Rise of the Planet of the Apes

In the film, we see over and over that it is not Caesar’s enhancement that causes problems. In fact, Caesar’s enhancement makes him the most moral and wisest person on the screen. The failure of those around him – from the cruel ape sanctuary caretakers to Caesar’s own father figure, Will Rodman – drive him to do what must be done: rebel.

So what am I saying here? That humans are bad and apes are good? Not at all. My argument is that in many science fiction films, we tend to question the ethics of the science itself and the ethics of pursuing that science. That is, there is a difference between saying “should science try to do X?” and “how can we study X in an ethical manner?” In the case of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, James Franco noted that someone might claim that “This is a Frankenstein story, or that you’re playing God.” But that mindset questions the pursuit of science in general, not how one can pursue a hypothesis ethically. It is how we experiment and what we do with the scientific results that matter. In the case of Caesar, humanity utterly fails to care for the mind that enhancement has created. Dana Stevens at Slate aptly described the film as “an animal-rights manifesto disguised as a prison-break movie.” And as with most prison-break movies, we’re on the side of the prisoners, not the warden, for a reason.

I argue that Caesar’s enhancement and that Caesar himself are ethical, but that the treatment of Caesar by every non-ape in the film (save Charles) is unethical and based on fear, arrogance, willful ignorance, and naiveté. Yes, that means that not only are the obvious villains in the wrong, but so are the other humans in Caesar’s life.

Word of warning: spoilers below.

To address my claim, we must first investigate whether or not enhancement itself harmed Caesar’s ability to be ethical. In the film, Caesar has a happy and inquisitive disposition. He likes exploring, solving puzzles, playing chess, and reading. Fast-forward to the revolution. Caesar directs his troops through the city, but not with the intent to cause mayhem and destruction and with express direction not to slaughter or maim. On multiple occasions, Caesar prevents wanton killing and only against Jacobs, the film’s ethically-bankrupt capitalist, does Caesar authorize death. Caesar’s goal is freedom, not revenge. So we are presented with a person, Caesar, who becomes more moral as his intelligence increases and his enhancement takes hold. He opposes killing and his primary goal for himself and his fellow apes is escape, not conquest. One struggles to make the case that a person who is unjustly imprisoned and abused does not have a right to seek liberation. I think we can make the case that Caesar’s behavior can be deemed ethical and, within the context of his treatment in the film, reasonable.

But how can this be? What sort of treatment would render Caesar’s rebellion justifiable?

Where to start? There are some obvious villains. Steven Jacobs (David Oyelowo) is the Big Pharma CEO who pushes for accelerated drug testing and the sacrifice of the chimps all in the name of profits. Jacobs is crafted to be hated. He knows that ALZ-112 might cure Alzheimer’s, but his need for return on investment leads him to kill the program. Only when there is evidence of intelligence increasing properties of the drug does Jacobs come around and reauthorize testing. I must admit, I was shocked by the idea that intelligence enhancing drugs equaled a paycheck in the mind of Jacobs, given the potential resistance to such a technology. But I digress. The point is that Jacobs is ultimately arrogant and uncaring about the animals upon the backs of which he makes his living, but he does little to impact Caesar’s life.

So is it the caretakers at the ape sanctuary? Brian Cox and Tom Felton are cruel and stupid, no doubt. That they have the backing of a faceless uncaring government bureaucracy does little to shock me. Somewhere in the world, there is an ape sanctuary that looks far too much like the one in this film. For every ape in the sanctuary, including Caesar, the caretakers are the second villains in their lives: the first are the original people who were raising each ape. In Caesar’s case, these men are not the instigators of the problem, but the catalyst for Caesar’s final rejection of humanity. The caretakers grind salt into the wound, but they did not make the first cut.

So who did first wound Caesar? I would argue that the main antagonist is not the cruel “caretakers” in the ape sanctuary, nor is it the Big Pharma CEO Steven Jacobs. Instead, I believe that James Franco’s character, Will Rodman, is ultimately responsible for forcing Caesar to rebel. Will Rodman is a mad scientist with a heart of gold. He makes a series of decisions no proper scientist would or should ever make: he brings a chimp that has been experimented on home and he tests his experimental drug on his father. This behavior is not that of a lucid person trying to do right, but of a lunatic lurching wildly towards love through every barrier that ethics and logic might erect. Will Rodman’s decision to test ALZ-112 on his father, Charles (Lithgow), is an almost unbelievable transgression. Yes, Will’s action comes from a place of love and concern for his father, but his recklessness only provides momentary relief from the horrors of Alzheimer’s before the drug fails and Charles experiences a brutal regression on par with that of his obvious namesake, Charlie, in Flowers for Algernon.

