While the Prawns seem to have mastered DNA-detecting technology, it remains a bit beyond our reach out here in the real, human world. But that may be the next big frontier in biometrics. Because, let’s face it, the typical kinds of biometric security used in of the lairs of movie super-villains isn’t science-fiction anymore—it’s reality.

Fingerprint scan? We can do that on a laptop, or even a mere thumb drive. Palm scan? Pssh. Placing a hand on the scanner is passé. Retinal scan? Of course. Facial recognition? Voice recognition? Done and done. All of these different biometrics has been exploited by security companies trying to make money in a world where verifying authenticity is becoming an increasing problem. But the biological signature big business and national governments really want to capture is DNA. Unlike our faces and voices, it never changes. Unlike our fingerprints, it’s very difficult to fake. And except for identical twins, it’s totally unique to each individual (and it may soon be possible to distinguish even identical twins [pdf]). Because this technology would be so valuable, everyone from the Austrian national government to major corporations is toiling away (pdf) in their R&D departments to  develop a DNA biometric lock.

But fear not, defenders of privacy: Science is still reasonably far (pdf) from using DNA for a biometric lock. First, there’s the sampling problem. There was a time when the only way to get a useful DNA sample was to get a drop of blood or a swab of tissue from inside the person’s mouth. And while it would probably be fair to force Tom Cruise to prick his finger every time he wanted to gain entry to the Mindhead—err, the Scientology—err, his secret hideaway, useful DNA can be extracted from skin cells just by using a simple adhesive piece of paper. Still, not optimal for a lock and key device.

Then the DNA has to be amplified and sequenced. It’s a staple of Hollywood crime shows that DNA this process can be accomplished in a matter of minutes, but in reality it takes hours to run the polymerase chain reaction. Then the amplified DNA has to be sequenced, and only then can it be matched up to an encoded “lock” to see if the person can be admitted. Again, watching Tom Cruise stand fuming for three hours outside the fortress of solitude is a pleasing thought, but it’s not really going to happen.

Still, there are a number of other DNA-oriented tricks companies are trying. Applied DNA Sciences, a company in Stony Brook, NY, has discovered a way to layer plant DNA into one-of-a-kind objects, like art work, or antiques, that they swear will have no effect on the object. They also can layer the DNA into ink and toner, allowing the possibility of printing money or credit cards with a DNA signature that could be read with a special scanner.

Of course, the fast way to figure this stuff out would be to reverse-engineer some handy alien weapons and see just what makes the weapons work or not work. Did the human scientists in District 9 think of that? Well, that would be a spoiler, now wouldn’t it?

Will we use metal in the future? What else would we build things out of? Might we use organic technology (machines and buildings made of or from biological organisms) instead?”
In The Graduate, that iconic film from 1967, bewildered 20-something Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) gets some career advice from a businessman who leans close and intones “I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? Plastics.” Benjamin didn’t follow that advice, but the rest of the world did, and in spades. By 1979, global production of plastic had exceeded that of steel and is still growing, reaching over 200 million tons this year. There’s no doubt that plastic will continue to play a major role in how we make things, but it won’t replace everything.

In some ways, plastic is the material of the future, the latest step in humanity’s long upward trek through the ages of stone, bronze, iron, and steel. The word “plastic” comes from Greek roots meaning “capable of being molded.” Compared to metals and other materials, plastic is infinitely versatile. With its ability to shape-shift and to take on different mechanical and optical properties, it shows up in a huge spectrum of applications from packaging and plumbing to toys, medical supplies, and computers. And unlike iron and steel, plastic doesn’t rust.

But plastic also has problems that will prevent it from replacing metals any time soon. Its very durability can be an issue. Discarded plastic objects can survive for centuries in garbage landfills without degrading, and plastic artifacts have been found polluting the oceans far distant from any land. Also, what doesn’t seem to be widely appreciated, the raw material to make plastic comes from a resource we need to conserve, petroleum.

On top of this, metals do some things better than plastic—just try cutting up an apple with a plastic knife. Copper and other metals are needed to conduct electricity through power grids; all plastic can do is insulate the current-carrying wires. However, plastic is making inroads relative to some materials such as wood, which is being replaced by plastic “lumber” in certain applications.

