Heterostasis

The body maintains its condition by a mechanism called homeostasis. There are hundreds of signals controlling hundreds of mechanisms, so that if part of the body starts to get out of sync with the others it is forced back in line. For the most part, these signals are sent by either chemical or neural signals. There is no overall control, and some of the signals cause undesired side effects.

Heterostasis is the idea that different parts of the body can be maintained deliberately out of sync with each other. For example, it appears that some immune diseases such as asthma may be caused by a lack of parasites. At least one doctor has deliberately infected himself with tapeworm in an effort to improve his immune function. Rather than go to such lengths, it may be possible to modify local chemical concentrations and/or the body's sensors for those chemicals, so that different systems have a slightly different picture of what's going on. It will take a lot of research to find what combinations of state are best, but it seems clear that our bodies are naturally optimized for a lifestyle different from the one we have chosen, and heterostasis may be a way to improve health.

Heterostasis may also be useful when modifying individual organs. Rather than trying to design a new organ to function precisely like the one it replaces, it may be easier to tweak the body's other systems so that they react correctly to the change. This also raises the possibility of maintaining different organs at different physiological ages for peak performance--a 90-year-old person might be healthiest with a ten-year-old liver but a 25-year-old heart.

The most extreme type of heterostasis would involve the separation of the body's components into independent subsystems, temporarily preventing all signaling between them. This would be an aggressive but straightforward treatment for massive damage or other dysfunction, in which part of the body was damaged enough to make the rest ill. Today, we can keep many organs alive for hours or even days outside the body, and we can keep the body alive for hours on a heart-lung machine. Our technology is incredibly crude in comparison with a nanotech-built interface that could simulate a healthy body in great detail. Each organ or system could thus be stabilized and repaired (or replaced) individually, without any harmful or unexpected messages from the other organs. Once everything was working well, the state of each organ would be synchronized, connections would be restored, and the body would be whole again. (When I wrote the first version of this article, in October of 2001, I thought this was a far-future possibility.