For Caesar, Will’s inability to pursue science ethically has the most horrible consequences. Of all the people in the film, Will should have known better than to provide a nurturing and loving environment limited enough to ensure Caesar’s intelligence is insufficiently stimulated, his knowledge of human norms and society stunted, and that any mistake will result in his improper imprisoning with fellow apes. Will also fails to recognize the incredible degree Caesar’s intelligence and, as a result, treats Caesar as an animal, not as a person with an IQ beyond that of most humans. At one point, Freida Pinto’s character, primatologist Caroline Aranha, says “You are trying to control things that are not meant to be controlled.” She is talking about Will’s attempts to cure Alzheimer’s and developing a drug to improve and fix the brain. Caroline is worried about trying to control nature. However, the fact that Will believes Caesar needs a leash, even into adulthood, is a better target for her critique. One does not leash a fellow person, one explains to and reasons with a fellow person. Will should not be trying to control Caesar. Will is arrogant and willfully ignorant, Caroline is naive and fearful, both fail Caesar. Just as with Frankenstein’s monster, the failure is not with the creation but with the creator.

Both Dr. Frankenstein and Franco’s Will Rodman utterly fail to protect or properly nurture their creations. In both cases, a single act of violence is sufficient for the creator to disown and abandon the creation to fend for itself. What was Caesar’s crime? Defending an Alzheimer’s sufferer, Charles, from an angry jerk of a neighbor. But since Caesar is an animal, he has no rights or recourse. Caesar is locked away with hardly a goodbye in the equivalent of a hardcore prison after his first misunderstanding with a culture that is alien and confusing. Trapped in a frightening and brutal environment, abandoned without sufficient explanation by the only father he’d ever known, and with a mind capable of comprehending the injustices against him, Caesar’s rebellion is a logical conclusion. Exposing his fellow apes to the more aggressive Alzheimer’s/brain-repair drug ALZ-113 is the application of enhancement as a tool of liberation. Caesar’s first word, “No!” is the animal equivalent of the Declaration of Independence.

Caesar and his ape rebellion do not rampage or seek revenge. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is not simply a story about how apes came to be intelligent. That’s only half of the story. The other half is the failure of humans, the failure of those closest to the apes, to recognize the new brilliant minds that had been created and to care for those new persons. Intelligent persons have a right to freedom and self-determination. Enhancement enables liberty. Simply being the result of an experimental new treatment does not take away one’s personhood or right to justice. If that justice and freedom is not provided, it must be taken. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a film that strives to show the humanity in our closest evolutionary cousins and the resulting tragedy of our inhumanity towards them.

For more on Rise of the Planet of the Apes, check out my interviews with James Franco, Andy Serkis, and director Rupert Wyatt.

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

Promotional Images via Rise of the Planet of the Apes Trailer

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.

The future is impossible to predict. But that’s not going to stop people from trying. We can at least pretend to know where it is we want humanity to go. We hope that laws we craft, the technologies we invent, our social habits and our ways of thinking are small forces that, when combined over time, move our species towards a better existence. The question is, How will we know if we are making progress?

As a movement philosophy, transhumanism and its proponents argue for a future of ageless bodies, transcendent experiences, and extraordinary minds. Not everyone supports every aspect of transhumanism, but you’d be amazed at how neatly current political struggles and technological progress point toward a transhuman future. Transhumanism isn’t just about cybernetics and robot bodies. Social and political progress must accompany the technological and biological advances for transhumanism to become a reality.

But how will we able to tell when the pieces finally do fall into place? I’ve been trying to answer that question ever since Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution was asked a while back by his readers: What are the exact conditions for counting “transhumanism” as having been attained? In an attempt to answer, I responded with what I saw as the three key indicators:

1. Medical modifications that permanently alter or replace a function of the human body become prolific.
2. Our social understanding of aging loses the “virtue of necessity” aspect and society begins to treat aging as a disease.
3. Rights discourse would shift from who we include among humans (i.e. should homosexual have marriage rights?) to a system flexible enough to easily bring in sentient non-humans.

As I groped through the intellectual dark for these three points, it became clear that the precise technology and how it worked was unimportant. Instead, we need to figure out how technology may change our lives and our ways of living. Unlike the infamous jetpack, which defined the failed futurama of the 20th century, the 21st needs broader progress markers. Here are seven things to look for in the coming centuries that will let us know if transhumanism is here.

When we think of the future, we think of technology. But too often, we think of really pointless technology – flying cars or self-tying sneakers or ray guns. Those things won’t change the way life happens. Not the way the washing machine or the cell phone changed the way life happens. Those are real inventions. It is in that spirit that I considered indicators of transhumanism. What matters is how a technology changes our definition of a “normal” human. Think of it this way: any one of these indicators has been fulfilled when at least a few of the people you interact with on any given day utilize the technology. With that mindset, I propose the following seven changes as indicators that transhumanism has been attained.