Plastic also offers a possible way to actually construct things using biotechnology. Unlike metals, which are classified as inorganic, plastics are organic; they’re made of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, the same constituents as living things, which links plastic to biological products. For instance, under the right conditions, certain microorganisms can synthesize compounds called polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs). These display properties like those of artificial plastics, with the benefits that they’re not petroleum-based and are biodegradable. Researchers are investigating ways to mass-produce these bioplastics, for instance by bioengineering plants to create them.

If you want to speculate even further, way past the idea of growing plastic rather than making it in factories, think about the science-fictionish possibility of bioengineering plants to produce plastic exactly in a desired shape from a drinking cup to a house. Current biotechnology is far short of this possibility, but science fiction has a way of pointing to the future. If bioplastics are the materials breakthrough of the 21st century, houses grown from seeds may be the breakthrough of the 22nd.

“There was a day and time when authors didn’t worry about making technology work. You just had to have the spaceship work,” said Staffel. “These days, technology is changing at such a rapid rate, that the science-fiction writer has to compete with reality in a way they didn’t before. People also understand technology more so than in the past, so if it isn’t right, the reader will spot it.”

The panelists—Greg Bear (City at the End of Time), David Williams (Burning Skies), Dani and Eytan Kollin (The Unincorporated Man) and Kirsten Imani Kasai (Ice Song)—cited alternative energy sources, environmental decay, eventual development of quantum computing, and man/machine interfaces in military and biotech arenas as technologies with the most impact on society.

“Biotech is transforming everything,” said Bear. “It has resulted in the removal of the middleman between audience and creator. But removing teachers and experts from the throne is not always such a good thing.”

Williams mines the weaponization of outer space and cyberspace, and military application of civilian technology for ideas.

“The only thing that’s cooler than ‘x’ is blowing ‘x’ up,” he laughed. He also noted the acceleration of technology will redefine our lives and ourselves. “In the next few decades, the focus will be less on what kind of energy we have and more on how we use it, what we define as human, and huge segments of the population retreating into religious denial, because technology is coming at them so rapidly.”

In The Unincorporated Man, the Kollins brothers explore the economic implications of technology and true nature of freedom. That story chronicles the last unowned man in a world where humans have become incorporated and no longer own a majority of themselves.

“Economics is the study of how masses of humans behave with a series of rules and using it to predict behavior,” said Eytan. “What happens when you really understand this and can manipulate the human mind?”

“We simultaneously want to be freed by technology, but we are also terrified by it,” added Dani. “And we should be terrified. Technology offers better ways to live and quicker ways to kill. Even if we used technology to create the perfect world, we’d probably screw it up, because that’s the nature of the human condition. It’s in that middle ground that we get to write our stories.”

For research, the novelists relied on science journals, Google searches, and getting the appropriate scientist to vet their writing for accuracy. “A scientist writing science-fiction is still only a specialist in one area,” says Williams.

Even when the science is stretched, it still must adhere to the universe imagined in the story. “Even if it’s excellent research, you only need a nugget of it, because it’s fiction,” says Kasai. “You can create a separate new reality as long as you operate according to the rules of that new reality.”

—Guest-blogger Susan Karlin

But producing synthetic human blood has been a grail of sorts of the medical profession for decades. Imagine, no more public-service messages on the radio, begging for donations, no more blood donor trucks. If synthetic blood came into being, there would be no more searching for exact blood types, or fear of contracting blood-born diseases from transfusions. Heck, the entire blood-for-cookie market would collapse, and I mean that in the best way possible. And it may actually happen, possibly within the next few years.

Last year, scientists working for Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) published results in the journal Blood that showed they could produce functioning, oxygen-carrying red blood cells from stem cells. By selecting stem cells from embryos that produce O-negative blood (universal donor), ACT could theoretically produce synthetic blood that anyone could receive.

But they have a scaling problem. ACT managed to produce five billion red blood cells from a single stem cell. But a liter of adult blood contains between four and six trillion red blood cells. The Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service (ScotBlood), a kind of Red Cross for the UK, will try to pick up where ACT left off, developing technology that will allow for industrial-scale production of synthetic blood. Marc Turner, a  Edinburgh University scientist and head of ScotBlood, hopes to have a proof of concept within a few years, but he told the BBC he thinks it could be 10 years before full production is a reality.

