Guessing at which technologies will come to fruition requires the ability to determine how many intermediate technologies can reasonably be attained in a given amount of time. From there, one can extrapolate and make educated suppositions about when one could reasonably expect something like a life-like prosthetic arm would be possible.

Rosellini explained his process with DX:HR:

My job at Microtransponder in large part is writing near-term science fiction.  I do this by combining all the failure modes from science, business, law etc…and then designing a research strategy to mitigate these risks and get new technologies into patients.  With Deus Ex, I was given the task of explaining in a rigorous all of the player abilities in the game.  To do this, I extrapolated where technologies would be moving in the next 20 years (to 2027, the start of the game).  Most implantable neuroprosthetics take 10 years to get to market, so essentially I was forced to make 1 extra jump to foreseeable technologies.

So what are the background technologies that support this research? Are there any scary government projects with weird code names like MK-ULTRA and project ARTICHOKE that may give us some insight into where neuro-implants might be heading? You bet there are. Read on to learn about just how soon we can hope for retinal displays, neuro-integrated prosthetics, and mind-computer interfaces.

Q: Will, please tell me a little about your current experience, expertise, and the research you’ve been doing.

A: I have six advanced degrees spanning business, law, and science. Before I began these academic pursuits, I was a professional baseball pitcher in the Arizona Diamondbacks system.   After retiring from baseball, I became fascinated with shrinking electronic devices to integrate into the nervous system and help patients with damaged nervous systems. To excel in this field of translational neurotechnology, I obtained the relevant business, accounting, and legal background to develop technology and raise capital for preclinical and clinical studies. While pursuing these deal-making skills, I sought the ability to evaluate the technical feasibility of neuroprosthetic systems. In particular, my degrees are an MBA, MS of Accounting, a JD, a Master’s of Computational Biology, a Master’s of Neuroscience, and a Master’s of Regulatory Science. I am in the final phases of a PhD in Neuroscience. My PhD work is focused on evaluating the safety and efficacy of a novel form of neurostimulation, called voltage-controlled capacitive discharge (VCCD), invented by Dr. Larry Cauller.

My company, Microtransponder, Inc. has been researching the therapeutic benefits of pairing Vagus Nerve Stimulation (VNS) with a variety of rehabilitation tasks to treat several neurological disorders such as tinnitus, post stroke motor rehabilitation, phantom limb pain (PLP), and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  We have developed a method to generate long lasting and spatially restricted changes to neural circuits using paired VNS.  As of July 2011, MicroTransponder has implanted 5 patients in a proof of concept Tinnitus clinical trial in Belgium and the results have been encouraging and will be discussed later in this document.  We have received several NIH grants for the animal research based on the robust nature of the scientific data.  Our researcher Dr. Engineer recently published a paper in Nature, regarding the paired VNS therapy and its ability to reverse the tinnitus precept in rats (Engineer et al., 2011).  Our VNS pairing method was reviewed in the April 2011 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine regarding the potential of our paired VNS therapy to treat a variety of neurological disorders.  Our preclinical and clinical studies suggest that  targeted plasticity using paired VNS therapy would be useful in many neurological disorders such as stoke, tinnitus and phantom limb pain in which plasticity is maladaptive.

Q: How did that impact your work on Deus Ex: Human Revolution?

A: I contacted the CEO of Eidos back in 2008 and explained that I was a big fan of the game and wanted to contribute however I could.  My job at Microtransponder in large part is writing near-term science fiction.  I do this by combining all the failure modes from science, business, law etc…and then designing a research strategy to mitigate these risks and get new technologies into patients.  With Deus Ex, I was given the task of explaining in a rigorous all of the player abilities in the game.  To do this, I extrapolated where technologies would be moving in the next 20 years (to 2027, the start of the game).  Most implantable neuroprosthetics take 10 years to get to market, so essentially I was forced to make 1 extra jump to foreseeable technologies.

Q: There are several technologies in the game that rely on direct connections to a person’s nervous system. If you were to make a conservative estimate, how many years away is technology like retinal displays, neuro-integrated prosthetics, and mind-computer interfaces?

A: In the 1870s, Richard Caton, a British physiologist, began a series of experiments intended to measure the electrical output of the brains of living animals. He surgically exposed the brains of rabbits, dogs, and monkeys, and then used wires to connect their brains to an instrument that measured current. “The electrical currents of the gray matter appear to have a relation to its function,” he wrote in 1875, noting that different actions — chewing, blinking, or just looking at food — were each accompanied by electrical activity. This was the first evidence that the brain’s functions could be tapped into directly, without having to be expressed in sounds, gestures, or any of the other usual ways.

Since then we have seen the wide scale adoption of cardiac pacemaker (electricity into the heart), cochlear implants (electricity into the cochlea), spinal cord stimulators (electricity into the spinal cord), deep brain stimulation and a host of other nerves are targets for activation using a battery, wire and electrode.

In a direct fashion to the game, DOD research arm, DARPA has been working on direct peripheral and cortical neural interfaces for mechanical augmentations since 2003 in the DARPA Revolutionizing Prosthetics program.

Q: The writers of Deus Ex: Human Revolution are trying to tell a story, so sticking to science may have been difficult in places. Where do you feel you took the most creative license?

A: I think there was a nice balance between science and science fiction.  We took some license on invisibility cloaks and the anti-gravity implementations.  However, I still spent some researching this and there is some evidence that this field will be viable at some point in our lifetime.

http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=118723&org=ENG

Q: There is a good chance that augmentations will be created by large corporations, how do you think that will impact the development of useful medical prosthetics and artificial organs?

A: This is already the case, with over 1M “augmentations” in place.  Our Vice-President Dick Cheney was a cyborg (he had a cardiac neurostimulation device).  More interesting will be the propensity to abuse the technology, which is the case with any advanced technology.  Checkout this article detailing the underground world of neuroenhancing drugs: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/04/27/090427fa_fact_talbot

The argument for implantable neuroprosthesis having the potential for abuse is not ripe yet.  This is in part due to the state of the technology.  As of now, no implantable is able to return all function back to the diseased nervous system.   The government has the greatest potential to abuse the technology.  It is now widely known that fear memories can be erased with animals.  Some of that work has been done in our lab for the treatment of PTSD in soldiers (we did this in rats).

However, Project MK-ULTRA or MKULTRA is a government project that started in 1948 and studies mind control through chemical interrogation and neurostimulation.  The project was first run by Sidney Gottlieb, Frank Olson and William Sargant. Although MK-ULTRA is most recognized with the LSD testing in the 1950′s and 1960′s, they have been involved with many other experiments in mind control related testing.  MK-ULTRA has tested interrogation through fear of deadly animals and Subproject 54, which through “perfect concussion” tried to erase the memories of U.S. submarine crew.  Some of the most secret projects in U.S. history all took place under MK-ULTRA, such as Projects Paperclip, Chatter, Bluebird and Artichoke.  The usage of electric shock to the brain for the creation of amnesia with hypnosis was discussed by an ARTICHOKE document dated 3 December 1951: “[Deleted] is reported to be an authority on electric shock. He is a psychiatrist of considerable note. [Deleted] explained that electric shock might be of considerable interest to the ‘Artichoke’ type of work. He stated that the standard electric-shock machine (Reiter) could be used. He stated that using this machine with convulsive treatment, he could guarantee amnesia for certain periods of time, and particularly he could guarantee amnesia for any knowledge of use of the convulsive shock. He stated that the lower setting of the machine produced a different type of shock. When this lower current type of shock was applied without convulsion, it had the effect of making a man talk. He said that this type of shock produced in the individual excruciating pain.  He stated that there would be no question that the individual would bequite willing to give information if threatened with the use of this machine. It was [Deleted]‘s opinion that an individual could gradually be reduced through the use of electro-shock treatment to the vegetable level”(P. 44).

Q: What augmentation do you think has the most potential to benefit humanity?

A: I believe our targeted plasticity using vagus nerve stimulation might be the single greatest innovation to benefit patients coming out of the labs in the next 10 years.  The idea that we can harness the brain’s natural plasticity and redirect to reverse disease states is a big idea that can really help patients.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes caught me off guard. I went into the film thinking it would be another anti-enhancement, “All scientists are Frankenstein’s trying to cheat nature” film. I have rarely been so happy to be wrong. Instead, the film treats the viewer to an entertaining exploration of animal rights, what it means to be human, and what’s at stake when it comes to enhancing our minds.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is told from the perspective of Caesar (Andy Serkis), a chimp who is exposed to an anti-Alzheimer’s drug, ALZ-112, in the womb. ALZ-112 causes Caesar’s already healthy brain to develop more rapidly than either a chimp or human counterpart. Due to a series of implausible but not unbelievable events, Caesar is raised by Will Rodman (James Franco), the scientist developing ALZ-112. Rodman is in part driven the desire to cure his father, Charles, (played masterfully by John Lithgow) who suffers from Alzheimer’s. As Caesar develops, his place in Will’s home becomes uncertain and his loyalty to humanity is called into question. After being mistreated, abandoned, and abused, Caesar uses his enhanced intelligence as a tool of self-defense and liberation for himself and his fellow apes.

That cognitive enhancement is a way of seeking liberty is a critical theme that gives Rise of the Apes a nuance and depth I was not anticipating. Though the apes are at times frightening, they are never monstrous or mindless. Though they are at time’s violent, they are never barbaric. Caesar and his comrades are oppressed and imprisoned – enhancement is a means to freedom. There is less Frankenstein and more Flowers for Algernon in the film than the trailer lets on. It’s an action film with a brain.

As Rise of the Planet of the Apes is not out yet, I’m reluctant to do a full analysis of the implications of the film’s plot. That will have to come after August 5th, when the movie releases.

I had a chance to interview Andy Serkis, James Franco, and director Rupert Wyatt. The interviews are posted after the jump, where you can see how James Franco was caught off guard by my questions about cognitive enhancement, Rupert Wyatt explores the way in which the apes mirror humanity, and Andy Serkis describes enhancement as a tool of liberation. It’s good stuff, enjoy.

These interviews are edited, but I will say I am mighty impressed by the thought and honesty all three put into there answers. If Rise of the Planet of the Apes is the beginning of a new series, I for one am excited by the potential for complexity and exploration of humanity and enhancement in the coming films.

Captain America is not a serious scientific film. Nearly every piece of technology is furious hand-waving. Vibranium? Vita-rays? Rocket-powered propellers? The cosmic cube? Awesome, yes, but not real. These, however, are narrative tools, not attempts at hard scientific prediction and therefore not something to be critiqued. What the comic-book-tech of Captain America allows for is an exploration of the ethics of enhancement. Here, more than perhaps any other fictional film I’ve seen, Captain America displays striking balance and nuance – it gets enhancement right.

Based on your knowledge of the film and/or comics, this post may contain *spoilers*, so consider yourself warned. And if you’re looking for review of why it’s a fun movie, A.O. Scott in the NYT captures my sentiments about the film perfectly: pulpy Nazi-punching goodness. Now, on to enhancement!