1. Prosthetics are Preferred: The arrival of prosthetics and implants for organs and limbs that are as good as or better than the original. A fairly accurate test for the quality of prosthetics would be voluntary amputations. Those who use prosthetics would compete with or surpass non-amputees in physical performances and athletic competitions. Included in this indicator are cochlear, optic implants, bionic limbs and artificial organs that are within species typical functioning and readily available. A key social indicator will be that terminology around being “disabled”and “handicapped” would become anachronous. If you ever find yourself seriously considering having your birth-given hand lopped off and replaced with a cybernetic one, you can tick off this box on your transhuman checklist.

2. Better Brains: There are three ways we could improve our cognition. In order of likelihood of being used in the near future they are: cognitive enhancing drugs, genetic engineering, or neuro-implants/ prosthetic cyberbrains. When the average person wakes up, brews a pot of coffee and pops an over-the-counter stimulant as or more powerful than modafinil, go ahead and count this condition achieved. Genetic engineering and cyberbrains will be improvements in degree and function, but not in purpose. Any one of these becoming commonplace would indicate that we no longer cling to the bias that going beyond the intelligence dished out by the genetic and environmental lottery is “cheating.”

3. Artificial Assistance: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Augmented Reality (AR) integrated into personal, everyday behaviors. In the same way Google search and Wikipedia changed the way we research and remember, AI and AR could alter the way we think and interact. Daedalus in Deus Ex and Jarvis in Iron Man are great examples of Turing-quality (indistinguishable from human intelligence) AI that interact with the main character as both side kicks and secondary minds. Think of it this way: you walk into a cocktail party. Your cyberbrain’s AI assist analyzes every face in the room and determines those most socially relevant to you. Using AR projected onto your optic implants, the AI highlights each person in your line of sight and, as you approach, provides a dossier of their main interests and personality type. Now apply this level of information access to anything else. Whether it’s grilling a steak or performing a heart transplant, AI assist with AR overlay will radically improve human functioning. When it is expected that most people will have an AI advisor at their side analyzing the situation and providing instructions through their implants, go ahead and count humanity another step closer to being transhuman.

4. Amazing Average Age: The ultimate objective of health care is that people live the longest, healthiest lives possible. Whether that happens due to nanotechnology or genetic engineering or synthetic organs is irrelevant. What matters is that eventually people will age more slowly, be healthier for a larger portion of their lives, and will be living beyond the age of 120. Our social understanding of aging will lose the “virtue of necessity” aspect and society will treat aging as a disease to be mitigated and managed. When the average expected life span exceeds 120, the conditions for transhuman longevity will have arrived.

5. Responsible Reproduction: Having children will be framed almost exclusively in the light of responsibility. Human reproduction is, at the moment, not generally worthy of the term “procreation.” Procreation implies planned creation and conscientious rearing of a new human life. As it stands, anyone with the necessary biological equipment can accidentally spawn a whelp and, save for extreme physical neglect, is free to all but abandon it to develop in an arbitrary and developmentally damaging fashion. Children – human beings as a whole – deserve better. Responsible reproduction will involve, first and foremost, better birth control for men and women. Abortions will be reserved for the rare accidental pregnancy and/or those that threaten the life of the mother. Those who do choose to reproduce will do so via assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) ensuring pregnancy is quite deliberate. Furthermore, genetic modification, health screening, and, eventually synthetic wombs will enable the child with the best possibility of a good life to be born. Parental licensing may be part of the process; a liberalization of adoption and surrogate pregnancy laws certainly will be. When global births stabilize at replacement rates, ARTs are the preferred method of conception, and responsible child rearing is more highly valued than biological parenthood, we will be procreating as transhumans.

6. My Body, My Choice: Legalization and regulation will be based on somatic rights. Substances that are ingested – cogno enhancers, recreational drugs, steroids, nanotech – become both one’s right and responsibility. Actions such as abortion, assisted suicide, voluntary amputation, gender reassignment, surrogate pregnancy, body modification, legal unions among adults of any number, and consenting sexual practices would be protected under law. One’s genetic make-up, neurological composition, prosthetic augmentation, and other cybernetic modifications will be limited only by technology and one’s own discretion. Transhumanism cannot happen without a legal structure that allows individuals to control their own bodies. When bodily freedom is as protected and sanctified as free speech, transhumanism will be free to develop.

7. Persons, not People: Rights discourse will shift to personhood instead of common humanity. I have argued we’re already beginning to see a social shift towards this mentality. Using a scaled system based on traits like sentience, empathy, self-awareness, tool use, problem solving, social behaviors, language use, and abstract reasoning, animals (including humans) will be granted rights based on varying degrees of personhood. Personhood based rights will protect against Gattaca scenarios while ensuring the rights of new forms of intelligence, be they alien, artificial, or animal, are protected. When African grey parrots, gorillas, and dolphins have the same rights as a human toddler, a transhuman friendly rights system will be in place.

