Make your own Organ

[rhoenix]

Why not separate tubes for respiration and digestion as a new "organ?" As long as we're talking improvements, it seems prudent to fix that, so a predilection for choking is removed.

[aerius]

Why not separate tubes for respiration and digestion as a new "organ?" As long as we're talking improvements, it seems prudent to fix that, so a predilection for choking is removed.

Might as well go for a prehensile penis while you're at it, imagine the fun you could have with a woman.

[Sun Wukung]

The chakras would be number one on my list and for one and one reason alone. I think having a bunch of biological batteries in ones' body would be an interesting addition to the human anatomy. The "batteries" would contain the "Qi" of the individual and give one interesting abilities. One could recover from sickness faster, live longer, and regrow simple skin damage. In more radical examples, even cure some forms of cancer due to the tumor being of a different "type" than the rest of the body. This could be used differently by people depending on their characteristics.

[Talanth]

Surely the ability to breath through your mouth is a great evolutionary advantage to anyone who has a bad cold?

[defanatic]

An organ which kick starts my blood pumping around my body when waking up. So then I could get up, and go to lectures that I have half an hour later without being in some sort of stupor.

A food-energy converter or something (so I could eat a peanut or some small bit, and run around all day)... This is complemented to an actual stomach, so I can grow some too. Could possibly go where my appendix is now.

An organ that can control my emotional state. Granted, I could fuck myself up, but it might be useful on occasions where someone has died, and I need to feel appropriately.

An organ that allows me to control growth and the like... I get the feeling that a lot of my organs are about controlling things I wish I could control.

An organ that kills bacteria growing around sweat glands.

Eyes that can see infra-red and ultra violet as well as the normal stuff, and can be tuned to use with any light level.

[Hawkwings]

I want a Space Marine's Betcher's Gland.

Spit poison

Or maybe the Catalepsean Node, so I don't need to sleep as much.

or the Larraman Organ, very fast healing, for surface wounds anyways.

[sketerpot]

What kind of organ would you like to have if it existed. I'd like one that maintains my body fat at a certain level and makes the excess feces instead of making my white fat cells bigger.

As you suspect, that just takes a bit of gene fiddling. Recently some biologists used RNA interference to block transcription of the fat insulin receptor gene in mice. They ate a lot but stayed thin and healthy, and they lived about 20% longer than normal mice. Reference:

Flier SN, Kulkarni RN & Kahn CR. 2001. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA., 98:7475-7480.

[Dooey Jo]

Not really an organ, but I'd like additional DNA and cell repair mechanisms. Perhaps some form of "backup DNA", which I heard some bacteria have.

Fixing the broken vitamin C-producing gene would be nice too.

Surely the ability to breath through your mouth is a great evolutionary advantage to anyone who has a bad cold?

Not really, the reason why noses can get stuffy is because humans can also breathe through their mouths, so it's not lethal. Had there been separate tubes, getting a nasal congestion could well be fatal, so there would probably evolve some mechanism to prevent it from happening (and it seems like other animals already have something like that; I've for instance seen dogs with colds, but never with stuffy noses).

[Lord of the Abyss]

Not really an organ, but I'd like additional DNA and cell repair mechanisms. Perhaps some form of "backup DNA", which I heard some bacteria have.

That reminds me of a cool idea from an Analog story, named Checksum IIRC. Add an extra organelle to our cells that performs a checksum operation on the DNA on a regular basis; if the checksum fails, the cell is a mutant and the organelle kills the cell. Normal cells will then replicate and fill the void like normal. This would eliminate cancer and any other problem that comes from cell mutations.

You'd also want to eliminate the normal cell replication limit; while that would normally increase one's risk of cancer, in this case it would give you cellular immortality ( ie, while your larger systems would still wear out, your cells will remain young forever )

[darthdavid]

I'd like an extra lobe to my brain that would give me a debug menu for my body. Let me adjust metabolism, hormones and other normally autonomic functions. If you're going completely out there I'd like it to be as good as the ones they have in the cultureverse so I could change my gender of other major bodily aspects over the course of a couple of months and tweak just about any aspect of my body.

[Qwerty 42]

A "switch," if you will, to go to sleep on command.

[Sun Wukung]

Now that I think about it...a natural lube gland on my dick would be nice too. Unless it does it at a bad time and it makes a mess. Oh god...think about what that would be like. It would be "Oh shit, I oiled my pants".