character in it. And of course, you could always say
> the people discussing things in shadowtech were wrong. Or you could have
> engineered people who were born in utero using host mothers and then force
> grown to adult age.

I've looked through Shadowtech and Cybertechnology, and I can't find anywhere
in those two books where it's stated that artificially incubated humans are
impossible. At one point the text states that "Currently, human gengineering
is only in its vestigial stages," followed by The Smiling Bandit countering
that, "Human gengineering has gone far past the `vestigial stages' of
development," but that the corps are obviously trying to keep it all hidden.

Also, Shadowtech states that replacement organs and bioware are made by
growing a "host body", which is optimized for the production of the
desired parts in the minimum possible time and that "this process cannot
be applied to humans in the same fashion." Which doesn't mean that a
related process couldn't be applied to humans in a different fashion. If
you can grow a mostly non-functional body with a couple useful parts in
a few months, why can't you (after you do the appropriate research) grow
a complete, functional body in several years?

I'm postulating that Hayashi (and a few other companies) have had "uterine
replicators" for over a decade as of 2057. That is, they can grow a zygote,
conceived either normally or in vitro, to the normal newborn stage in the
normal nine months. Furthermore, they have probably been quietly offering
this service at a high price to certain well-connected people, i.e. top
executives who don't want to spend nine months pregnant. The ability to grow
a somewhat altered human to adulthood from "scratch" in less than the normal
time is a logical extension of this technology.

Justin Fang (justinf@****.caltech.edu)
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