There are three major factors that make the enhancement of Steve Rogers and his crimson domed antithesis, the Red Skull, unique among comic book lore. The first is that Steve Rogers was deliberately enhanced by someone. There is no accident, no crisis-as-catalyst-and-crucible event, no mystic charm, and no superhuman heritage to explain or justify Rogers’ becoming superhuman. Rogers is superhuman because Dr. Abraham Erskine develops a superhuman serum for that express purpose. Here, the science of enhancement is itself portrayed in a positive light. In what seems like every other superhero origin story, powers are acquired through scientific hubris. Be it the unintended consequences of splitting the atom, tinkering with genetics, or trying to access some heretofore unknown dimension, comic book heroes invariably arise by accident. The super serum, the vita-rays, and the outcome of the experiment on Rogers are all a scientific success. They happen precisely the way every person in the room hopes they will. Dr. Erskine is not a madman but a humble, ethical, and brilliant scientist trying to make better people. As such, he looks for the best in the humans he hopes to enhance. In short, Steve Rogers might be the only major superhero who is the result of scientific experimentation going to plan.

Second, Steve Rogers deliberately chooses to become enhanced. I had expressed my doubts about Rogers’ consent being genuine, but the film makes his determination and clarity of thought evident. Unlike many heroes, who seem to acquire their powers out of recklessness around science (Banner, Parker, Richards, I’m looking at you), Rogers very consciously decides to go through with Dr. Erskine’s procedure. He, in fact, might be one of the only heroes who ever knew he was going to be come a hero before his transformative event. That foreknowledge is critical for demonstrating that enhancement isn’t something that is only desired by egomaniacs. Rogers seeks strength and speed to defend and protect others. His body did not match how he saw his true self. Again, we see an anti-science motif of comic books turned on its head. Normally, those who seek superpowers are unworthy because they believe they deserve to be better than others, thus, the experiments go wrong. This attitude is embodied in the Red Skull, whose evil quite literally boils to the surface when he injects the super serum. However, Rogers’ reasoning is that others deserve to be protected and defended. Altruism, not egoism, is the driving force behind Rogers’ desire to become enhanced.

Third, and most important, is that enhancement in the film is not merely “functional” enhancement. That is, Rogers is not just stronger and faster. In a private moment, Dr. Erskine explains to Rogers that the serum and vita-rays affect “everything that is inside. Good becomes great. Bad becomes worse.” Erskine is not talking about physical traits here. Rogers’ “bad” traits (i.e. his laundry list of medical issues) are not aggravated by the serum, but cured. The good/bad that becomes great/worse are moral qualities and capacities of the person. Captain America is literally super-moral. His already above-average sense of moral clarity and determination to do what is right becomes amplified in the same way that the lust for power and pleasure from slaughter are magnified in the Red Skull.

Moral enhancement, a fairly recent talking point among thinkers in the bioethics community, is handled deftly in Captain America. Enhancements do not change who we are or from where we come, but serve to empower and improve traits which we already possess. For Steve Rogers, those traits are what we wish for most in our heroes: beneficence, altruism, and humility. Note, among his list of valued traits are not unwavering loyalty to national authority (despite his irritating flag fetish) or deference to some commanding power. Instead, Rogers’ own judgment causes him to defy orders at almost every turn. Why? Because Captain America’s sense of ethics is itself enhanced. He is a better human being because of Dr. Erskine’s process.

I haven’t seen a movie that was this pro-science and pro-human goodness in a long time. I may not have seen a movie that was this pro-enhancement ever. Did I mention it also involves Nazi-punching?

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter.

Promotional Image of Captain America via Marvel.com

Designers of prosthetics and artificial organs have for a long time tried to replicate the human body. From the earliest peg legs to some of the most modern robotic limbs, the prosthetic we make looks like the body part that needs replacing. Lose a hand? Dean Kamen’s DEKA arm, aka the “Luke arm,” is a robotic prosthesis that will let you grasp an egg or open a beer. The Luke arm is a cutting edge piece of technology based on a backward idea – let’s replace the thing that went missing by replicating it with metal and motors. Whether it’s an artificial leg or a glass eye, prostheses often seek to reproduce not only the function of the body part, but the form and feel as well.

There are good reasons to want to reproduce form and feel along with function. The first reason is that our original bits and pieces work quite well. The human body as a whole is a natural marvel, let alone the immense complexity and dexterity of our hands, eyes, hearts, and legs. No need to reinvent the wheel, just replicate the natural model you’ve been given. The second, less obvious reason, is that we as a society have been and remain deeply uncomfortable with amputees and prosthetics. Many people don’t know what to do when faced with an artificial arm or leg. I wish it were different, but it largely isn’t. So prostheses are designed to look like whatever it is they replicate to hide the fact that the arm or leg or eye isn’t biological.

That methodology is being challenged by a few recent innovations: Össur’s now famous Cheetah blades, Kaylene Kau‘s tentacle arm, and the artificial heart with no heartbeat. These new prostheses and artificial organs are a result of approaching the problem by asking “What does this piece allow us to do?” not “How do we build an artificial one?” The implications for how humans will view themselves in the coming decades are monumental.

There are three major ways in which non-standard prosthetics and artificial organs will change the way we come to understand the human form.

Redefining Normal: The first is a continuation of a current trend already underway: a serious questioning of what a “normal” person should look like. Tattoos, piercings, plastic surgery, sub-dermal implants represent voluntary challenges to the normative standards of human appearance. As more and more soldiers return home from Iraq and Afghanistan amputees and paraplegics, the average person’s exposure to someone who needs and wears a prosthetic is far more likely. Carrie Davis, an amputee advocate and surrogate mother, runs Camp No Limits, a summer camp for children who use prostheses where they discover they are neither alone nor abnormal. Millions of people need some sort of mobility assistance, prosthetic, or artificial organ. They are our friends, family, co-workers, and customers. De-stigmatizing their condition is essential for both improving their daily quality of life and progressing as a civilization.

Nature Doesn’t Know Best: The second is a de-mystification of nature. Evolution is lazy and a cheapskate. Natural selection doesn’t ensure that the best form evolves, merely that the slightly better form is preferred. What does that mean? It mean we delude ourselves that we are the “most highly evolved species” when so many of us wear glasses and are susceptible to sinus infections, lactose intolerance and appendicitis. It also means that just because the human hand is amazing, it isn’t the end-all-be-all of grasping, touching, and manipulating. Elective amputations due to non-amputating injury are the start of the process of recognizing that we might be able to build a better grabber. However, given enough time and technological progress, voluntary amputations by otherwise healthy, uninjured individuals may become commonplace. Showing that a prosthetic can serve all the functions of a hand or foot without having the same form is a huge blow to anyone who doesn’t think the human body could have used a few more revisions on the drawing board. In the future, natural hands and legs might just not be good enough for those who have access to the best in prosthetics technology.

Artificial Aesthetics: The final change will be an aesthetic shift. Prosthetics may be designed the way the best pieces of consumer technology are today. If elective amputations ever become even remotely normal, you might find yourself in a virtual fitting room, swapping among various forearms and terminal attachments. Aimee Mullin’s famous “My 12 pairs of legs” TED speech shows the very beginnings of this trend. Because the form follows the function, there is actually more, not less, freedom for designers. Whatever attaches to your shoulder just needs to be able to open a drawer, pull on pants, type a message, and put in a contact lens. Prosthetics design could help redefine beauty. So long as it does that, the prosthetic can be neon green and see-through for all anyone cares. By focusing on function, the form is liberated.

It’s easy to say that these trends will change the way we see other people and ourselves, in particular those who are amputees. It’s hard to know how a crowd would react to a woman with a tentacle arm or how it would feel to rest your head on someone’s chest and hear not a heartbeat but a constant whir. Disorienting doesn’t even begin to cover it.

To give you an idea of where we’re heading, I’d like to end with an anecdote.

Last week I was on St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan. For those of you unfamiliar with St. Mark’s Place, it’s one of the more eclectic gathering places in New York City. You’ll find NYU students, old school residents who’ve been there for decades, baffled tourists looking to buy some cheap sunglasses and an “I Heart New York” t-shirt, East Village punks, SoHo spillover, western otakus, and hipsters galore. One of the bars has a bouncer who wears a conical hat in all seriousness and I’m pretty sure one of the record-holders for most facial piercings frequents the block. If you want to see interesting people, it’s a veritable buffet. Yet, last week, one of the people who caught my attention was a blonde in her 20′s walking with a few friends. Among the crowds festooned with mohawks and jeggings, I might not have even noticed her. Just a cute girl in a t-shirt and jean shorts. All but for the fact that her right leg was, from mid-thigh to sneaker, made of metal. Her knee was a visible hinge. This was not a prosthetic designed to “look normal” and she made no effort to hide it under pants or a long skirt.

I use my language here carefully when I say I was struck by how unbelievable it was that her leg was prosthetic. Visibly, it was obviously artificial. But nothing about the way she carried her self, the way she talked to her friend as they ambled down the street, the way in which crowds ignored her and she didn’t notice them, was strange – which is what made the whole experience so odd. Among New York crowds, I expect people to gawk. But that her right leg was a prosthetic was a non-issue. People were so disinterested that I had to ensure I, myself, was seeing what I thought I saw. No one cared.

That disinterest heartened me because the idea of “nothing to see” is extremely difficult for our brains to process when we are looking at a deviation from the human form. As we are exposed to more and more prosthetics that get the job done rather than act as awkward disguises, the more our brains flex and flow around the idea of what a human looks like. The benefit is two-fold: 1) those who need prosthetics get devices that actually let them do what they need to do and 2) amputees and prosthetics are no longer hidden, but humanized and normalized. And we’re only at the very beginning. I can’t wait to see what inhuman innovations the prostheses of the next few decades will bring.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter.

Images via Össur and Oscar Pistorius.com, PlayMeDesign, and Kaylene Kau’s Coroflot.

Deus Ex 3: Human Revolution is a cyberpunk video game coming out later this year. I, for one, am pretty excited. Set in the near future the game is a prequel to the original Deus Ex. For those of you who aren’t video game fanatics, the first Deus Ex is a cyberpunk conspiracy thriller that follows around a transhuman protagonist, JC Denton, as he tries to keep the world from spiraling into Armageddon. Robots, A.I., genetically modified animals, and cyborgs aplenty help and hinder him. Denton himself has several nano-augmentations that give him superhuman abilities (e.g. cloaking, super-strength). Deus Ex 3 explores the rise of general cybernetic augmentation and the corporate espionage that accompanies it. As part of the viral ad campaign you can access the website for Sarif Industries, the leading manufacturer of cybernetic prosthetics. I love the boilerplate:

No one should ever have to give up a normal life because of a random incident, or indeed, lose a dream over a physical limitation. So believes David Sarif, idealist, philanthropist, founder and CEO of Sarif Industries. Pursuing his belief, Mr. Sarif acquired a failing Detroit auto factory in 2007 and repurposed it for the automated manufacture of prosthetics.

The weirdness of the site comes from its nearness to reality. There are links for the stock price and pictures of the interior of the main headquarters. There is even an ethics statement!

