Spotlight – Stem Cell Growth Accelerator

Stem Cell Growth Accelerator is one useful invention.

Background

As I wrote the HG Wells Star Trek fan fiction stories, I kept butting up against one unfortunate problem – how do you handle medical care?

After all, throughout the ages, medical care has, mainly, been abhorrent. Was I to show people undergoing bloodletting or getting leeches for treatments? Or show them dunked in wells in order to drive out the evil spirits? Hell, Leonard McCoy denounced surgery as ‘butchery’ in TOS. What’s a time traveler to do?

Enter stem cell growth accelerator.

The Thought Experiment

My initial inspiration came from, of all things, how I understand HIV to spread through the body. My understanding is that the retrovirus enters into a cell that becomes a host and essentially converts that cell into an HIV factory. The body does not recognize this as a problem for a long time, as the HIV is sitting within what, to the body, seems to be a normal, healthy cell.

And so I thought – what if, instead of making a horrible virus, a host cell was, instead, making some sort of cure cells. And what if it could make them at a phenomenal rate?

If a chemical like that could be introduced into a person, and it could self-replicate, and it would be healing rather than harming, the possibilities were very nearly endless.

In order to prevent things from becoming too good to be true, I further decided that, while the healing process would be fast, all pain would remain. Hence, a year’s worth of pain could be easily crammed into an hour.

Ow.

Upshot

Stem cell growth accelerator is one of the easiest inventions for me to explain. Exposition is generally a snap. I often have a character break an arm or suffer a cut or a gunshot and, voila! They are suddenly healed. But they cringe and nearly pass out while the healing process is occurring. I will definitely use this idea more. I may even at some point write something showing its development.