Individually, each of these conditions are necessary but not sufficient for transhumanism to have been attained. Only as a whole are they sufficient for transhumanism to have been achieved. I make no claims as to how or when any or all of these conditions will be attained. If forced to guess, I would say all seven conditions will be attained over the course of the next two centuries, with conditions (3) and (4) being the furthest from attainment.

Transhumanism is a long way from being attained. However, with these seven conditions in mind, we can at least determine if we are moving towards or away from a transhuman future.

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

Image of psychedelic human eye by Kate Whitley via dullhunk on Flickr Creative Commons.

Heads up, this article has *spoilers* about the movie Hanna.

Joe Wright’s new film, Hanna, staring Saoirse Ronan is being hailed as the anti-Sucker Punch for its portrayal of a rich, rounded, and compelling female lead. Hanna is a young woman in her late teens (her age is indeterminate) who can beat you up, break your neck, and shoot you down six ways from Sunday. Why is she able to do that? Well, that right there is an interesting question. You see, Hanna was genetically engineered to have “high intelligence, muscle mass, and no pity.” But here’s the rub: she was also raised to be a trained assassin.

So who is to credit (or perhaps, to blame) for Hanna’s ability to crush faces with naught but her hands and an emotionless grimace? Is it her genes or her training?

The film ostensibly portrays Hanna as a naive heroine striving against her draconian and demonic “mother” figure, Marissa Wiegler, with the help of her noble father, Erik Heller. But I submit that is not the case: I believe the “teaching” and “nurture” Heller gives to Hanna makes him as much a monster as Wiegler. Hanna’s battle is to be a good human being against a perfect storm of nature and nurture designed to make her a heartless killer.

Hanna, on initial viewing, symbolizes the contest between genetics and environment. Or, perhaps more familiarly, nature vs nurture. Cate Blanchett is Marissa Wiegler (pronounced by Hanna in proper German as a deliciously evil “Veeglur”), who we gather from the course of the film had more than a little to do with engineering a batch of children to be super soldiers. After deciding the project was a failure/waste/danger, she shut it down and slaughtered the guinea pig children.

Eric Bana plays Hanna’s “father,” Erik Heller, the rogue agent who saved Hanna from Wiegler’s clinical cessation of the program. Heller (as we see from a flashback) it seems was in love with the surrogate mother of Hanna. Heller rightly sees Hanna as a child worth saving, not an experimental product to be disposed of at Wiegler’s leisure. To keep Hanna alive, Heller moved with her to a cabin in an endless wood “just below the arctic circle.” There, amid the caribou and evergreens, he taught her from day one to be the ultimate assassin.

Yet, if Heller sees her as human, not as a mere sum of her genetics, he does a pretty terrible job showing it. Hanna is raised in her father’s demented version of home school with a major in survival skills and violence and minors in 10+ languages and science. They live off the land, training for a confrontation about which Hanna has little knowledge. Then, when he decides the time is right, Heller presents Hanna with the option to throw a switch that will “tell Marissa Wiegler where we are.” Joseph Campbell would be proud at the simultaneous subtlety and neatness of Hanna’s vector for crossing the first threshold of the hero’s journey.

We are lead to believe that Hanna has been trained by her father to protect herself so that she cannot be killed by Wiegler. This theory, however, is not the case. The reason is that, though their life in the wild is hard, Heller and Hanna have a good life. Hanna, thanks to her genetic enhancements, is an adept learner and needs no protection in the wild. She is in excellent health, has spectacular creative and critical thinking ability, shows inventiveness, and has appreciation for the wilderness that surrounds her. The film shows us that Wiegler and the US government in general had no idea where Erik Heller was, nor did they seem to care. If Heller had really wished to save Hanna, he would have simply destroyed the tracking beacon and lived a life of happy hermitage with his prodigious adopted daughter.

But she knows nothing of music, of the arts in general, of human kindness or of the myriad aspects of humanity not comprised by Hobbesian elements. Heller never gives Hanna a choice.

Instead, Heller raises an assassin. Then, after coaxing her to set events in motion, leaves to run his own parallel mission to kill Wiegler. The film is about Heller using Hanna as a pawn in his quest of vengeance. Heller “saves” Hanna from death only to then single handedly complete the experiment Wiegler and her genetics team started. In short, Wiegler bred Hanna to be a monster, and then Heller trained her to be one.

Yet Hanna rebelled against both.

What is astounding is that in spite of Heller’s selfish and cruel rearing, Hanna is a good individual. She never harms an innocent (a Spanish dude trying to get fresh gets a scare, but nothing serious), nor does she present any level of irrational rage, maliciousness, or cruelty. When she fights, it is in an emotional vacuum and always in self-defense. Saoirse Ronan’s portrayal even gives Hanna a moment of sadness and pity for Wiegler at the end. Echoing the scene that opens the film in which she kills a deer, Hanna is sorry that the death was painful and not instant. Wiegler’s death is, like that of the deer, a necessity for Hanna’s existence.