A standout piece is the ad for Sarif’s products (cyber hands, eyes, and arms), which seemed like a perfect pastiche of every pharmaceutical ad I’ve seen in the past year: testimonials by attractive people in bright lighting engaging in their favorite cultural or outdoor activities, like rock climbing and football throwing (though mercifully not through a tire wing). Also interesting is the news feed which features headlines I had to research a bit to see they aren’t quite true. The “road to here” also provides a strange alt-history of augmentation and prosthetics that gives you the feeling this all might just be right around the corner. The site’s slickness and dedication to near-reality makes it an eerie predictor of what a future prosthetics company may actually look like.

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Image via Sarif Industries

Cybernetic brains might make that possible. As computing power and storage continue to plod along their 18-month doubling cycle, there is no reason to believe we won’t at least have cybernetic sub-brains within the coming century. We already offload a tremendous amount of information and communication to our computers and smartphones. Why not make the process more integrated? Of course, what I’m engaging in right now is rampant speculation. But a neuro-computer interface is a possibility. More than that: cyber-brains may be necessary.

The idea of a cyber-brain is pretty simple. Our brains are all-in-one systems that store, process, organize, and collect data. A cybernetic brain would augment one, many, or all parts of that system.  The processing and organization part, not to mention analysis and synthesis, would require something resembling artificial intelligence. People would probably be wary to jack themselves into an A.I. helper brain. So, based on current trends and my rudimentary knowledge of computer progress, my guess is that cybernetic collection, storage, and retrieval of information will be the easiest pieces to integrate into our biological brains: a neural external hard drive. We’ve externalized the storage process for ages – the written word, anyone? But what if we could internalize it again?

That’s what cyber-brains could allow. Ever since we started writing things down, we’ve been trying to make it faster and easier to write, to read what others write, and to remember what we read. A cyber-brain takes the externalization potential of computers (massive amounts of stable and inexpensive data storage with rapid and accurate recall) and removes the lag time. Instead of sitting at your computer or pulling out your phone, opening the file, and taking in the contents, the information is already in your cyber-sub-brain. Anything you store on your cyber-brain, from a song to a novel to the contents of Wikipedia, would be as easily and rapidly accessible as your most vivid memories currently are. Speaking of, your memories would be stored more accurately and permanently than regular ol’ neurons can allow. Almost any piece of information you might need, whether experienced or downloaded, would be at your mental fingertips.

We face a spectacular information glut. It is impossible for any one person to, say, watch every good movie on Netflix, read every informative entry on Wikipedia, and follow every worthy news story. There just isn’t enough time to absorb and process all that content. But what if I didn’t have to actually watch or play or read the item in question to grok its quality and content? Cyber-brains might allow you to, a la Neo and Trinity in The Matrix, to download huge data sets and immediately utilize them. The major advantage is that the time-cost of gathering information becomes nearly zero. Thus, the extra time is freed up for information to be analyzed, synthesized, and, more importantly, utilized.

In the coming years, we may need a form of externalized cybernetic memory to compensate for the overwhelming influx of data. The ability to take digital files and put that content within direct, immediate access of the mind would at least give the average person a fighting chance.The possible benefits are almost unimaginable. Instead of the current information crisis, where the wealth of the world’s knowledge is available at a mouse-click but there is literally not enough time to absorb it all, we would be faced with a world of ultra-informed individuals. What would that world look like?

The optimistic part of me wants to believe all of that data would become knowledge that would lead to happier relationships, more logical decisions (e.g. voting, finances), and a better world would result. The pessimistic part of me fears a world of cynics and nihilists, simultaneously overwhelmed by and indifferent to the wealth of information they possess. The world would continue as it is, just a bit more jaded by what we all know.

The realistic part of me suspects something in between. In a world of cyber-brains, everyone would have nearly the same degree of information. However, information is just information until a mind processes and understands it. Thinking would still take a lot of work, and sometimes letting someone else do the thinking for you is still easier.  ”Education” would be all practice and application. Granted, your basic intelligence would limit your processing power. Even though an infant with a cyber-brain might “know” calculus, she wouldn’t be able to understand calculus. Epistemology aside, the take away point is that a cyber-brain would eliminate the need for lectures, text-books, and rote memorization. Critical thinking and creative utilization would become the main priorities of education. Perhaps social stratification due to pure intelligence would be more noticeable, or maybe it’ll be willpower and determination that draw the lines.

My hope is that people would at least be more skeptical and the most egregious liars (coughGlennBeckcough) would have much less flexibility in spinning the facts their way. The first step towards understanding is raw data. The more people who have data, the more people will have real knowledge. What they do with that knowledge is still their prerogative. So I suspect the more things change, the more they will stay the same.

Sadly, cyber-brains are still a long, long way away. Until then, I guess we just won’t know. And I pray I don’t lose my phone. I keep a lot of the best bits of my brain in there.

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Image of cyber-brain via Wikipedia: Ghost in the Shell

Even today, Ball points out, societal and cultural debate is pervaded by the belief that technology is intrinsically perverting and thus carries certain penalty. Views that human cloning will be used for social engineering, eradicating one gender or resurrecting undesirable figures from the past, for example, all reflect age-old fears about the consequences of meddling in the ‘unnatural’. Ball warns that, as there is no global ban on human reproductive cloning, there is a strong chance that it will happen. It is thus likely to become a de facto reality without the well-informed debate it deserves.

Let’s unpack that little nugget, because it contains two very important points.

The first point is that many of our fears about advancing science and biotechnology related to the body trigger fundamental, core cultural fears. Leon Kass calls this the “Yuck” reaction, or, more eloquently, “Wisdom from Repugnance.” Kass’ argument is that we are naturally repelled by abhorrent ideas, like torturing babies and eating people. As regular readers of Science Not Fiction know, eating people isn’t always bad.

Well, as it turns out, Leon Kass’ argument that we should trust our gut when it says, “yuck!” is a pretty terrible way to do ethics. Why? Because what is “yuck” to me might be “yum” to you. And we’re back to not knowing if doing something ethically questionable, like cloning people, is morally permissible. Unnatural at least explains why so many people say “yuck” to modifying humans; it is a lesson we’ve been told over and over for millennia in myths and religion.

The second point is that we should be discussing these ideas like rational adults. Biotechnology is progressing at a rate and in ways that are so rapid as to be unpredictable. I make lots of educated guesses and suppositions, but none of what I write here is a prediction or a guarantee. My interest is in figuring out whether or not something like cloning is ethically permissible if we’re ever able to do it. As Ball notes, there is no current global ban on cloning. There is, as it stands, no global ban on most of the transhumanist issues, from eugenics to cognitive enhancers to A.I. to nano-implants. These possible technologies strain the very foundations of many of our philosophies and cultural institutions. If the lack of a global ban means the technology is likely inevitable, we better figure out how to go about things correctly.

Debate and discussion are essential to making good decisions. Recognizing our old, deep seated prejudices and biases, such as those against technology and making people, is equally essential. Simply because something is unnatural does not mean it is immoral. But that’s where the discussion starts, not where it ends ends.

Image of Book Cover via Bodley Head

Allow me to elaborate. Vat-grown meat is still a work in progress. But it is a real possibility. One of the scientists trying to make it a reality is Dr. Vladimir Mironov. He envisions giant factories called “carneries” that create meat the same way a brewery brews beer. One of his many goals is to be able to add taste and texture controlling features like fat and vascular systems to make his test-tube steaks as delicious as the real thing:

“It will be functional, natural, designed food,” Mironov said. “How do you want it to taste? You want a little bit of fat, you want pork, you want lamb? We design exactly what you want. We can design texture.”

Vat-grown meat is a godsend for those of us who are omnivores, but recognize the significant flaws with our current agricultural system. Many factory farms keep animals in inhumane conditions and the industry around animal meat is an incredibly wasteful and polluting. The current response to these conditions is to support organic, local and humane farming practices. The problem, of course, is that organic, local, and humane practices are economically inefficient, which makes the cost of ethical food prohibitive for most of us.

Yet I see vat-grown meat as presenting a significant conundrum to many supporters of the ethical/organic food movement: it’s too unnatural.

The crux of the matter is that most ethical foodies and environmentalists operate within a framework of the narrative of “the natural.” What that means is that the less technology and science a process uses to put food on your plate, the more natural, and therefore the more ethical it is. This anti-science attitude explains the irrational fear of genetically modified organisms as food. The problem, as I see it, is that the most artificial, technological and un-natural process – vat-grown meat – might be the only long-term large-scale solution available for the ethical dilemmas surrounding what we eat. And the ethical dilemmas of farming in general are significant:

“Thirty percent of the earth’s land surface area is associated with producing animal protein on farms,” [visiting scholar, Nicholas] Genovese said.

“Animals require between 3 and 8 pounds of nutrient to make 1 pound of meat. It’s fairly inefficient. Animals consume food and produce waste. Cultured meat doesn’t have a digestive system.

Additionally, cultured meat doesn’t have a nervous system, so you can’t hurt it. It doesn’t have an immune system, so you don’t have to inject it with antibiotics or growth hormones. The curious result is that artificially created meat will be more natural and humane than anything you’d find in the store today.  And, of course, there is always the future to think about, as Genovese points out:

“Further out, if we have interplanetary exploration, people will need to produce food in space and you can’t take a cow with you.

“We have to look to these ideas in order to progress. Otherwise, we stay static. I mean, 15 years ago who could have imagined the iPhone?”

For those of you who are vegans, organic foodies, and loco-vores, what are your thoughts on vat-grown meat?

Image of happy cow by wwarby via Flickr Creative Commons

An American body-modification artist of a similar mindset [to Anonym] has created small metal discs of neodymium metal, coated in gold and silicon, which give off mild electric current when in a electromagnetic field. When inserted under the fingertips, this current stimulates the fingers’ nerve endings, allowing the bearer to literally feel the shape and strength of electromagnetic fields around power cords or electronic devices.

Anonym had several of these implanted professionally, choking at the cost, and then learned it was possible to buy the metal herself in bulk, far more cheaply.

So she began experimenting with homebrewed sensors. The metal itself is extremely toxic, so she needed a coating to bioproof it, finding a solution ultimately in a silicon putty-like substance called Sugru. But hot-gun glue works fine too, she says. (“I have lots of things in me coated in hot-gun glue,” she says.)

Anonym describes academic transhumanists (aka moi) as “lame.” My initial thought was “this is not a transhumanist, this is a crazy person!” Whenever I get freaked out by someone’s behavior, I feel old and conservative. To cure this feeling I go see what old, conservative people think. Charles T. Rubin of the Futurisms blog at The New Atlantis was happy to oblige me. Rubin worries that biohackers like Anonym represent some sort of glorification of “self-mutilation” and our society’s inability to see her behavior as the cry for help it really is. Rubin’s hand-wringing post over Anonym’s “self-mutiliation” made me realize what bothered me about Anonym wasn’t her attitude or her aesthetic. Besides the ill-advized techniques (vodka for sterilizer? Rubbing alcohol is cheaper and, uh, actually sterile!), the general ethos of biohackers and grinding is one I’m all about.