Of course, the one question really left outstanding is this: Once we have TruBlood, will we also find out that there have been vampires living among us? ‘Cause I’ve been watching the show, and I’m not sure that’s such a good thing.

But mostly I want to talk about pyrokinesis. And if you’re curious about that, you gotta click the jump, to avoid pesky spoilers from last night’s episode.

Whatever one wants to say about Fringe’s science, we should at least concede that they know their science fiction. The word pyrokinesis was indeed, as Walter tells us, invented by Stephen King though he certainly didn’t come up with the idea of people starting fires with their brains (King himself has admitted his indebtedness to previous sci-fi stories).

But can it be done? Well, technically, no. Brain waves generate hardly any energy, not even enough to light a light bulb. The ignition point of a piece of wood is about 307º F, and the ignition temperature of human fat is 480º F. Lighting them on fire would require far more than thought. (Thought plus gasoline and a match would do the trick. But I digress.)

For pyrokinesis believers, the theory is that people with the ability to set fires with their minds rely on a subatomic particle called a pyrotron. But while this idea gets some attention in the, ahem, alternative lifestyles press, it gets no attention from Google Scholar. Well, no attention, except for the fact that the term is widely used to describe certain pieces of scientific equipment. Oh, and the Australian government calls its fire-wind tunnel simulator a pyrotron, too.

There have, of course, been any number of reported cases of people with the pyrotechnics ability. I read several, and they were generally magicians’ tricks, but the best has to be A.W. Underwood, from all the way back in 1882. (Confession: I found his tale through Wikipedia.) Underwood managed to convince everyone in the town of Paw Paw, Michigan, that he had the ability to start fires with his thoughts. Dr. L.C. Woodman, a physician from the area, examined Underwood and came away convinced the phenomenon was real, and he even wrote his study up for Scientific American. The controversy about Underwood raged until Dr. R. Thomas, writing in The Medical Age, in 1883, revealed a possible method for the trick, one he had performed himself. First, he would store phosphorus in his mouth, near a gum. When he wanted to perform, he would hold a hanky to his mouth (”Seldom my own,” he writes) and spit the phosphorus into it. Then he’d rub the hanky in his hands. Bam! Houston, we have hanky ignition. Since phosphorus combusts at a temperature near that of the body, the extra friction was all that was needed to cause it to ignite. Thomas thought Underwood had to be using the same technique.

While that trick would certainly still work, I postulate another way to perform  pyrokinesis. Given that we now have the ability to use a toy to move objects with brain waves alone, couldn’t those brain waves just as easily trigger a computer that then flicked on a lighter? You might call that cheating. And I might set you on fire with my brain—with an assist to my trusty pyro-bot.

Moving on (and spoilers below). The linchpin of the episode was a character who, thanks to the experimental and fictional) Cortexifan treatment he received as a child, developed the ability to spread his emotions to people nearby. When he’s depressed and considering suicide, a nearby person might consider, say, jumping in front of the No. 7 Train (which is the most reliable train in New York. Again, just trying to be helpful here).  Obviously, here in the real world, emotions can’t be aggressively spread to random strangers…well, unless they’re looking at you…and talking to you… and generally interacting with you. OK, they can be spread to random strangers, just less strongly.

There’s a tower of research amply demonstrating that human groups respond to each other’s emotional moods.   We read other people for facial expressions, posture, and gestures and we respond by modifying our own responses to fit theirs. The tone and word selection of people we are talking to also influences our moods, especially when these people use strong negative terms like “hate” or “awful.” Recent research even shows that these emotional cues other people give off trigger different reactions in the parts of our brains that govern emotional response.

But those are all small group or person-to-person interactions. In December, Harvard and UC-San Diego scientists published findings showing that happiness can even spread across large groups. Their 20-year study of 4,739 people, they showed that happiness spread across different small group sub-units of the larger sample. A happy person could affect the moods of people with three degrees of separation.

But in Fringe we understand that the reverse-empathetic effect is caused by Cortexifan, an experimental drug from Walter Bishop. As yet, there are no drugs that amplify our ability to impose our emotions on others, but there’s a whole class of them that do amplify our ability to respond. Entactogens or empathogens (the debate rages over the proper name) are a whole class of drugs that improve our ability to empathize with those around us. The most famous member of this group, Ecstasy, has been heavily studied for its legendary ability to make people love one another, which is why it gets the fabulous nickname, the Hug Drug. You know when a nickname makes it’s way into scientific papers, it’s fabulous. Also, no longer cool. Again, just trying to help.

