Magnetic Fields
Magnetic Fields: One of the many banes of my existence.
It's long been thought that, if there were to be life somewhere out there in the void of space, it would probably be composed of more or less the same stuff that living things on earth are made of. If you're alive on this planet, chances are you've got a lot of carbon in you. Living matter seems to follow a few specific chemical patterns, and despite the diversity of elements in our physical vicinity, we living things are made up of only a few.
But the universe is big. Absurdly big. And who's to say we've pinned down exactly what life can and can't be? Our conception of intelligent life includes some sort of consciousness like our own, but need that consciousness run on a similarly organic organism? Couldn't there be, somewhere in the vastness, something very much like life but made of entirely different materials from life as we know it?
It'd be a huge relief to the medical world if we could just make new organs. We've tried faking it with some degree of success--hearts, for example, are somewhat replicable with similar machines, and dialysis can replace kidneys from an external vantage point--but some organs are too subtle to simply swap out with cyborg parts. And some people prefer not to walk around like Darth Vader, with inorganic body parts powering their newly bizarre existence.