Instead, I realized I had no idea why Anonym was making the modifications she was making. RFID chips are sort of useful, but the neodymium discs seem like a lot of work for a minimal payoff. So you can feel electric current. Neat, I guess? Since neither is illegal, the self-surgery comes off as a “look at how hardcore I am” attitude rather than a genuine act of rebellion. Until the mods give a person a useful ability beyond that of a normal individual, folks like Anonym are just body-modifiers who’ve found a new way to get their jollies. Cool, yes, but no more transhuman than a piercing or tattoo.

Original images via anicole and quapan at Flickr Creative Commons

A brief synopsis: Having run out of energy on Earth, humanity has gone to the Moon to extract helium-3 for powering the home planet. The movie begins with shots outside of a helium-3 extraction plant on the Moon. It’s a station manned by one worker, Sam, and his artificial intelligence helper, GERTY. Sam starts hallucinating near the end of his three-year contract, and during one of these hallucinations drives his rover into a helium-3 harvester. The collision causes the cab to start losing air and we leave Sam just as he gets his helmet on. Back in the infirmary of the base station, GERTY awakens Sam and asks if he remembers the accident. Sam says no. Sam starts to get suspicious after overhearing GERTY being instructed by the station’s owners not to let Sam leave the base.

So Sam tricks GERTY into letting him go out of the station in one of the rovers. He finds the first Sam who has crashed and brings him back to nurse him to health. The new Sam decides that chronic communication difficulties—which have only permitted seeing previously recorded messages from his wife and daughter waiting for him to return back on Earth—might be an elaborate deception. He goes far enough off base to get outside of the range of jamming antennas and calls back home to Earth to discover his daughter, who was an infant in the pre-recorded messages, is now a teenager, his wife is now dead—and her father Sam is there on Earth.

The sinister truth of the helium-3 base is now fully disclosed. What is actually happening is that the “first” Sam was himself a clone (where this means everything, including all his memories, not simply a genetic clone). Evidently, the copying occurred early in Sam 1’s stay at the station. Each clone is awakened with the thought of returning home to his family in three years. What actually happens at the end of those three years is that the clone is incinerated in the return capsule, and a new clone is awakened, to begin the cycle anew.

Near the end of the film comes a striking moment. The Sam that nearly died in the earlier crash has gotten increasingly sick and will die soon. The two Sams realize that the bosses of the station are coming to kill both of them and activate a new clone. They hatch a plan that has one of them leaving back to Earth in one of the helium-3 delivery shuttles. After newly awakened Sam tells dying Sam that he deserves to go back—“you did the three years”—dying Sam disagrees, and tells new Sam that he should return to Earth, because dying Sam is too sick to make it. This is a really powerful moment in the film, and our feelings about it are helpful in untangling our own mangle of thoughts about identity and death.

Dying Sam’s sacrifice seems less significant than, say, me telling an unrelated co-worker to take the capsule home. There are suggestive biological resonances to this feeling. Think of how, in social insects like bees, individuals give up the right to reproduce in order to facilitate the genetic continuity of individuals that they are closely related to. So, would the fact that you have a copy of yourself, which diverged from you even quite some while back (in this case, three years of solitude on a Moon base), ease your anxiety about dying?

Consider the following thought experiment. Rather than three-year stints, the clones of Moon get replaced on a 24-hour cycle. You fall asleep. Your memories and any other physical changes from the “base copy” get noted and propagated to a new clone. You are then, in Moon-like fashion, vaporized, and in the morning, a new clone is awakened after these changes have been “installed.” You awake, none the wiser for this change in body. Consciousness is not continuous, of course, and discontinuities such as sleep are natural places where we can do the “body change” business with minimal mess (not unlike what was depicted in the fantastic sci-fi film Dark City). The gap between what actually happens in sleep and this scenario seems too small to quibble over. Or is it?

As experiences and other physical changes separate you from your base clone as weeks, months, and years pass, your ability to separate your own identity from that of the clone grows similarly. It is like a core scene in the play “On Ego,” when a Star Trek-like teleporter fails to vaporize the original version of the protagonist. So two protagonists now exist. From that moment forward what was once one person is now two people, with increasingly different senses of self and experiences.

Your sense of how much you would sacrifice for your copy might be a good test for how different you feel from him or her. Your sense of how much comfort you would feel in dying, knowing that this other version of you lives on, might be another good test for how much of your identity has leaked out of the lump of tissue that has hitherto conveniently been bounded off by your jacket of skin. Perhaps in the first few days after such a teleporter accident, you would feel you could give up your life for your copy (and be relaxed about the idea of dying so that one of you can go on); after a few weeks, maybe something less than your life, and after some years of passed, perhaps you’d feel you could sacrifice nothing more than you would sacrifice for a close friend. (Topic for a future movie and post: Does forming a close friendship involve blurring and merging of your two identities?)

Here’s some final thought experiments for you to puzzle over. The great anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote in her paper “The Forensic Self,”

[In] western culture, whatever we say seriously about persons and selfhood needs to some extent to be compatible with what a jury in a court of law will accept.

For a graduate degree in philosophy with Ian Hacking many years ago, I once applied this idea to the issue of multiple personality disorder (MPD), to see how the judicial system dealt with defenses of MPD. The courts have mostly taken a view most eloquently put by Judge Birdsong in the case of Georgia v. Kirkland: “…we will not begin to parcel criminal accountability out among the various inhabitants of the mind.”

Rather than MPD, let’s see where we get when we apply Douglas’ insight to the problem of multiple person disorder: having multiple copies of yourself present at once. What if, just prior to copying, one of you formed a criminal intent. Because of slightly different post-copying existences, one of you now decide to stop the other. Would it be ethical to kill your copy? What would ethics require of how you treat one another? After all, we have sometimes odd ideas of what we are allowed to do to ourselves: Yes to smoking ourselves to death, no to elective limb amputations. These confusions would only be amplified by the peculiar situation of having multiple person disorder. Or being the victim of a sinister plot by Lunar Industries on the Moon.

Instead of a massively complicated set of servos, gears, and microchips the user manipulates the tentacle through two switches: One tightens a cord, causing the tentacle to curl and grip an object, the other lets it go.  It’s primarily designed as an aid in conjunction with a biological arm, but it can grip large and small objects effectively.

The arm can join a suite of prosthetic limbs that are changing the way medicine and the rest of us think about replacing a lost limb. Last year, New Zealander Nadya Vessey, who’s missing both legs, asked special effects company Weta (all three Lord of the Rings movies) to make her a mermaid prosthetic she could use for swimming. They needed eight staff members and two and half years, but they did it, and now Vessey swims in the ocean with her fin.

Aimee Mullins, an actress, model, and athlete, has been rethinking legs for years. Mullins was born without calf bones (her fibulae, to be specific) and has had to function with artificial limbs her whole life. After achieving success as a track and field athlete, she gave a TED Talk, which launched her in a new direction.

Instead of using limbs for utilitarian purposes only, she began to work with designers to bring art into the limbs. In 1999, designer Alexander McQueen built her carved wooden legs that look exactly as if she were wearing boots, and in 2002 Matthew Barney gave her transparent plastic legs for his Cremaster Cycle. Mullins soon realized her legs could be worn as objects of beauty, and as fashion accessories. These days, she has 12 pairs of legs, some of which allow her to change her height in a five-inch range between 6′ 1″ and 5′ 8″ (her usual height).

In a TED talk she gave last year, Mullins told a story about a friend who was actually jealous of her ability to change her height.  Science is laboring to provide other advantages to those with prosthetic limbs, including the possibility of running faster, jumping higher, and being stronger than the biological originals. No doubt my SNF colleague Kyle Munktrick approves.

Not that we should get too carried away with the advantages of replacement limbs. Blogger Jon Kuniholm lost an arm in Iraq. He writes that when someone tells him his prosthetic arm his cool, he answers, “No it’s not. When it’s good enough that you want an elective amputation, then it’ll be cool.”

You see, I was merely quoting Margaret Somerville, the Director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University in Canada. In addition to thinking gay marriage is bad for the kids, Somerville really does not like transhumanists. She thinks that  personhood is the “world’s most dangerous idea,” (sounds vaguely familiar) because if aliens, animals and robots have rights too, we won’t value humans anymore. In her recent piece, calmly titled “Scary Science Could Cause Human Extinction” Somerville makes a strange argument about xenotransplants (i.e. organ transplants). First, she beats up on transhumanists and our support of life-extension. She attempts to link life-extention with genetically modified animal organ transplants. She then argues that the transplants will, get this, cause a mutant virus leading to a global pandemic obliterating humanity. I am not joking:

[Using genetically modified pig-hybrid organs] poses a risk, not only to transplant recipients, their sexual partners, and their families, but also, possibly, to the public as a whole. An animal virus or other infective agent could be transferred to humans, with potentially tragic results – not just for the person who received the organ but for other people, who could subsequently be infected. And there might be a very remote possibility that it could wipe out the human race.

Somerville’s argument abuses the word “potentially” and its synonyms in a desperate attempt to draw a link in the reader’s mind between xenotransplants and a cataclysmic plague. Human-to-human disease transmission during transplants is extremely low, and the genetic differences between humans and animals, even hybrids, would lower the risk all the more. Martine Rothblatt, (a Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies) wrote a whole book, Your Life or Mine, addressing the fears around xenotransplantaion. In short, Somerville’s concerns about xenotransplantation are not based in science, but in bioLuddite hysteria. Somerville’s case against xenotransplantation is in terminal condition already, and things only get worse from here.

I would summarize the rest of her argument if it wasn’t, well, so incoherent. For example, Somerville is confused about anti-aging research. She seems to think that researchers are simply trying to slow down human maturation, “so that we would reach puberty around 40 years of age, early middle age at 80.” Um, no. The goal is not to slow the maturation process but to inhibit and potentially reverse the damage that accrues at the cellular level over time due to aging. Aubrey de Grey describes his anti-aging research as Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, not Strategies for Twenty Years of Puberty (by Einstein’s mustache, that’s a dystopia if I’ve ever heard one). Humans would mature normally, we just wouldn’t age as rapidly once mature. Somerville’s misunderstanding on the anti-aging point is indicative her perspective throughout the article.

How Somerville gets from reversing cellular damage to pig-hybrid xenotransplants as a way to slow aging I’m not sure. I’ve never encountered an argument for life-extension based on total organ replacement, save perhaps Outnumbering the Dead. As Somerville’s article has no citations, so it’s hard to know where she’s getting her information. I imagine her thought process around life-extension and xenotransplants was something like this: Transhumanists probably support both of those things, why make logical connections when you’ve got a movement to smear, am I right?

But let’s say we grant Somerville all of her erroneous points, and agree that xenotransplants from animals is a terrible, dangerous idea that will cause global catastrophy. Guess what, it doesn’t matter. Pig-as-organ-farm idea went out of vogue right about when we realized we could, uh, forget the pig. MIT researchers are beginning to figure out how to use a hydrogel scaffold to support and guide the growth of stem cells into new organs. If they get technique perfected, single stand-alone organs could be grown from your own cells – perfect matches made on demand. Or maybe we’ll just build artificial organs, like kidneys and lungs, and make everyone into cyborgs. No worries of robot-to-human virus transmission. Feel better, Marge?

Image from K Sandberg at Vintage Collective via Flickr

The full audio of the event can be streamed or downloaded from here.