A geneticist combined these different creatures to produce one new, scary one. The beast went on a rampage, injecting its eggs into several people, and before we knew it larvae were bursting out rib cages. Ick, for sure.

But what I found most intriguing were the organisms the geneticist decided to combine. What was his plan. Here’s a look:

Gila monster: One of two venomous lizards in the world. The gila monster generally lives unobtrusively in the American Southwest.  It’s venemous, but the venom is generally used in self-defense.

Why the Fringe Monster needed it: Not sure, really. Gila monsters can eat a lot food at one time and then not eat for a while, a trait which might be useful.

Tiger: Tigers are solitary hunters who typically live across southern and eastern Asia. They’re also cats, and possibly vulnerable to having their bellies rubbed, but I’m not sure I’d try that. Seems like a good way to have my head playfully batted off my shoulders.

Why the Fringe monster needed it: I think it had to be for size. Tigers can get to be nine feet long and weigh 600 pounds. Most of the ingredients described to us are small or even tiny creatures. Maybe they used the tiger to provide the bulk for the beast.

Parasitic wasp (Megarhyssa macrurus): There are actually several species of  M. macrurus, but they share the characteristic of preying on the larvae of beetles, weevils, or butterflies.

Why the Finge monster needed it: These wasps lay their eggs via a long ovidepositor, just like our friend the monster. The female wasp injects the eggs into the host, and the larvae feed until they go into chrysalis. After chrysalis, the mature wasp eats its way out of the host. (This life cycle has been grist for the science fiction mill before, being the inspiration for the modus operandi of the eponymous creature in Alien and its sequels.)

Vampire Bats (Desmodus rotundus): The common vampire bat, made famous through the ages as a carrier of rabies, but also as the inspiration for Satan’s bat wings.

Why the Fringe monster needed it: On the show, it’s exposited that the bat is the solution for a fundamental problem in combining beasts: How do you get the beast not to reject its hybrid parts? Bats, they tell us on the show, have a special immune system that allows the bat to carry diseases without being infected by them. Well, I couldn’t find evidence of that (though I’m happy to have the way pointed to me). What I did find is that bats, especially vampire bats, carry rabies, and in fact are the primary vector for rabies in humans. They can also carry ebola virus, and maybe other things. But it’s not clear they do this any differently than any other rodent.

But vampire bats offer a number of other useful traits for a big monster. As hunters, they are incredibly quick. Typically they will land near prey, then creep up on it and leap at the last second to pounce on it, no doubt with a malicious blood-sucking grin on their tiny faces. Once there, their saliva has an anti-coagulant that allows them to suck blood until they’re sated or unseated from their hold. What monster worth its salt wouldn’t want those skills?

Fringe never gives us a hint of what this monster might have been intended for. Possibly it was simply a proof of concept. But the combination of beasts is suspicious: two stalking predators, two venomous creatures, and one that lays its eggs inside another creature. Plus they grew it really big. Was the plan to unleash this bad boy on Tokyo?

I can’t think of any, (eliminating of course, those inevitable mid-episode first attempts, where the cast has often overlooked some crucial piece of the puzzle that they figure out by the end), except perhaps for a failed attempt to stop an epidemic on an episode of Babylon 5 way back in 1995. But that’s the kind of cliche-breaking madness we’re coming to expect from  Fringe. In last night’s episode (warning, spoilers follow!), our heroes were faced with the inexplicable presence of a boy who had somehow survived for 70 years in a sealed underground vault. The boy was mute, though he seemed to understand English well enough, so our resident mad scientist Dr. Walter Bishop (literally mad. Non-fans may not know, but he was in a psychiatric hospital for years) donned his white lab coat and got to work. His neuro stimulator (”What can’t it do?”) was supposed to read the boy’s brainwaves and convert them to speech, but aside from a voice-like noise, it simply didn’t work. And then…the plot moved on. No more neurostimulator. On with the show!

