This one is another significant development in the growing transhumanist story, and one for the transhumanist scrapbook(and my thanks to M.M. for finding this one, and bringing it to my attention). It seems the scramble is on to search for "extraordinary humans" and that this scramble is being led by pharmaceutical companies. Hold on to your hat, folks, because the implications here are enormous as we'll see in a moment:

Drug COmpany Launches Global Hunt for Superhumans

This one almost compels all sorts of high octane speculation. For our purposes, there are two paragraphs here that provide the compelling force:

“'For example, individuals or groups who exhibited exceptional wound healing after surgery or trauma might warrant further investigation. Equally, those who have consistently displayed exceptional resistance or immunity to infections, or who, after a robust clinical diagnosis, displayed unusually fast or spontaneous disease remission might be the basis for a winning submission,' (Dr. Duncan McHale) said."

And this one:

"A ten-year-old Pakistani street performer’s ability to cut himself with knives and walk on burning coals without experiencing pain caught the attention of researchers in 2006. Scientists have since discovered that he and a handful of other people in the region lack a particular protein on the surface of their nerves and hope to replicate this trait to treat severe pain."

We've already seen the agribusiness industry use its modifications of naturally occurring crops and seeds to patent those modifications, and via patent law to claim royalties and license fees and to sue farmers in court for even more money for the horrible crime of their fields having been found to be growing their crops without a license, through the natural processes of birds eating and dropping seeds, wind, and so on. In our book Transhumanism: A Grimoire of Alchemical Agendas, Dr. Scott de Hart and I wondered what would happen if this precedent in law were applied to genetic modifications of humans that entered the general population: could corporations claim rights to fees for modifications? or even outright ownership?

But the central core of my high octane speculation today is something else altogether. Most readers of this website are probably aware of the stories of unusual human beings, the peasant in Georgia in the Transcaucusus region who smokes a pack of cigarettes a day and who lives to be 120 years old, or, as the article itself mentions, people who seldom seem to get sick, or if they do, who inexplicably heal much fast than others. As the article avers, many of these phenomena are due to unusual genetics. So in their search for such people with (1) longevity genes or (2) special healing properties or (3) ability to withstand pain without any anaesthetic, we see hidden agendas, for by combining such traits, by engineering them, one could create, for example, a soldier able to heal on the battlefield or endure much more than the normal amount of punishment((under torture, for example), or longevity.

There may be even deeper agendas, for lurking behind any such major drug companies are the major shareholders, who cannot help but be, at some point, the very wealthy families whose names we are all familiar with, including many families of European nobility, and that raises the prospect that, behind the potential corporate and military agendas, there is an even deeper one: looking for genetic confirmations of old ideas, and old texts, and old "bloodlines." And given that some of those old ideas and old texts suggest that certain old technologies also alluded to in those texts could only be activated by certain people in physical contact or proximity with them, then that raises the stakes of the high octane speculation considerably.(See my The Cosmic War: Interplanetary Warfare, Modern Physics, and Ancient Texts in this regard).

See you on the flip side.