Yet, in my mind, it was the death of Hanna’s father, Heller, that signaled her true liberation. Neither Hanna’s genetic coding nor her father’s relentless conditioning could force Hanna to be any specific kind of person. Her will, her sense of self, and of right and wrong determined who she was. She acted to protect those who helped her and was visibly sorry for those who died or were threatened at her expense.

Thus, the tragedy of Hanna is that those who had the means to shape her life, both biologically and environmentally, chose to treat her like a means to an end, not as the human being she would become. She is a transhumanist hero. I’d love to see a sequel exploring how she continues to discover the world her father did so much to hide from her.

You will spend a third of  your life asleep. If you don’t, your waking hours will be of reduced quality and productivity. For 99% of us, seven hours a night is biological necessity. For a select 1%, what Melinda Beck at the Wall Street Journal dubs the “Sleepless Elite,” less sleep equals more life. So-called short sleepers operate with a kind of low-intensity mania which allows them to go to bed late and wake up early without needing a gallon of coffee to get through the day. And, as it turns out, the ability might be genetic.

“My long-term goal is to someday learn enough so we can manipulate the sleep pathways without damaging our health,” says human geneticist Ying-Hui Fu at the University of California-San Francisco. “Everybody can use more waking hours, even if you just watch movies.”

Dr. Fu was part of a research team that discovered a gene variation, hDEC2, in a pair of short sleepers in 2009. They were studying extreme early birds when they when they noticed that two of their subjects, a mother and daughter, got up naturally about 4 a.m. but also went to bed past midnight.

Genetic analyses spotted one gene variation common to them both. The scientists were able to replicate the gene variation in a strain of mice and found that the mice needed less sleep than usual, too.

Dr. Fu’s research is a reason for excitement because the goal is not just to locate the gene, but to find a way to manipulate sleep pathways safely. For those of us already alive, that means there might be better, safer, more effective stimulants in the future. For those not yet born, genetic engineering may enable future generations to spend less time sawing logs and more time enjoying life. More life! Less sleep! It’s like a longevity enhancement that does nothing to extend your time alive, but instead maximizes your use of that time. But how do short sleepers use their time?

And this, my fine friends, is where the real benefits of whatever genetic magic short sleepers possess comes into focus. Our immediate instinct when we hear we can get a benefit is “what is the cost?” For example, less sleep? I bet I’ll become crazy. Or moody. Or more sleep won’t mean I’m more productive. What ever makes me more energetic will make me too addled to focus.We are programmed by experience to be skeptical of too-good-to-be-true offers. The cynical part of me is reminded of a quote from LCD (R.I.P.) Soundsystem’s jam “Pow Pow:” “But honestly, and be honest with yourself, how much time do you waste? How much time do you blow every day?”

Would we really do any more with our lives if we had more time awake? What are the lives of short sleepers like? University of Utah neurologist Christopher Jones has found common traits among short sleepers in addition to their ability to only catch a few winks:

To date, Dr. Jones says he has identified only about 20 true short sleepers, and he says they share some fascinating characteristics. Not only are their circadian rhythms different from most people, so are their moods (very upbeat) and their metabolism (they’re thinner than average, even though sleep deprivation usually raises the risk of obesity). They also seem to have a high tolerance for physical pain and psychological setbacks.

“They encounter obstacles, they just pick themselves up and try again,” Dr. Jones says.

Short sleep research is still in its early phases, but most of those studied thus far are successful, productive, happy individuals. They quite literally get more out of life. Short sleepers don’t spend a third of their time on this planet asleep. I need to get me some of that.

I’m sad to say I still need a whole pot of java after my requisite seven hours to be a normal human being. Fingers crossed for a pharmaceutical solution sometime soon.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog and on facebook and twitter.

Image of sleepy businessmen via Wikipedia Commons

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

Some background on Peter Lawler. He writes for Big Think, loves The New Atlantis (their writers at Futurisms are great sparring partners) and was on the President’s Council on Bioethics (PCBE) . For those of you unfamiliar with Bush’s President’s Council on Bioethics, they were the brilliant minds behind halting stem cell research, focusing on it-worked-for-Bristol-Palin abstinence-only sex education and being generally terrible philosophers and thinkers. Charles Krauthammer was asked his opinion of ethical issues, I kid you not. In short, the PCBE happily rubber-stamped the backwards and anti-science decrees of Bush and Cheney in an effort to supplicate the deranged Christian base of the Republican party. I tell you all of this lovely information so you have a working context for the luminary Big Think has decided to employ.

Thus, on to the question: will designer babies turn the USA into a culture of compulsory overachievement?