But I do wish someone had at least given poor Dr. Bishop a nice sip of cognac and a there-there pat. Science is nowhere near achieving what he was trying to achieve. Neuroscientists have been working with functional MRI scanners since at least early 1990s to sift out speech patterns from brain waves, but they’ve been stymied by all the other signal noise that go with speech. Silly little activities like breathing have been giving them fits.

At the end of last year, Dutch scientists from Maastricht University had a breakthrough. Dr. Elia Formisano and her team discovered that the brain gives each phoneme of speech a unique code or fingerprint that shows up in the fMRI data.  Then, whenever the brain hears the sound, no matter who or what is uttering it, the brain combines the different fingerprints into coherent speech. By reading the code, Formisano and her team discovered they could parse out different sounds, and even who is speaking them. Ultimately, they hope to be able to combine those sounds and tell what words are being heard.

So, to sum up, we’ve got brain-scanning computers that can hear what we hear, see what we see, and possibly even move based on our thoughts. Hellooooooo SkyNet.

Last night’s episode was about a crash project to grow beef (or at least something beeflike) without the cow. Unfortunately, according to the company’s long suffering food taster, their initial efforts tasted more like “despair.”

Growing edible meat in a vat is classic staple of science fiction, but its has also been a goal of several real researchers ever since 1908, when Alexi Carrel kept some chicken heart tissue alive and growing in a nutrient bath. The pace has quickened since the turn of the 21st century, with the non-profit research organization New Harvest being founded in 2004 to support work in developing “cultured meat.”

As pointed out at the conclusion of last night’s episode of Better off Ted, the problem isn’t so much the basic idea, but getting it to work economically. There’s also the issue of making sure the end result is something that is close enough to the taste and mouthfeel of real meat so that consumers will accept it. Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if this piece of science fiction didn’t become science fact in the next ten to twenty years.

I want Superheroes in my story, all with amazing powers. I also want a good explanation for their origin: could genetic mutation or manipulation create a superhuman?

The short answer is yes, within limits. Billions of years of evolution have produced a vast number of abilities in different animals that are beyond the gift of any normal human. Dogs have noses stuffed with olfactory receptors that make them 100 to 1,000 times as sensitive as humans to scents. Fish that swim in the Antarctic Ocean have natural anti-freeze molecules in their cells that allow them to thrive in water that is so cold it would kill a human within minutes. Many insects can see ultraviolet frequencies of light that are invisible to us, giving them a very different view of nature.

Because all life on Earth uses the same genetic code, in theory anything that you can find in nature is up for grabs. For example, the blood cells of crocodiles contain a type of hemoglobin that is so efficient at oxygenating a crocodile’s body that the crocodile can lurk underwater for an hour without coming up for air. Researchers have been able to tweak the DNA responsible for producing human hemoglobin to incorporate some of the genetic instructions found in crocodiles, thereby creating more efficient human hemoglobin. This superhuman hemoglobin is currently only produced by bacteria in vats and is intended for medical applications, but in principle it could be engineered into human being, giving them Aquaman-like powers.

There are certain physiological limits to what you can borrow, (for example, angel-sized wings on a human being would still be too underpowered to allow him or her to fly. If you really want a character to have working wings, a more radical rearrangement of the superhero’s body plan would be required) but nonetheless scientists have been taking useful traits from one organism and engineering them other organisms for decades now—a famous example is a gene found in the crystal jellyfish that produces a protein that fluoresces, giving off green light. This gene has been used to create “glow-in-the-dark” rabbits, fish, cats, mice and more. You’re not limited to transferring genes between animals either—you can mix and match between bacteria, animals and plants.

This technology is known as transgenics, and it was first demonstrated in 1973. It—along with other advances in genetic engineering—so freaked scientists out at the time that they agreed to a voluntary moratorium on any related experiments until an international conference—the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA—was held in 1975 to establish the rules under which research would be conducted. These rules included a list of prohibited experiments that were deemed to be too dangerous as they might result in horrible scenarios, such as the release of deadly new diseases into the wild.