We all pitched in to comment on the clip featuring Keanu Reeves learning kung fu through an apparently painful download in The Matrix. The panel consensus: if something like a neuroprosthetic arm for everyone is in the near future, downloading skills a la The Matrix is at the far end of the far future. Reasoning: there are hundreds of thousands of sensory and movement neural channels being activated while learning of kung fu (not even counting vision, which has a million channels per eye). To train the brain via download, we’d either need to excite those channels in just the same way artificially — at roughly normal speed — or figure out how to directly modify the many millions to billions of neurons in the brain that are changed while learning kung fu. Either option presents technical challenges we are far from overcoming.

I picked the Minority Report clip, which featured robotic spiders artfully killing any last doubts you might have had of having privacy in the future. In this clip, some police come to an apartment complex that they are searching for a person in, and release a platoon of nimble robot spiders. These spiders spread out and crawl up people to scan their retinas to identify each person in the building. They sense in the infrared (which is why Tom Cruise hides in a tub of cold water) to detect the warmth of live bodies to be scanned. One of the brilliant aspects of the way it’s shot, as a pan over top the exposed rooms of a floor of the building, is how it shows just how “normalized” the loss of privacy has become in the future, with one couple in the midst of a fight hardly pausing their exchange of blows to let the scan happen before starting to whale at each other again. It’s as natural as selling a row of pumpkins on FarmVille and losing your privacy through Facebook application data misuse.

There’s a few things I love about this segment of the film. The first is that, like most good sci-fi, it simultaneously makes you say “oh wow that’s cool,” while terrifying the crap out of you that this may be the endpoint of all the privacy failures we are being subjected to. Sci-fi as incubator of dreams and place to work out our anxieties about technology.  On a professional level, I also liked how center stage was not a humanoid robot for once, but rather a non-human biologically-inspired robot. I appreciate that story-tellers need robots that people can relate to, but the disconnect between what actually goes on in robotics (where humanoid robotics is a tiny fraction of research effort) and what’s always in the movies is sometimes jarring. Not only did Minority Report show a biologically-inspired robot, it showed them in exactly the context in which they make a lot of sense: solving problems that conventional machines and robots don’t do well, such as high agility motion that needs large amounts of sensory intelligence. Animals are fantastically agile. But agility requires a lot of flexibility in the way a body can move, and with that flexibility comes the great challenge of how to control all that movement for stable motion, and how to acquire enough sensory information to guide the body in a highly nimble way. It’s a fantastically complicated problem, and understanding how it works is precisely what motivates some of us who do research in this area.

I also liked how the makers of the movie went to the trouble to seek out a colleague who studies jumping spiders, Damian Elias at UC Berkeley, to get good sound of the spiders scampering around.

It’s interesting, as Sean Carroll noted for a similar panel he was part of  at Comic Con, how much demand there is for this kind of discussion. With the blogosphere and traditional media saturation of science and tech news, maybe this all portends the dawning of a new age of sci-fi for viewers who will be a lot more sophisticated in the kinds of stories that will get them intrigued.

Now a crew of scientists at Southern Methodist University is working on their own technique for creating two-way communications between an artificial limb and a user’s brain. It uses non-metallic polymers, and at its core, it uses the same principal as whispering galleries of the sort that can be found in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, or at certain parts of Grand Central Station in New York. Indeed, they call it a “whispering gallery mode.”

A person standing in the gallery outside the Oyster Bar in Grand Central could turn and face the wall, and speak a sentence. None of the rushing commuters and tourists walking through the gallery would hear a thing, but a person standing on the other side of the gallery, in exactly the right spot, would hear the first person’s voice as if s/he were standing right there.

The effect works because the shape of the gallery allows the sound wave to bounce up and around the wall with hardly any loss of energy. The effect only works if the gallery has just the right shape, and the people are standing the right distance apart, and it only works along a narrow band along the surface of the gallery, called the “mode.” Hence, the term “whispering gallery mode” to describe this technology.

Now imagine that instead of a great stone edifice covered in soot and filled with people, the gallery is a tiny polymer sphere. When the sphere is slightly deformed by an electric charge, light enters. When the sphere snaps back, light gets trapped in the sphere, zipping around and around, with hardly any loss of signal strength, until the sphere is deformed again.

A group of such spheres forms the crucial interface between a robotic limb and the nerves that communicate with it. The end of the nerve is surrounded by a cuff, which terminates in these tiny balls. When the brain sends a signal down the nerve, the electric pulse triggers the cuff, which then deforms the sphere, sending a beam of light to the prosthesis, which then moves.

The signal works the other way, too. The robotic arm can trigger the cuff or the nerve itself with infrared light, allowing for true two-way communication between the robotic limb and the brain.

Researchers at Southern Methodist University have already built a device that pretty much achieves all of these functions but it’s far too large, at several hundred microns. But they received a grant from DARPA or $5.6 million, and they’re hoping to build a robotic limb using this technology for a dog or a cat within the next two years. Just think: Doc Ock could have a little friend!

Anyone who’s had an EKG knows they’re a moderately unpleasant experience: Electrodes dangling long wires must be taped to your chest (which includes getting a patchy shave from the nurse, for the hirsute among us), which of course makes moving around the room a challenge when it comes to stress tests or other related examinations.

We’ll dispense with most of that stuff, if engineering doctoral candidate Yu Mike Chi and Dutch biotech IMEC have their ways in the market place.  Chi, who is still studying at the University of California-San Diego, devised a sensor that can pick up the electromagnetic pulses from heartbeats through layers of cloth, eliminating the need for direct skin contact. The sensors relay medical quality heart rate data to a nearby computer. The sensors can be embedded in a hospital gown in a medical environment, or eventually in clothing for ongoing data collection.

IMEC’s  sensors still have to be stuck to a patient’s body, but they’ve built them so they can communicate as a body area network to an Android smart phone. If a person using the BAN collapses or has some other medical emergency, the phone could call for help, and doctors or EMTs could review the data immediately prior to the patient’s collapse to make a diagnosis.

The problem for both devices will be familiar to anyone with a heavily used smart phone: battery life. Julien Penders, who designed the BAN for IMEC, told New Scientist he couldn’t use the BlueTooth wireless standard because it demanded too much power. By applying a nRF24L01+ standard, his network can transmit signals every 100 milliseconds  survive for seven days on a single charge.

Neither of these products is ready for market — Chi has two working prototypes and is looking for venture capital, and IMEC’s system isn’t ready for mass production —- but combine them and we’re starting to get something that worthy of the Enterprise: clothing  laden with biometric scanners that wireless broadcast medical data to a pocket computer.

Then again, there may be some privacy problems: I’d hate to suddenly start getting spammed by Pfizer, just because my BAN showed an increased pulse rate during an exciting movie.

For years, researchers have been using fluorescent proteins in bacteria and animals to study everything from gene therapy and neural development to cancer and limb regeneration (and create some very pretty pictures). The concept is fairly simple: by inserting the gene for GFP (green fluorescent protein, originally found in jellyfish) at the end of another gene—say the gene for hemoglobin—its glow can be used to measure how much hemoglobin is produced and where it is produced in the cell.

Inspired by the success of GFP as a research tool (it earned its discoverers the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008), scientists have adopted a similar approach to identify and locate transplanted stem cells in animal models. Except in their case, they’ve begun to use the gene for luciferase, the enzyme responsible for the mesmerizing glow of the firefly. And if this method works, it could make stem cells a potent tool for addressing heart disease.

Bioluminescent imaging (BLI), as the method is known, uses the light emitted when luciferase catalyzes the oxidation of luciferin, a pigment (which is strong enough to be perceived even across multiple tissue layers), to track embryonic and adult stem cells in small animals. Though it lacks the spatial resolution of more advanced imaging technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging, BLI has already proven useful in observing stem cells in vivo. What might make BLI even more useful is if it could also shed light (pun intended) on the stem cells’ differentiation status—that is, whether or not they are doing their job. For instance, if a doctor wanted to use stem cells to treat a stroke patient, it would be helpful if she could monitor the cells’ progress visually and determine whether or not they were forming new neurons. Thanks to some clever engineering, a group of researchers led by Steven Ebert of the University of Central Florida have developed a mouse embryonic stem (mES) cell line that glows more brightly the faster it develops into new cardiac tissue. This cell line could vastly improve doctors’ understanding of how diseased hearts recover and how stem cells can guide the regenerative process. Eventually, it could even eliminate the need for some forms of heart surgery.

They did so by tying the expression of the luciferase gene (LUC) to that of Ncx-1, a gene that encodes a protein that removes excess calcium ions from cells and is crucial for proper nerve function. Because the Ncx-1 gene is only expressed in new tissue, Ebert and his colleagues used it to quantify tissue growth. As a control, they created two other mES cell lines in which the expression of luciferase was tied to other genes. The cell lines were otherwise identical to the Ncx-1-LUC cell line.

They injected both undifferentiated and differentiated versions of the cell lines into the left ventricles of several mice and measured luciferase activity (i.e., look for the pretty light) immediately. While they could see light in a few specimens, most showed little to no luciferase activity for more than a few hours at a time. Several days later, however, the light signals became stable and, in some cases, grew stronger over time—which indicated that the heart was regenerating. The mice that exhibited the strongest bioluminescence following the onset of cardiac differentiation were those that had received the Ncx-1-LUC cell line. By contrast, the mice that had received the cell lines in which luciferase was linked to another gene did not display increased bioluminescence following differentiation. In fact, some displayed less bioluminescence.

Though all the usual caveats apply, the main advantage of this technique is that it could enable doctors to monitor the pace of recovery in a patient with cardiovascular disease without having to resort to surgery. After injecting the stem cells into the patient’s heart, a doctor would only need a microscope outfitted with a special camera lens to assess her progress. And the same approach could be used to evaluate a slew of other stem cell-based therapies. Since luciferase does not harm the stem cells’ performance or the human body, there is no reason why it couldn’t be used in other organs—perhaps the gene could be tweaked further to produce a unique glow for each organ. If and when the continuing litigation over embryonic stem cell funding is resolved, researchers will have a shiny new tool to aid them in their quest to turn stem cells into healers.

Image: Steven Ebert/UCF

Ickiness aside, biometrics have become less futuristic and more now-istic. The entire town of León, in central Mexico,  contracted with Global Rainmakers, Inc., to install iris scanning technology throughout the town. Locals will be able to use iris scanning to get on the bus, use ATMs, and get hospital care.

But the people of Leon might want to consider a report (free with registration) from the National Research Council before they go too far down that road, because there are some significant problems with going all biometric, all the time.

In biometrics, computers aren’t behaving like the human brain, which can match a picture of a thing with another picture as a unified whole. Instead, computers measure: for a face scan, it might be measuring nose length, the distance between the eyes, and so on. But these measurements change over time: Faces become jowly and wrinkled, fingers get fatter, even irises can change over time.

Thus, biometrics become an exercise in probability. Whereas a PIN can be an exact match (1,2,3,4,5 always always equals an idiot’s luggage code), the biometric scanner is hoping to get a good enough measurement so that it  can say this face is probably the one in its database. But in a probablistic model, there’s a chance of both false positives and false negatives, either of which could be awkward when a drunken Leonian wants to take the bus home, or the same Leonian, hungover the next day, needs to get a thousand pesos  from the ATM.