Let us examine Lawler’s argument proper, if such a thing can be said to exist. Most of his post is a cobbled together string of non-sequitor rhetorical questions posing as an argument. But he’s a professor, so I’ll show some respect and presume he makes sense. Lawler’s argument is that if we enhance our children, it’s so they will be competitive and productive, and to make sure enhancement doesn’t increase inequality, we’ll have to make sure they’re all enhanced to the max, regardless of the benefits for the actual child. Though he doesn’t cite the paper, Lawler’s argument seems to be based on Alan Buchanan’s “Enhancement and the Ethics of Development.” Buchanan’s argument is complex, but part of it revolves around the idea that previous forms of human enhancement (agriculture, printing press, microprocessor) had huge benefits for the economy. Thus, it is logical to conclude that the State has incentive to provide, um, incentives for families to enhance in the name of productivity and the economy.

However, Lawler isn’t addressing Buchanan, merely a disfigured straw-man version of Buchanan’s argument. Lawler’s rhetorical goal is to lead the argument to a point of absurdity, where you’ll react, aghast at how awful a world with enhancement will be. The crowning moment is when Lawler says that the society will neither welcome the “gift” of a child with Down syndrome, nor will it tolerate “all those stupid and disease-ridden Mormon and Catholic kids.” Not so, for the following reasons.

1. Buchanan’s argument, as well as those of most proponents of human enhancement, is predicated on the idea that not only will enhancement itself be an option, but the kinds of enhancements and the available traits one can select from will all be optional. Lawler ominously implies there will be a mandate of a “perfect” child, a specter long rejected and rallied against by actual bioethicists. No one will be forced to do anything.

2. Lawler implies that those who support enhancement devalue the lives of those with disabilities. Do those who seek to cure HIV devalue the lives of AIDS sufferers, or are the developers of prostheses disdainful of amputees? I hardly think so. Parents who choose to have a child should love that child as is–period.

3. Again, he doesn’t cite his source, but Lawler’s reference to “Mormons and Catholics” is a nod to Donna Haraway’s epic lines:

Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse.

Let’s ignore for the moment that an increase intelligence and education correlates with a drop in religious belief. I’ll be honest: I have a very, very hard time disagreeing with Haraway that teaching creationism is a form of abuse. Any religious fundamentalism (funny how Lawler neglects Islam, Judaism, and protestants) is a pestilence. Believe in whatever Supreme Being you so desire, just don’t attempt to derive logic or laws that govern the rest of us from the fictive texts you hold so dear.

4. Enhancement is still extremely speculative. Ethicists argue about it the same way we argue about philosophical zombies and aliens to understand personhood. Enhancement helps us understand how procreation and parenting creates an ethical obligation to the child. The ability to enhance intelligence, morality, charm, and other complex but universally desirable traits is a long, long ways off.

5. That said, an enhancement arms race might ever take off would result in the least destructive, most beneficial Cold War in human history. Oh no, the world is suddenly a-flush with inventive, moral, empathetic, charming, attractive and beneficent people! Whatever shall we do!

In short, enhancement is not going to be commandeered by the state to make generations of godless child robots hell-bent on productivity. Not by a long shot. For more coherent thoughts on designer babies, I suggest Anders Sandberg’s post “Making Babies.” Mr. Lawler promised more on the topic, I sincerely hope he delivers.

People who work in robotics prefer not to highlight a reality of our work: robots are not very reliable. They break, all the time. This applies to all research robots, which typically flake out just as you’re giving an important demo to a funding agency or someone you’re trying to impress. My fish robot is back in the shop, again, after a few of its very rigid and very thin fin rays broke. Industrial robots, such as those you see on car assembly lines, can only do better by operating in extremely predictable, structured environments, doing the same thing over and over again. Home robots? If you buy a Roomba, be prepared to adjust your floor plan so that it doesn’t get stuck.

What’s going on? The world is constantly throwing curveballs at robots that weren’t anticipated by the designers. In a novel approach to this problem, Josh Bongard has recently shown how we can use the principles of evolution to make a robot’s “nervous system”—I’ll call it the robot’s controller—robust against many kinds of change. This study was done using large amounts of computer simulation time (it would have taken 50–100 years on a single computer), running a program that can simulate the effects of real-world physics on robots.

What he showed is that if we force a robot’s controller to work across widely varying robot body shapes, the robot can learn faster, and be more resistant to knocks that might leave your home robot a smoking pile of motors and silicon. It’s a remarkable result, one that offers a compelling illustration of why intelligence, in the broad sense of adaptively coping with the world, is about more than just what’s above your shoulders. How did the study show it?

Each (simulated) robot starts with a very basic body plan (like a snake), a controller (consisting of a neural network that is randomly connected with random strengths), and a sensor for light. Additional sensors report the position of body segments, the orientation of the body, and ground contact sensors for limbs, if the body plan has them. The task is to bring the body over to the light source, 20 meters away.

A bunch of these robots are simulated, and those that do poorly are eliminated, a kind of in-computo natural selection. The eliminated robots are replaced with versions of the ones that succeeded, after random tweaks (“mutations”) to these better controllers have been made. The process repeats until a robot that can get to the light is found. So far, there’s been no change in the shape of the body.