The big technical problem with transgenics is getting the desired new genetic material into an organism’s cells. With adult creatures, the techniques of “somatic gene therapy” could be used. In a nutshell, this involves taking a infectious agent, such as a virus, and modifying it to transport the desired new DNA into the subject’s cells. With some agents, known as retroviruses, the new DNA is integrated into the cell’s genome, along with the rest of the cell’s native DNA. This means that as long as the cell is alive, the altered DNA will continue to function, and if the cell divides, the new DNA will be passed onto to its daughter cells. Other methods of delivery do not integrate the new DNA into the cell’s genome, meaning that the effectiveness of the therapy can decline over time, as the host body makes new cells without the modified instructions.

Gene therapy is promising in theory, and there have been some early successes in treating genetic diseases, but there also have been some disasters. Cancer is a possible side effect. There is also always the risk of triggering a massive immune response, which is what killed the most famous victim of gene therapy-gone-bad, 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger. He died of multiple organ failure within four days of receiving an experimental gene therapy intended to treat his liver disease.

If you are willing to ignore a lot of laws, you could do away with gene therapy and start with a human egg. Developing an egg fertilized with altered DNA into a baby would automatically mean that every cell in the subject’s body would have the new genetic material, and could pass those genes on to his or her descendants. This situation is analogous to what occurs when a natural mutation arises, and can also give rise to extraordinary abilities. For example, in 2005, DISCOVER reported on a six-year-old boy, dubbed “Superboy” who was born with bulging muscles. By age six, he could easily lift two seven-pound weights with arms held out horizontally. Researchers identified the cause of his super strength as being due to a mutated gene for myostatin, a growth factor that tells muscles when to stop growing.

Why not give all our children the gene for superstrength? Or a gene related to higher intelligence? The problem is that when we go beyond treating a disease and trying to enhance humans in this way, we would lose a vast amount of genetic diversity, which would sooner or later come back to bite us in the ass. Genetic diversity is so important to the survival of higher life forms that it prompted the evolution of sex, despite all of the drawbacks and effort involved in trying to find a mate.

Sex is a great way to let a species constantly shuffle and recombine DNA from a pool of genes. This helps us keep one step ahead of all sorts of challenges, including pathogens. If we selected a handful of favored genes, and spread them throughout the population at the expense of other genes, we would be at risk of creating a human genetic monoculture. Monocultures are notoriously prone to falling prey to epidemics of disease, as occurred in Ireland in the 19th century when the dominant strain of potatoes turned out to be very susceptible to blight. The resulting famine killed a million people.

But what about giving your superhero powers beyond those found in nature, like the ability to shoot a freeze-ray from their hands or telekinesis? There we must step beyond the bounds of pure genetic engineering and start using nanotechnology or cybernetic modifications, both of which will be the subject of future Codex Futurius entries.

At this stage, the research into self-repair could best be described as promising — certainly promising enough to motivate several of the top materials research teams in the world to work on the project, and promising enough to inspire significant investment by major corporations like Airbus. Plus, anyone who solves the myriad problems behind self-repair is sure to be richer than Midas, maybe even richer than Bill Gates.

The most mature research doesn’t really involve a spray on fix-it like the one the Cylons offer so much as self-repairing capacity built right into the materials. Oh and I should clarify, while some scientists are looking at metal oxides as way to create self-repairing metal, the future of this field can be summed in one word: Plastics.  Because polymers can be manipulated relatively easily, researchers seem to be focusing most of their efforts there.

One technique relies on layering materials with alternating hardened structural layers and soft repair layers. When a structural layer breaks, the repair layer flows into the crack and hardens on contact with the air outside, or some other stimulus. But there is always the possibility of leaks and trouble with keeping the repair material fresh and ready over the long haul.

Instead, researchers are focusing on microencapsulation. Instead of using a layer of repair goo, they distribute tiny balls filled with repair stuff  throughout the matrix of the material. Each ball would resemble an M&M, with a hard  outer layer and delicious choco- err, soft repair material in the center. When cracks in the structural component appear, the balls could potentially be activated by the force of the break, by heat, or by some more complicated catalyst embedded in  the material. Once activated, the shell would break, and the liquid center would flow into the crack and harden.

