The follies of biotechnology
Searchers are still finding human remains at Ground Zero in New York City. Which is understandable, of course; almost 3,000 people died there. They will continue to find human remains there for the forseeable future. What they’re finding now is so small that a single person could potentially be found in hundreds of different “remains”, some of which are no bigger than a fingernail. It’s been over five years now though; it’s time to get over it.
There have been repeated calls now to stop construction to keep searching for remains. It’s simply not worth it though, and it won’t happen. The World Trade Center site is prime realty, and each day that construction drags on represents another millions of dollars lost in potential revenue. It just doesn’t make sense to keep up this search.
Laboratory technicians have run thousands of tests (at a cost of millions of dollars) on human remains recovered at Ground Zero in this past year, yet only three were positively matched to a person who died on September 11. The samples are simply too small, old, and/or degraded by now. The costs have long since outweighed any potential benefits. How much consolation can someone get from having a piece of a loved one’s rib bone to bury?
Part of this is to blame on advances in technology that have allowed increased amounts of efforts to be wasted on folly. If September 11 had happened just a few decades ago, the attempts to identify the dead wouldn’t be going on for over five years after the attacks. They lacked the technology to spend absurd amounts of efforts on pointless endeavors. It also would’ve been easier for people to come to terms with their loved one’s deaths. They would realize their loved one died, accept that they would never have a body to bury, and hopefully move on with their life. Unfortunately, that’s not the case today. Because of biotechnology, some people have been strung on for years, futilely hoping that some new small piece of a former human will, in the bowels of some expensive high-tech laboratory, be proven to be a part of the one they lost, and they cannot get over it or move on until that happens, however unlikely it is.
I really don’t understand this reverence for dead bodies anyway. In my view, 100% of the worth of the person is in their life. Once they are dead, the body is nothing, a husk of a former person. Bodies aren’t good for anything except burying, burning, or maybe chopping into pieces for harvesting organs. I guess it’s primarily a religious thing. Religious people place far more importance on dead bodies than non-religious people. I believe the classic phrase “worm food” most accurately describes what worth a human being’s body has after death.