With the first successful robot-controller combination found (one that gets to the light), the body form changes from snake-like to something like a salamander, with short legs sticking out of the body. (All body shape changes are pre-programmed, rather than evolved.) The evolutionary process to find a successful controller-bot combination repeats, with random changes to the better controllers until, once again, a controller-bot combination is found that is able to claw its way to the light.

Then the short legs sticking out to the side slowly get longer, and rather than sticking out to the side, they progressively become more vertical. With each change in body shape, the evolutionary process to find a controller repeats. Eventually, the sim-bot evolves to something that looks like any four-legged animal.

That was all for round one of evolution. For round two, the best controller from round one was copied into the same starting snake-like body type that round one began with. But now, the change in body forms occurs more rapidly, so that by the time 2/3 of the “lifetime” of the robot is completed, it has reached its final dog-like form. For round three, this all happens within 1/3 of the robot’s lifetime. For round four, the body form starts off as dog-like and stays there.

So there are changes occurring at two different time scales: changes over the “lifetime” of the robot, similar to our own shape changes from fetus to adulthood; and changes that occur over generations, through which development during a lifetime occurs more rapidly. The short time scale is called “ontogenetic” and the long scale (between the different rounds) is “phylogenetic.”

The breakthrough of the work is that it found that having these variations in body shape occur over ontogenetic and phylogenetic time scales resulted in finding a controller that got the body over to the light much faster than if no such changes in body shape occurred. For example, when the system began with the final body type, the dog-like shape, it took much longer to evolve a solution than when the body shapes progressed from snake-like to salamander to dog-like. Not only was a controller evolved more rapidly, but the final solution was much more robust to being pushed and nudged.

The complexity of the interactions over 100 CPU years of simulated evolution makes the final evolved result difficult to untangle. Nonetheless, there is good evidence that the cause of accelerated learning in the shape-changing robots is that the controllers developed through changing bodies have gone through a set of “training-wheel” body shapes: a robot starting with a four-legged body plan and a simple controller quickly fails—it can’t control the legs well and simply tips over. Starting with something on the ground that slithers, as was the case in these simulations, is less prone to such failures. So not any old sequence of shape changes works: mimicking the sequence seen in evolution garners some of the advantages that presumably made this sequence actually happen in nature, such as higher mechanical stability of more ancient forms.

Less clear is the source of increased robustness—the ability to recover from being nudged and pushed in random ways. Bongard suggests that the increased robustness of controllers that have evolved with changing body shapes is due to those controllers having had to work under a wider range of sensor-motor relationships than the ones that evolved with no change in body shape. For example, any controller that’s particularly sensitive to a certain relationship between, say, a sensor that reports foot position, and one that reports spine position would fail (and thus be eliminated) as those relationships are systematically changed in shifting from salamander-like to dog-like body form and movement. So that means that if I suddenly pushed down the back of a four-legged dog-like robot, so that its legs would splay out and it would be forced to move more like a salamander, the winners of the evolutionary competition would still be able to work because the controllers had worked in salamander-like bodies as well as in dog-like bodies.

In support of this idea, the early controllers, that were purely based on moving the body axis (“spine”), appear to be still embedded in the more advanced controllers; so if something happens to the body (say, one leg gets knocked), the robot can revert to more basic spine-based motion patterns that don’t require precise limb control. Bongard observed that the controllers evolved through changing body shape exhibited more dependence on spinal movement, using the legs more for balance, than those evolved without changing body shape. (It would be interesting to try his approach with simulated aquatic robots, which can be neutrally buoyant like many aquatic animals are, and thus don’t have the “tipping over” problem that Bongard’s simulated terrestrial robots had).

To be fair to existing robots, even with a controller that worked under every conceivable body shape and environmental condition, they would still break all the time. This is because the materials we make them out of are not self-healing, in contrast to the biomaterials of animals. Animals are also constantly breaking (at least on a micro level), and the body constantly repairs this. Bones subjected to higher loads, like the racket arm of a tennis player, get measurably thicker. Not only is the body self-repairing, recent innovative computer simulations of real neurons that generate basic rhythms like walking and chewing have shown that the neurons keep generating the rhythm despite big variations in the functioning and connections of these neurons. These functions are so important to continued existence—the body’s version of too big to fail—that embedded within them are solutions to just about everything the world can throw at them.

This new work provides the fascinating and useful result that fashioning controllers that work through a sequence of body shapes mimicking those seen in evolution accelerates the learning of new movement tasks and increases robustness to all the hard knocks that life inevitably delivers. It suggests that without the sequence of body shapes that evolution and development bring about, we might have nervous systems that are much too finely tuned to our adult upright bipedal form. Instead of crawling to help after we twist our ankle in the woods, we’d be left with nothing but howling for help.

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.