And there’s all sorts of chances for error: If the initial scan is bad, the whole database will be bad; if there’s poor lighting at the scanning point, or if equipment becomes old and worn. The report from the National Research Council goes into detail on all these problems.

And that’s just a part of the technological problem. There are of course significant social concerns of privacy invasion, since a unique eye scan becomes a central fixed point for all electronic interactions. And then there’s the problem of hacking.

Yes, yes, the point of biometrics is that it becomes a password that cannot be guessed or stolen. But as the NRC report notes, a hacker could find a way to submit the bit-code to the system and gain entry. If that happens once, the individual is screwed. Unlike a bank car, your eye cannot be canceled and replaced, nor your fingerprints, nor your palm. All that’s left is a transplant. And that seemed pretty unpleasant for Mr. Anderton.

I have seen the future, and it is cilia. Yes, you read that right: those trillions of tiny hair-like extensions that carpet every inch of your body could bring scientists’ visions of a universal class of “smart” materials that change and adapt when subjected to various stimuli closer to reality. These artificial cilia could one day do everything from testing drugs and monitoring air quality to measuring glucose levels and detecting electromagnetic fields.

While largely ignored over the past century (or, at best, dismissed as being purely vestigial), scientists are finally beginning to appreciate the many vital functions they perform in and outside of our bodies. Much like an antenna or sensor, cilia gather information from their surroundings and react—by activating a cellular process or shutting down cell growth, for example—if something seems amiss. They can also act as miniature roads or railways, carrying dirt, bacteria and other noxious materials out of our lungs or shuttling a fertilized egg from the ovary to the uterus. And, perhaps most importantly, cilia make it possible for us to see, hear, smell, and otherwise feel the outside world.

Now some researchers believe that cilia-like structures could bring their sensory prowess to medicine, environmental monitoring and a number of other fields. Leading the charge is Marek Urban of the University of Southern Mississippi who has created a copolymer film with hair-like filaments that mimics the functions of normal cilia.

Each of these artificial cilia is equipped with an array of sensors that enable it to respond to the slightest fluctuations in temperature, pH, or light by folding over, shrinking or even changing colors. These unique behaviors are the direct result of molecular rearrangements and conformational shifts in the structure of the copolymers. For instance, when Urban and his colleagues exposed the cilia to hydrochloric acid vapors, they immediately bent towards them and changed colors from yellow to red.

A longer exposure resulted in further bending and a change of color from red to purple. Yet when the researchers switched to using ammonium hydroxide vapors (which have a much higher pH), the cilia reverted to their original shape and color. The cilia similarly responded to variations in temperature and different wavelengths of light by shrinking, modifying their surface morphologies, and becoming fluorescent.

Though more proof of concept than anything else, this work clearly demonstrates the “smart” potential of these copolymers. And, as the NSF release notes, it looks like Urban and his collaborators aren’t wasting any time putting them through more trials and dreaming up new applications. If scientists can further expand their functionality and incorporate them into other technologies (eventually even our bodies), the cilia could become a ubiquitous component of our future everyday lives—helping to treat diseases or simply supplementing our sensory tool set by granting us new abilities.

Images: University of Iowa and Zina Deretsky/NSF

I had hoped for a good response to “The Most Dangerous Idea in the World,” but I must admit I did not expect the slew of comments, responses, and the huge Reddit thread that it triggered. You critiqued my stance on religion, on economic equality, on the value of suffering and death, on the benefits of technology, and on the “you support eugenics? what!?” level.  The value of any idea is how well it stands up to public scrutiny and debate. So allow me to put up my rhetorical dukes and see if I can’t land a few haymakers on your many counterpoints.

There were five big counterpoints to transhumanism that emerged from the comments. For the sake of clarity and brevity, I have paraphrased each.

1. Transhumanism is new-age, techno-utopian, “Rapture of the Nerds” pap.

2. Transhumanism will split society between rich transhumans and poor normals.

3. Without death, there will be overpopulation, insufficient resources, we’ll all get bored and bad old people will never go away.

4. Eugenics is bad. Period.

5. What if I don’t want to be transhuman?

And now, my answers:

1.) Transhumanism is new-age, techno-utopian, “Rapture of the Nerds” pap.

There are, I admit, strains of transhumanism that are rather embarrassing. Naive, utopian, ludicrous–call them what you will–the “technology will solve all of our problems with robot bodies” is an infantile and useless perspective. I am certainly not a Singularitian (fan of the “singularity”), nor do I operate under the delusion that the Big Goals of transhumanism (e.g. life extension, human level A.I., precise genetic engineering) will occur in my lifetime. Transhumanism, as I and most serious ethicists see it, is a philosophy that highlights the relationship between humans and technology in order to better understand the human condition. It recognizes our biology, our behaviors, and our biases as contingent, not essential, and therefore open to change. The fundamental purpose of transhumanism is to explore those potential, and often terrifying, routes of human change in a way that is as honest and objective as possible.

2.) Transhumanism will split society between rich transhumans and poor normals.

That is a real and frightening possibility. Many respected critics of transhumanism, including one of our own here at Discover Mag, make precisely this claim. The problem is that every new advancement has the potential to further split society. Alternatively, every new advancement can potentially level the playing field. Cellphones have nearly 75% global market penetration. Rural villages that still didn’t have land-lines a century after the telephone was invented now have access to a means of global communication. Technology is inherently neutral. It is only the society and culture in which it exists that determines whether or not it becomes a tool of oppression or liberation. Many, if not most transhuman organizations, mirror the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (where I am a program director) or the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, both of which are committed to ensuring transhumanism benefits humanity as a whole, not a select few.

3.) Without death, there will be overpopulation, insufficient resources, we’ll all get bored and bad old people will never go away.

Death, even of the natural kind at the end of a long life, is a pretty terrible and lazy solution to the world’s problems. For issues of overpopulation and resources, it’s worth remembering that as civilization advances, birth rates go down and population growth alters. This is not to say the problem will solve itself, but it does indicate that civilization’s indicators of progress are fundamentally changing. Growth is giving way to prosperous sustainability. Let’s work towards sustainability instead of avoiding life-extension, eh?

As for the existential arguments against life-extension, well, I’ve never heard a convincing one. What happens when we get bored or frustrated with our current lives? Usually we have some sort of crisis (e.g. mid-life), re-evaluate our goals and place in the world, and move in a new direction. And with radical life-extension, we won’t be “too old” to try something new, or even to start over. One could live a century in a particular way and,  instead of having a deathbed conversion of regret and longing, one could simply decide to start anew. Imagine having the option to have the life experience of a centenarian with a 24 year-old’s health and vigor.

Last point: no matter how many bad people die, new ones keep popping up. And in the process we keep losing some of humanity’s best and brightest, no matter how we try to hold on to them. If you sit around waiting for evil to just keel over an die, you’re doing it wrong.

4.) Eugenics is bad. Period.

Eugenics, like any technology, is neutral. “Eu” is actually the Greek root for “good.” The problem is that over history a lot of nasty people felt that they should be able to force their definition of “good” on others. Though Hitler is a common example, there was a eugenics program in the US for quite sometime that coercively sterilized those deemed unworthy to reproduce, due to race, economic status, and mental condition. Both programs are considered “negative eugenics” in that they prevent unwanted individuals from reproducing. Positive eugenics is different in two key ways. The first is that it is entirely voluntary. Whether parents want to merely screen for potential diseases, fine-tune every detail of their child’s traits, or leave the whole thing to chance is their prerogative. The second difference is that there is no “ideal”–the process is open ended. Instead of eugenics having a state-decreed goal like blond hair and blue eyes, every parent would decide what is best for their child. As most people want healthy, intelligent, happy children, those traits are what would define the “good” of positive eugenics.

5.) What if I don’t want to be transhuman?

Sorry friend, you already are. But I’m happy to let you decide how far to run with it. Transhumanists are not the Borg, folks. Resistance is not futile. Transhumanists merely want the option to move beyond biology to exist, not for it to be imposed.

For many cancer patients, treatment can be a double-edged sword. While recent advances in chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgery have brought relief to millions of sufferers, a significant fraction have had to sacrifice their ability to have children in return. Going under the knife or being bombarded by high-energy rays—though often critical for therapy—can sometimes irreparably damage a woman’s eggs or man’s testes, robbing them of their fertility. To say that this leaves young patients pondering therapy with an unenviable set of choices would be something of an understatement.

Fortunately, thanks to some groundbreaking work by researchers from Brown University, female patients may soon never have to make this most difficult of decisions. A team led by Sandra Carson, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology, has built the first synthetic human ovary from scratch by cobbling together the three cell lines involved in egg development—the theca cells, granulosa cells, and egg cells themselves—into a fully three-dimensional honeycomb-shaped structure.

The hope is that the artificial ovaries could eventually be harnessed to nurture and grow immature eggs removed from patients about to undergo therapy. (For lengthier procedures, the extracted eggs could even be cryopreserved before being placed into the lab-grown organs.) Once the treatment is over, the mature eggs, or ova, would be reinserted into the patients’ ovaries or, if these have sustained too much damage, fertilized in vitro and implanted into the uterus.

The underlying tissue engineering technology, called the 3-D Petri dish, was developed by Carson’s colleague, bioengineer Jeffrey Morgan. As the name implies, 3-D Petri dishes do a lot more than simply provide a comfortable medium for the cells to grow: they also direct them to assemble into specific 3-D shapes that can be combined with other cell clusters, Lego block-style, to construct larger “microtissues.” With it, the researchers coaxed the theca cells to form tiny honeycomb structures that they then filled with clumps of granulosa cells and egg cells. Like a normal ovary, the theca cells closed around the eggs and granulosa cells a few days later. And, like its human counterpart, the artificial ovary successfully fostered the eggs’ growth to maturation.

In addition to helping keep the patients’ child-bearing dreams alive, these artificial organs could offer scientists an unprecedented look at how the natural ovary develops and how various problems, including exposure to chemicals and radiation, can inhibit or even shut down egg development. The research could also help oncologists design better treatments that are just as effective, or even more so, but much less risky for the patients (and future children).

