One aspect of the stem cell issue, and of the importance of the passage of Proposition 71 and the creation of the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), is that, if its work is a success, individual human immortality (IHI) could become commonplace, at least for those with the medical insurance and/or cash to afford it, especially if they are affiliated with a certain prestigious private university in Northern California.

The "regenerative" part of the CIRM refers to the regeneration, the production in a bio-medical lab, of new, and good-as-new, human cells of various types, including the type of nerve cells that, in their billions, go to constitute our brains, the platform upon which our consciousness, in the materialist view, depends.

The condition of these cells, and of the brain as a whole, plays the central role in how we think and feel. Give a wild teen Ecstasy, and his or her mood changes. Deprive the brain of glucose or oxygen for the requisite period and the chemical and electrical messaging that sustains us, or IS us, will slow and stop. Allow glutamate plaques to build up in the brain and memory fades.

Find a way to replace these gunked-up brain cells with fresh new ones, and you might be able to stop or reverse the damage. What this implies, and what proponents of Proposition 71 failed to mention in their campaign to pass it, is immortality, plain old simple living forever.

If Proposition 71is a success, those with that entitlement will be able to contribute a skin cell or a cheek cell, which will be combined with a denucleated human or synthetic human egg cell (best to produce these without nuclei in the first place, to save a step) to create a "therapeutic clone." The stem cells derived from that bit of personalized medicine would then be shepherded along in petri dishes or something similar to produce fresh new brain cells (and muscle cells, and bone cells, and skin cells, etc.), exactly suited for replacing the current old, worn-out, cancer-prone, less-efficient cells then constituting a person's body, including his or her brain.

Transitioning these laboratory products into a person's blood, brain, muscles, bones, etc. could mean that he or she could soon be as good as new. Or better. These special cells, which won't be rejected by a person's immune system because they carry his or her own DNA fingerprint, could be enhanced as part of the shepherding process to fire faster, more strongly, in better harmony with their fellow cells, and be more precise modulators of the bio-chemical processes of which they are a part.

But, you may well wonder, will I still be "me" if my old brain cells are replaced by fresh new ones that weren't in my brain when I went to Cancun on spring break or won the Noble Prize in Medicine or Physiology?

Are you the same "you" when your skin cells sloughs off and is replaced by new, identical skin cells? If you break the handle of your hammer and replace it, then break the head and replace it, is it still the same hammer? If memories reside, not in single cells but in networks of cells ("the network IS the computer"), and old faulty cells are replaced in the neural network of your brain with fresh, new ones, won't the memories be maintained at an even higher level, like what happens when you attach a new 120 gigabyte hard drive to your home computer?

For more about memory, immortality, and the future of human consciousness, take a look at visionary thinker Ray Kurzweil's 2000 The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence and his more recent book, co-written with Terry Grossman, an expert in longevity medicine, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever.

In his 2000 book, Kurzweil envisioned the emergence of immortal (and possibly collective) consciousness through the merger of human biology and ever more powerful computers. The development, with Proposition 71 money, of a means to maintain indefinitely the physiological existence of individual brains probably means, in the context of the scenario postulated by Kurzweil, an easier transition to the long-term situation in which human consciousness is perpetuated and enlarged in the far more durable medium of silicon-based, rather than carbon-based, matrices.

For a metaphorical science fictional treatment of the transitioning of human consciousness into immortal computer networks, see the second third of Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves. For more on this theme, try Robert Silverberg's Shadrach in the Furnace. For a view beyond the collectivization and making-immortal of human consciousness, see Asimov's The Last Question.