But that’s still not quite what the Cylons have given our doughty Galactica crew, now is it? Their stuff is some kind of living outer coating that can hold together Galactica’s hull indefinitely. Technology of that sort is the goal of David Bramston and Ron Dixon at the University of Lincoln (UK). Looking to nature for inspiration, they realized that biofilms offer a model for fix-it spray. Typically, we think of bacteria floating free in the air. But in biofilms the bacteria form colonies along the outer surface of some object (think the rocks near the ocean, or your teeth) and then secrete a protective outer layer. Certain kinds of bath tub scum (the hardest to clean kind) are biofilms, and so is dental plaque. Since the bacteria naturally repair breaks in their outer coating, Bramston and Dixon realized they could provide a model for creating a shell around metal or plastic that would then fix cracks as they occurred.  Scientists at the Scripps research Institute are already developing algae that can produce the raw materials for plastic. It doesn’t seem a huge leap to combine the traits of biofilm and the traits of producing plastic into a single organism. Although we’re still pretty far from having any kind of commercial product, it does seem to be a technology on the way.

While the nature of Gepetto’s actual disease escaped me, it’s worth taking a moment to think about whether she actually chose the most efficient route to curing herself.  Her goal was to create transplant organs that her body wouldn’t reject. Since the organs from a clone would share her DNA, her body would probably have accepted them.  But  rather than taking the immoral and illegal route of making cloned babies, she might have considered therapuetic cloning instead, a method which focuses on stem cells instead of whole people, and which promises to be a) not murderous and b) more efficient anyway.

Theoretically it goes like this: In the first phase, scientists take an unfertilized egg cell (oocyte) and replace its DNA with adult DNA, and then “activate” the embryo (often with electricity) to make it start growing and splitting. Once the egg has divided into roughly 200 cells, they move to the second step, isolating the stem cells and trying to get them to grow and replicate for 12-16 weeks. Then, third, they manipulate the stem cells so they differentiate into cells appropriate for different organs, and finall inject those stem cells into the organ to repair the organ.

Currently, the third step is the furthest along. University of Wisconsin scientists have gotten stem cells to differentiate into  brain tissue, and others have made cardiace tissue. But the first step, getting a human oocyte to grow and divide into a blastocyst, was an obstacle for years, until a California company called Stemagen had a huge breakthrough in 2006 (they published the results in 2008). I talked to their spokesperson, Roman Jimenez this morning to get a better handle on exactly what they did.

Scientists had successfully swapped the DNA in an oocyte for adult DNA in all sorts of animals for decades. They’d gotten the egg to grow and divide in pigs, mice, and other creatures, but never in people. Stemagen’s idea was to maximize what Jimenez called “egg quality.”  They went to fertility clinics and asked couples who were recieving donated egg cells if they would be willing to contribute some extra eggs for science. When a recipient agreed, they then they asked the donors of those egg cells the same question. In the end they recieved 25 eggs from three 20-24 year old healthy women. Using those eggs, they succeeded in implanting adult DNA, and provoking five of the those eggs into separating up to about 120 cells.

The breakthrough led to massive media coverage, condemnation by President Bush and the Pope, and a thirty minute segment on the Today show. The development meant one  of the major hurdles for therapuetic stem cell therapy had been cleared. What’s still missing is that second step,  the isolation phase. Scientists have not yet managed to get the stem cells from the blastocyst to grow and thrive.  Jimenez said Stemagen did try, back in 2006, to get the five sucesses to this stage, but the blastocytes didn’t live long enough.

I should point out that all of this work is done in the lab, and indeed, that the whole point of the research is to develop a way to make useful stem cells for medicine that won’t require anything awful like what Gepetto did on Eleventh Hour.  Direct human cloning remains highly controversial on moral grounds, but it may be scientifically doable. Last week Cloning and Stem Cells published results from Robert Lanza that showed that Stemagen’s technique not only led to a blastocyst, but that it also lead to a genetically viable embryo that could theoretically have been implanted and brought to term. Lanza’s experiemnt showed that the adult DNA injected into the oocyte had actually turned back the clock on itself to revert to an embryonic state, making the egg cell nearly identical to natural embryos used to implant into women at fertility clinics. The results signal that while people may not want human cloning to happen, it’s scientifically possible to do.