Images: Carlson Lab/Brown University and Morgan Lab/Brown University

Below are short excerpts of the guest scientists’ responses, with links to the full versions:

Ken Caldeira: “…If you could directly produce chemical fuel from sunlight and do it affordably, that could really be a game changer…”

Jack Horner: “…If we want to see an animal like a velociraptor, we will be able to create one by genetic engineering. It might even be possible to make something that looks like a T. rex…”

Oliver Sacks: “…We thought that every part of the brain was predetermined genetically, and that was that. Now we know that enormous changes of function are possible…”

Sylvia Earle: “…We’ve explored only about 5 percent of the ocean. For us to have better maps of the moon, Mars, and Jupiter than of our own ocean floor is baffling…”

Rodney Brooks: “…The arguments we have about drugs and sports are minuscule compared with what’s coming, such as ‘What is the definition of human?’ We have the Paralympics now, but we’ll have the Augmented Olympics in the future…”

Debra Fischer: “…Every year since 1995, we have discovered more extrasolar planets than the year before. A parallel thing could happen with extraterrestrial life: After we find one example, we’ll hone our strategies to be smarter and more efficient…”

Tachi Yamada: “…I don’t believe just because you’re poor, you shouldn’t have access to lifesaving technology…”

Neil Turok: “…The science has reached the point where questions that used to be just philosophy could be observationally testable in 10 or 20 years…”

Ian Wilmut: “…We should be able to control degenerative disorders like Parkinson’s and heart disease…”

Sherry Turkle: “…Sometimes a citizenry should not ‘be good.’ You have to leave room for real dissent…”

Brian Greene: “…We may establish that there is not a unique universe—that ours is just one of many in a grand multiverse. That would be one of the most profound revolutions in thinking we have ever sustained…”

If the oceans eventually become too acidified to sustain most marine life and the jellyfish take over, we can at least take solace in the fact that we’ll have an abundant source of renewable energy. GFP (Green Fluorescent Protein), the same protein isolated in Aequorea victoria that earned three researchers the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2008, has found a new lease of life in solar and fuel cells being developed by Zackary Chiragwandi at the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. Much like the dye found in cutting-edge dye-sensitized solar cells, GFP absorbs a specific wavelength of sunlight—in this case, ultraviolet light—to excite electrons that are shuttled off to an aluminum electrode to generate a current. After giving up their energy, the electrons are then returned to the GFP molecules, where they are ready for another round of stimulation (so to speak).

The cell’s design is simple: two aluminum electrodes are placed onto a thin layer of silicon dioxide, which helps to optimize light capture and energy conversion efficiency, and a single drop of GFP is deposited between them. Without prodding, the protein then self-assembles into strands to connect the electrodes and form a tiny circuit. While cheaper than conventional solar cells, dye-sensitized cells still require some costly materials and are hard to build, making these bio-inspired cells potentially a much more alluring proposition down the line. And because slightly different versions of GFP are found in a number of other marine species, there is the potential for an entire array of more finely tuned GFP cells.Chiragwandi and his colleagues also employed the same basic components to fabricate a rudimentary fuel cell. A mixture of reagents that includes magnesium and luciferase, an enzyme used for bioluminescence, produce the light that activates GFP’s electrons and help the device run—no direct sunlight needed. Because of its minuscule size and low power output, the fuel cell might be a good fit for a wide range of medical nanobots that could one day patrol our bloodstreams and treat our illnesses from within.

These devices are just the latest in a long line of renewable energy technologies that seek to bring down costs and boost efficiency by capitalizing on Mother Nature’s designs. Just a few weeks ago, 80beats’ Joe Calamia wrote about an Australian team’s discovery of chlorophyll f, a pigment that captures light in the infrared wavelength, in cyanobacteria. Since none of the current solar cells can absorb IR light, which accounts for over half of the sun’s rays, some researchers are already giddy at the prospects of harnessing this pigment for use in more efficient cells.

In the realm of science fiction, there’s also the “human” fuel cell (I almost hesitate to use the term since it inevitably brings to mind The Matrix‘s silly human batteries) being developed by a group of French scientists which Discovery News reported on several months back. This device would run on a combination of oxygen and glucose—theoretically ad infinitum—and could thus quite easily be implanted in not only humans but a variety of animals as well. Sure, it probably wouldn’t have much juice but, like the jelly-fuel cell, it could handily power those nanobots.

And if that’s all too highfalutin for you, there’ll always be the trusty poop-powered mobile.

Image: Clicksy/Flickr

While it may sound unheard of, scientists have been pressing bacteria into service in construction for years. The use of mineral-producing bacteria has already been explored in a variety of applications, including the hardening of sand and in repairing cracks in concrete. But there are two problems inherent to this approach. First, the reaction that these bacteria undergo to synthesize calcium carbonate results in the production of ammonium, which is toxic at even moderate concentrations. The other problem is a more prosaic one. Since the bacteria have to be applied manually, a worker or team of workers would have to go out every few weeks to patch up every little crack on every slab of concrete—nearly defeating the purpose of making the repair process simpler and more cost-effective.

Jonkers’ solution was to track down a different bacterial strain that could live happily buried in the concrete for prolonged periods of time. Because the bacteria would be mixed into the concrete from the start, they could immediately nip small cracks in the bud before they had a chance to expand and become exposed to water, rendering them vulnerable to further wear and tear. (Concrete structures are typically reinforced with steel bars, but these can easily become corroded when water seeps into the cracks.) Such a strain would have to endure the high pH environment of concrete and churn out copious amounts of calcium carbonate without also producing large quantities of ammonium.The researchers found just the right candidates: a hardy bunch of spore-forming bacteria belonging to the genus Bacillus that make a great living in the alkaline soda lakes of Russia and Egypt. Jonkers and his colleagues placed the spores and their food source, calcium lactate, into small ceramic pellets to prevent them from being activated prematurely by the wet concrete mix and adversely affecting the integrity of the material. The spores remained dormant until the formation of a crack allowed water to sneak in, waking the bacteria and their appetite. As they began to chow down, gobbling up the calcium lactate and water, they also began to pump out calcite (a very stable form of calcium carbonate), which quickly went to work filling up the holes. Now that they’ve successfully tested the bacteria’s mettle, Jonkers and his co-workers plan on comparing the strength of their natural concrete to that of the real thing. While not examined in the New Scientist story, I imagine that it should be possible to genetically tweak the bacteria into building a stronger form of calcite (or an even tougher material) that would match up more favorably to its man-made counterpart.

For those of you who would prefer to keep bacteria out of your walls (not that you need to worry, since these particular strains wouldn’t survive outside), there are other alternatives. Michelle Pelletier, an engineer from the University of Rhode Island, has created a microencapsulated sodium silicate healing agent that, like the bacteria, springs into action when a crack begins to appear. The sodium silicate reacts with the calcium hydroxide embedded in the concrete to form a malleable gel that covers the holes and hardens within a week of activation. According to Pelletier, the material may also help ward off corrosion by enveloping the steel bars in a thin, protective film.

Though their approaches to solving the problem may differ, both Jonkers and Pelletier tout the climate benefits of their inventions: Cement production already accounts for roughly 7 percent of worldwide carbon dioxide emission production, so any technology or procedure that could make concrete structures more durable would be a welcome development.

Image: sociotard/Flickr

At last week’s American Chemical Society (ACS) meeting, a group of scientists from the United Arab Emirates University announced that it had broken this trend by conducting the first large-scale survey of frog skin compounds. Over the course of a year, they managed to isolate close to 200 novel substances, as SciDev.Net‘s Christine Ottery reports, mostly from species endemic to African countries—a small drop in the bucket when compared to the 6,000 frogs (and thus many hundreds, if not thousands, of unique skin secretions they hope to collect) they have received from labs all around the world, but a significant step forward nonetheless.

These potent compounds, collectively known as antimicrobial peptides (which are strings of amino acids), are not only found in frog skin secretions, but in a range of other animals as well (us included) where they do triple duty warding off wave after wave of bacterial, viral, and fungal broadsides. Think of them as the body’s own antibiotics. And unlike those you buy from the pharmacy, which mostly only put a cap on further bacterial growth, these antibiotics consistently go for the kill—often dismantling their victims’ cell membranes, targeting vulnerable cell structures or destroying them outright.

This aggressiveness has proven to be something of a double-edged sword. While antimicrobial peptides work wonders against the legions of micro-invaders laying siege against our bodies, their zealousness can also work the other way around, attacking the very cells they are meant to protect. The UAEU researchers have been trying to mitigate this problem by tinkering with the peptides’ structure to make them less dangerous for humans but more deadly for pathogens.

Among the standouts they’ve already identified are one compound from the mink frog that fights “Iraqibacter” (Acinetobacter baumanii), a bacterium that inflicts drug-resistant infections on (surprise) wounded Iraq War veterans, and another from the foothill yellow-legged frog that could upend the formidable methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and other multi-drug resistant bacterial strains. Though only time will tell if these AMPs can be refined and turned into viable drugs, the second compound alone would easily justify the extensive testing required. And, who knows, there’s always the slight chance that we’ll really luck out and stumble upon some new miracle compound, or several, that could cure our most intractable diseases and potentially ward off future plagues.

The other, perhaps more important, question is whether these substances will work just as well in the human body as in the laboratory setting, where all of these experiments have been done. Even putting aside the peptides’ potential for mutual destruction, there is no way of knowing how altering them to make them compatible with our bodies will affect their efficacy. According to the researchers, clinical trials may only get underway 5 years from now. Let’s just hope there will still be enough frogs by then to sustain their work. Though it’s hard to put a number on it, I’d wager that we have already lost a significant number of promising antibiotic substances through our destruction of the rainforest and other highly biodiverse environments. Some day, the only thing standing between mankind and a devastating new pandemic could very well be a frog- or other animal-derived antibiotic substance.

Image: rainforest_harley/Flickr

Despite what you may think, this isn’t actually such an unusual pairing. By virtue of their simple design (most only contain enough genes to encode a few dozen proteins) and infinite capacity for manipulation, viruses have become the favored go-to tool for scientists seeking to explore cellular systems and tinker with their underlying components. Gene therapists have been infecting bacterial, plant, and animal cells with viruses for years in order to shuttle in new genes and repair malfunctioning ones. In one recent application, a team of researchers led by University of Pennsylvania ophthalmologist Arthur Cideciyan restored sight to two blind individuals by injecting a virus equipped with a retinal gene into their eyes.For others, the appeal of viruses lies in their aptitude for genetic engineering. A little over a year ago, a group of MIT scientists led by Angela Belcher successfully transformed the M13 bacteriophage, a virus harmless to humans, into the cathode and anode of a lithium-ion battery. In 2006, the same team had tweaked several of the M13′s genes to make it self-assemble into a negatively-charged paper-thin film that could be used as an anode.

Constructing the cathode proved to be more of a challenge because the materials used to make it needed to be highly conducting—and most such materials tend not to be. To get around that problem, Belcher and her colleagues imbued the viruses with the ability to attract iron and phosphate along their thin, filamentous bodies and paired them up with carbon nanotubes to create dense networks of conductive material.

Unlike conventional batteries, these can be molded to fit any shape and could eventually be sprayed onto a range of other devices. The virus batteries can also be assembled in a more environmentally friendly way: at normal room temperatures and without relying on toxic chemicals. The ease with which researchers can alter their properties—to change the battery’s design or, say, to switch to a better cathode—by simply turning on or off one gene or another only makes them more attractive. This week at the American Chemical Society (ACS) meeting, Mark Allen, a postdoctoral researcher from Belcher’s lab, reported that they had done just that—engineer the virus’ genetic code slightly differently to make an iron fluoride cathode. That’s important because the use of current lithium ion battery technologies is severely limited by their relatively low energy density. Metal fluorides have shown promise because they do a better job of maximizing energy density, particularly when used in the cathode. Their Achilles’ heel is their cycle life, which is much shorter than existing batteries, but some research indicates that infusing them with oxygen could resolve that issue.

