• What Does It Feel Like to Be Unattractive and Desired by None?

The top answer comes from a man who is barely five feet tall and experienced many setbacks in life. A growing body of research indicates that taller men have better lives on average. They have:

• better career prospects
• more frequent opportunities for romance
• increased intelligence
• happier mood
• longer lifespan

Harvard economics professor Grew Mankiw, who himself is over six feet tall, wrote a semi-serious paper arguing in favor of a height tax. If economists truly believe in taxation that redistributes wealth to people who have poorer circumstances in life, that means they should examine the possibility of tax increases on tall men – or at least tax breaks for shorter men. The height tax is a politically untenable topic and is probably unnecessary in the long run, but evidence tends to suggest tall people have better lives.

Most people who provided counsel to the Quora respondent focused on short-term solutions (moving to a place with a population that has a lower than average human height) or long-term solutions (waiting for a technological singularity and then uploading the brain into a better body). Controversial limb-lengthening surgery also exists for the purposes of increasing height. The downsides are its expensive cost, the long recovery process, and the unimpressive results.

Stem cells are a promising medium-term solution. Stem cells could restore the body’s bones and muscles to a youthful state and allow for their expansion in a growth phase. They could also turn back the clock on the pituitary gland and cause it to produce excess growth hormone. This would be a delicate process to deliver the benefits of height without causing the health complications associated with gigantism and acromegaly.

Developed countries have lots of regulations on stem cell treatments and for good reason. They want to prevent people from wasting their money on scams or getting cancer from untested therapies. The good news is that some developing countries (especially in Southeast Asia) have fewer moral, ethical, and regulatory barriers to researching stem cell treatments. A country like China that has an excess of males who want to increase their mating prospects is prime territory for the development of height-increasing stem cell therapies. – Updated 11/27/2011

Personal Opinion

It is interesting that Sam mentions the company Shenzhen Beike Biotechnology Company because a source I found which discusses the issue over the ethics and moral implications of using stem cells is brought up in a journal by Boston College entitled “Ethical Concerns in the Emergence of Stem Cell Therapies“ by Benjamin Schanker

“…There may eventually come a day when organs or limbs can be manufactured, neuronal growth stimulated, or bone growth and height increased using stem cells. These further advances will certainly raise questions around issues of what it means to be a human being…”

This guy also states the possibility that maybe one day stem cell technology will allow people to increase their height.

The thing about this post is that Sam Snyder is claiming that there is some device in a clinic in China which was made or manufactured somewhere in South Korea which can implant stem cells into the bones of a person leading them to become upwards of even 12 inches taller.

I would love to hear from Sam to see who this person he knows is and whether that is any real evidence that this device exists somewhere.

I am in South Korea myself and plan to take a trip to China sometime soon so maybe I can do more research and find this actual device.