But before we get to the post-human, there will be the short reign of the transhuman, where we begin to move beyond our biological heritage, but still remain bound to it — and some contend we may have already have begun to enter this stage, with the advent of technologies such as always-on-and-everywhere access to the Internet enabling us to leverage our native intelligence. If transhumanism really gets under steam though, it will be difficult to predict what will happen — except for one thing: it will be messy. In last week’s release of the trade comic paperback of Transhuman, writer Jonathon Hickman and artist JM Ringuet explore just how messy things might get, as venture-capital-funded start ups battle it out in the marketplace regardless of the human cost. (Warning: this is a book for adults and some may find the graphic violence offensive.) It’s not the first work to plumb the messiness of transhumanism (Ian McDonald’s tales of India in the late 21st century come to mind), and the plot sometimes veers into the fantastic (I doubt any amount of genetic engineering will ever really enable telepathy!), but it’s a clever tale filled with all-too-believable characters and a mordant sense of humor.

Early in the episode, the late Dr. Graiman tells Knight, via hologram, that he was actually KARR’s first driver. As we know, KARR started programming himself and became a killing machine, forcing the government to scrap the program and build KITT.  To prevent Knight from spilling the beans, they wiped Knight’s memory.  Induced amnesia is a classic of Sci Fi—and of soap operas, and who knows what all— but can it actually be done?

The current theory of memory formation is somewhat in flux, but generally there are four stages: acquisition, consoliddation, storage and retrieval. A 2007 study at the Scripps Research Institute found that the same clusters of neurons that activated during memory formation re-activated during memory retrieval in experiments on mice. the results lend credibility to the reconstruction theory of memory activation which says that when you summon a memory to the forefront of thought, it is actually reconstructed. And if memories are being reconstructed with each use, that process of formation can be interrupted.

After all, memory formation is disturbed by drugs all the time. Ever go on a bender and not remember what happened in the morning? That’s the alcohol interfering with memory formation. At Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Roger Pittman is using propranolol, a high blood pressure medication, to interfere with the creation of memories. In theory, if a patient describes a memory to a psychologist, the memory will be reactivated. But as the memory is reconstructed, the drug interferes with the memory’s formation, allowing the person to forget. Pittman describes his results as very preliminary, so, don’t go expecting to run to CVS for a forgetting drug any time soon.

Another early, promising result on this front comes out of the University of Georgia where Dr. Joe Tsien has found a way to interfere with an enzyme,  calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (CaMKII), crucial to memory formation. Tsien trained a mouse to be afraid of an object. They found that by overstimulating CaMKII, they caused the mouse to forget past associations with the object, even associations as much as a month old.

Of course, there are other, less precise ways to interfere with memory formation. Electroshock Therapy causes memory loss, but also brain damage. And some hypnotists say they can cause memory loss in a willing patient. But Knight was clearly not willing, and brain damage might not be desirable in an elite field operative.

Then again,  Michael Knight needed memories erased of having driven a talking car that could transform into a robot. Maybe they knocked hm out, woke him up, and convinced him that it was all a dream. You know, kind of like the end of Newheart.

What made this movie stand out for me was how the robot was controlled. The pilot stood in a cokpit in the robots torso. He was attached to the robot by a series of straps that connected directly to the robot through the walls and ceiling. When he moved, the robot moved. Since he was some kind of martial arts super star, his robot was about as fine a defender of the universe as one could hope for, as long as the hero could overcome his psychological issues and fully self-actualize (If you recall the name of this anime, please oh please, comment and let me know what it is).

So, obviously, we still haven’t gotten around to inventing battle bots that can fight our wars for us, but if we did, we’d have a much better system for controlling the robot than silly straps. Motek Medical, a Dutch company, is getting us on our way by devising an optical system that not only does motion capture, but also tracks muscle force and torque. To use the system, dubbed CAREN, users put on a body suit (if you’ve ever seen a behind-the-scenes featurette from The Polar Express, you know what this is) with reflective sensors at crucial joints. Cameras around the room then pick up the location of the sensors and display a skinless body double on a large screen. The computer than applies a model of human motion based on measures conducted by Motek to display which muscles that are in use. Muscles that are in use turn green, and the more intense the green, more force they’re exerting (This video makes it all clear).

Motek has already installed the system in a couple of hospitals around the world to help patients recover from strokes or injury. But combining strapless motion capture with the ability to transmit the force of the muscles also advances the prospect of remote surgery, as well as more efficient remote operated vehicles that could be sent to other planets or to the bottom of the sea floor. And, of course,  it also puts us one step closer to robot karate contests, which would make for some excellent programming on ESPN, if nothing else.