Another research group led by James Culver from the University of Maryland announced that it had also made the parts for a lithium-ion battery by using the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV), which infects tobacco plants. In a study published this month, he and his colleagues demonstrated that their virus-built silicon anode had roughly 10 times the capacity of current graphite anodes. One advantage of Culver’s design is that the batteries could eventually be grown (quite literally) in the field by farmers—though that is at least several years away. And while these batteries will initially be developed for the military to lighten soldiers’ loads on the battlefield, there is no reason why they couldn’t eventually make their way into your next shirt or pair of shoes. Perfect for when that invisible dress goes out of style.

Image: Donna Coveney/MIT

The major challenge that scientists face is developing a sensor that is both long-lived and biocompatible. The human body is extremely picky about implants, and will quickly reject or react poorly to most materials found in everyday electronics. Even the materials that make peace with the body’s immune system, like those found in pacemakers, are not always ideal. Some require constant maintenance, while others need to be replaced every few days and are inconvenient to install, to say the least.

But external devices have their own problems. Patients often forget to wear portable devices like glucose monitors, making it more difficult for their physicians to evaluate their condition over extended periods of time. And imagine how annoying it would be to walk around with several monitors because your doctor wanted to track multiple vital signs. A much better alternative would be a single, unobtrusive, and long-lived implant that could detect and measure several chemicals in the body at once.

Fiorenzo Omenetto, a biomedical engineer at Tufts University, may have the solution: a tiny flexible biosensor wrapped in silk and gold. Long-time DISCOVER readers will already be familiar with the many benefits of silk and its numerous potential applications in medicine—there’s a reason we’ve been trying to mass-produce spider silk for years. In addition to being super-tough and stretchy, silk also happens to be a great fit for most tissue surfaces in the body.

What makes gold an appealing component is its unique electromagnetic properties. Along with a number of other highly conducting metals, including silver and copper, gold can be tweaked on a nanoscale level and combined with other materials to respond to frequencies in the terahertz range, which sits at the far end of the infrared range. These artificial composites, called metamaterials, have vaulted into the popular imagination in recent years due to their frequent association with the Harry Potter invisibility cloak.

As it turns out, enzymes and other proteins in the body resonate at specific frequencies within this range (they have their own “T-ray” signatures), making them easy to identify with the right type of antenna—the biosensors. To build the sensors, Omenetto and his colleagues took 1 square centimeter silk film squares and sprayed them with a gold-based metamaterial sheen. They then folded them up into small cylinders and implanted them into muscle tissue. Even buried under several thin slices of muscle, the sensors still resonated at their characteristic frequencies.

The sensor works by detecting subtle changes in the silk substrate that are caused by blood proteins and other chemicals floating around it in the tissue. Once the metamaterial picks up on the molecules’ distinct T-ray signatures, it transmits the information back to the researchers. In the case of a diabetic patient, for instance, the metamaterial would be able to track minute variations in glucose and insulin levels. As Omenetto puts it, the sensor is effectively “a lot of small antennas that behave as one.”

The possibilities of this sensor in research and medicine could be limitless. The ability to detect tell-tale signs of diabetes, cancer and a variety of other severe diseases would make treatments much more effective and tailored to the individual patients. Though the field is still in its infancy, startups like GlySens Incorporated and Physiologic Communications are hoping to capitalize early on the growing wave of interest in this technology. In addition to tracking small-scale changes in protein levels, the sensors could eventually be used as remotes to activate other devices in the body, such as a wireless defibrillator or insulin pump. And there may come a day when we can check our health status via an iPhone app. Of course, I’m still holding out hope for Fantastic Voyage-style mini-submarines to monitor the body, but that’s a different story.

Image: Hu Tao/Tufts University

You may not be consciously aware of it, but at any given time your brain is playing host to billions of simultaneous conversations (and no, I’m not talking about those voices). I speak, of course, of the conversations between your neurons—the incessant neural jabbering that makes it possible for you to move your limbs, learn, remember, and feel pain. Every time we experience a new sensation or form a memory, millions of electrical and chemical signals are propagated across dense networks of axons and jump from one synapse to the next, building new neuronal connections or strengthening existing ones. And they are constantly changing—forming and reforming associations with other neurons in response to how the brain perceives and processes new bits of information.

Despite being central to our understanding of how the brain functions, these neural chats remain largely a mystery to scientists. What exactly are the individual neurons “saying” to each other? And how do these electrical and chemical “messages” become translated into actions, memories, or a range of other complex behaviors? To help decipher these discussions, a team of researchers from the University of Calgary led by bioengineer Naweed Syed have built a silicon microchip embedded with large networks of brain cells. The idea is to get the brain cells to “talk” to the millimeter-square chip—and then have the chip talk to the scientists through a computer interface.

Syed’s team demonstrated that it was possible to fuse neuronal networks to a microchip in 2004 when they created the original “brain on a chip,” the first bionic hybrid technology of its kind. The neurochip stimulates the cells and the resulting chatter—the activity of the neurons at the level of the ion channels and synaptic ends—can be recorded with a computer. At the time, Syed and his colleagues used the chips to eavesdrop on snail neurons, which are large (4 to 10 times larger than human neurons) and thus easier to cultivate than other animal brain cells.

The new version also relies on snail cells but is automated—a major improvement which means that just about anybody can now learn how to properly grow the cells on them. Furthermore, they offer a much higher degree of resolution and are more accurate. Whereas the first neurochips only enabled scientists to monitor the chatter between two brain cells, the new and improved models now allow them to listen in on entire networks and pick up on all the minute neural exchanges.

Aside from giving researchers unprecedented access to the brain’s innermost workings, the hope is that this technology will pave the way for new drugs to treat neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson’s and advanced prostheses that better mimic normal human motion by communicating directly with the brain. Over the coming months, Syed and his team plan on cultivating the neurons of a group of epileptic patients on their chips in order to study the cells’ dysfunctional activity.

People who suffer from epilepsy are wracked by frequent seizures which are brought on by unusual and excessive neuronal chatter. By honing in on the defective ion channels that trigger these abnormal signals, Syed believes that his chips will yield crucial insights into the disease and lead to a more effective treatment. If proven successful, the same model could be applied to other brain disorders, eventually eliminating the need to test drugs directly on patients—or at least providing a good pilot study before moving on to patients—and thus greatly accelerating the pace of research and development. It’s the same principle as the lung-on-a-chip, which scientists hope will lead to new drug-testing protocols that obviate the need for animal subjects.

It’s certainly not hard to see the appeal of these technologies. Everyone can get behind the idea of faster drug-development cycles and more finely tuned treatments, especially if it means that no humans or animals will be harmed in the process. In several years, after they become more sophisticated and ubiquitous, these neurochips could give a big boost to the fight against brain disorders, which are some of the trickiest puzzles in medicine.

Image: Yale

Tattoos are a nerd’s best friend. The Loom’s science tattoo emporium is all the proof I need. But Frog Design‘s idea for Dattoos takes things to the next level:

The concept of the Dattoo arose in response to current trends towards increasing connectivity and technology as self-expression. To realize a state of constant, seamless connectivity and computability required the convergence of technology and self. The body would need to literally become the interface. Computers and communication devices require physical space, surfaces, and energy. The idea of DNA tattoos (Dattoos) is to use the body itself as hardware and interaction platform, through the use of minimally-invasive, recyclable materials.

The picture reminds me of the Buzz Lightyear/ Turanga Leela style forearm computer. That seems like a pretty practical place to put a Dattoo. I have a few other ideas:

1. Put a Dattoo on the palm of your hand, for more interesting waving and “talk to the hand” gesturing.
2. On the bicep, for wearing your Facebook status/latest tweet on your sleeve.
3. Upside-down on your stomach, for the world’s most entertaining navel gazing.

Dattoos are a long, long way off — it’s currently just a concept design, not a technology plan — but I can imagine artists like Lady Gaga and Marina Abramović coming up with crazy ideas for installations and projects. Or, you know, it could be used to make people healthier, I guess. My daily subway commute would sure be even more colorful. Can someone make this happen, please?

Image via FrogDesign.com

In the not too distant future, the phrase “shooting up” could take on a whole new meaning. At least if the U.S. Army has its way. Wired‘s Danger Room blog reported a few days ago that the military is seeking bids for a high-tech form of vaccination that could be delivered quickly and efficiently to a large number of troops in the heat of battle. More specifically, the Pentagon wants a DNA vaccine that can be administered via a literal shot to the arm—and a jolt of electricity. All without causing too much “discomfort” to the patient, of course.

Suffice it to say that this futuristic-sounding vaccine would be a far cry from what you and I received as children. As last year’s swine flu epidemic made painfully clear, our current methods of vaccine development, which have remained essentially unchanged for decades, are woefully outdated. The vaccines take too long—upwards of seven months—to produce, are easily prone to failure if not prepared correctly and, in many cases, lose their potency after only a year. These failings have helped draw attention to DNA-based vaccines, cocktails of genetically engineered plasmids which offer the promise of inducing a stronger, and more targeted, immune response. Where regular vaccines are slow to develop and hard to combine, DNA vaccines can be made relatively quickly and mixed together to ward off multiple pathogens at once. They are also generally safer to produce and administer, more durable and can be scaled more easily.

Like other vaccines, however, they are still primarily injected into muscles and thus suffer from the same inefficiency problems. Because the DNA is not injected directly into the host cells but into the spaces between them (the “intracellular spaces”), the vaccine first needs to be taken up before the cells can mount a robust response and pump out the necessary disease-fighting proteins.

The two main alternatives cited in the Army’s solicitation are gene guns and intramuscular electroporation. The first gene gun was designed in the 1980s by a Cornell University scientist as a tool with which to transform plant cells by blasting them with microscopic DNA-coated gold or tungsten beads carried on a powerful whiff of helium gas.

Gene guns have since focused their crosshairs on animals and humans alike, particularly after the Army recently embraced them as their vaccine delivery method of choice. The main downside is that it can only deliver small quantities of DNA, not the two or more vaccines at a time that the Army wants. Intramuscular electroporation, which improves vaccine uptake by temporarily opening pores in their membranes through short bursts of electricity, can be used to supply sufficient amounts of DNA, but it comes at a cost: pain. So what ideal device would the Army like?

The optimal vaccination strategy would capitalize on the efficiency of electroporation, eliminate the discomfort associated with intramuscular injection, and be useful for simultaneous delivery of two or more DNA vaccines. A minimal successful outcome would provide effective delivery with reduced discomfort for one DNA vaccine.

For the moment, electroporation seems to be the method of choice among the companies operating in this burgeoning field. Inovio, a Pennsylvania-based startup that has emerged as one of the field’s dominant players, claims that its electroporation system can boost cellular uptake of a vaccine 1,000-fold or more. The company employs a handheld needle-electrode applicator tethered to an electric pulse generator to inject the vaccine into skin or muscle and deliver a few short zaps of electricity to jostle the cells into taking it up. Unlike most such electroporation systems, Inovio claims its own is relatively painless—”tolerable without anesthetic.” But it’s important to bear in mind that while DNA vaccines are making concrete progress, they still have quite a ways to go before they supplant conventional vaccines. (Plasmid purification, in particular, remains a challenge.) With any luck, the Army will have found its desired device by the time the first DNA vaccines hit the production line.

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