Katie Roiphe over at Slate is worried about helicopter parents screwing up their kids by trying to perfect them:

You know the child I am talking about: precious, wide-eyed, over-cared-for, fussy, in a beautiful sweater, or a carefully hipsterish T-shirt. Have we done him a favor by protecting him from everything, from dirt and dust and violence and sugar and boredom and egg whites and mean children who steal his plastic dinosaurs, from, in short, the everyday banging-up of the universe? The wooden toys that tastefully surround him, the all-sacrificing, well-meaning parents, with a library of books on how to make him turn out correctly— is all of it actually harming or denaturing him?

The article’s title “If we try to engineer perfect children, will they grow up to be unbearable?” grabbed me (of course). The “engineering” bit wasn’t, to my chagrin, referring to actual, genetic engineering. Instead, Roiphe was referring to parents obsessing over every aspect of their child’s lives, as if some misstep in the minutia would produce an invalid. These parents seem to accept the nature/nurture divide and, realizing there is nothing they can do to improve the genetic make-up of their little bundle of joy, attempt to overwhelm nature with nurture. Yet in the process parents are inhibiting the, ahem, natural ways in which children learn and develop: unstructured play, exploration, discovery, and getting hurt. How can we get helicopter parents to back off? Maybe with genetic engineering?

Roiphe is not the first to make an argument against over-parenting. Michael Sandel, in his “The Case Against Perfection” worries about helicopter parenting being exacerbated by genetic engineering :

But here, too, bioengineering and genetic enhancement threaten to dislodge it. To appreciate children as gifts is to accept them as they come, not as objects of our design or products of our will or instruments of our ambition. Parental love is not contingent on the talents and attributes a child happens to have. We choose our friends and spouses at least partly on the basis of qualities we find attractive. But we do not choose our children. Their qualities are unpredictable, and even the most conscientious parents cannot be held wholly responsible for the kind of children they have. That is why parenthood, more than other human relationships, teaches what the theologian William F. May calls an “openness to the unbidden.”

But what Sandel worries about already exists, as Roiphe’s piece shows. Even without genetic engineering, deranged hyper-parents that I see everyday in New York attempt to smother Mother Nature with viola lessons, Mozart immersion cribs, and organic baby food. Sandel’s concern is that genetic engineering will some how make what is already cartoonishly awful somehow worse. I doubt that. Instead, I submit that genetic engineering will do the opposite. Parents who have designer babies will know their children will have been engineered with high intelligence, musical acumen, marvelous memory, and a robust immune system. If you knew all those things about your kid on a genetic level, would you fuss over every moment, or let your kid get a little dirty, content that she’ll discover her many talents on her own?

Could it be that genetic engineering might (might!) be part of what cures us of the hyper-parenting pandemic? Let’s hope so. For the kids’ sake.

Image of soon-to-be-filthy-child by jimharmer via Flickr Creative Commons

Fossilized dinosaur embryos, found still in their eggshells, have claimed the title of the oldest vertebrate embryos ever seen–they were fossilized in the early Jurassic Period, around 190 million years ago, researchers say. The embryos are from the species Massospondylus, a prosauropod, the family of dinosaurs which gave rise to iconic sauropods like the Brachiosaurus.

Of course, just because we found the well-preserved bones of a dinosaur embryo doesn’t mean we can bring the thing back to life with a snap of the fingers (or even with a crack scientific team “sparing no expense”). But remember that most scientists were very skeptical that any viable tissue could be found in dinosaur bones until Mary Schweitzer did just that—and faced a lot of misguided attacks before her results were confirmed.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the discovery was the fact that these dinosaur babies are in some important ways baby-like: big heads, no teeth, get around on four legs instead of two (as did Massospondylus adults). The researchers suspect that these little ones therefore probably couldn’t survive on their own, and must have depended on their parents—the oldest ever example of parental care. And if that’s the case, it sort of makes sense that they’d appeal to our weakness for things baby-like, even if they’re not of our species.

So if and when we do bring Massospondylus back from the mass grave of extinction, we better be ready to raise the kids well. Any ideas on how to parent a prosauropod?

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.

In an unrelated, but completely relevant article, the Washington Post’s Kwame Anthony Appiah triggered a debate over moral progress and history with his recent “What will future generations condemn us for?” His guesses are that our prison system, the industrial meat complex, elderly care, and environmental damage will bring the most intense “how could they do that?” from history students. Will Wilkinson adds that nation-states dividing up the world with their borders, tariffs, and limits on freedom of movement will look pretty awful to citizens of the next century. Tyler Cowen (who teaches at my alma matter) tried to figure out what we might condemn future generations for, worrying that torture, pre-emptive war, and anti-gay sentiment may make a comeback. What is going to help determine whether we’re moving towards utopia or dystopia?

The most interesting twist on Appiah’s original idea, and a potential answer to my query, comes from conservative op-ed writer Ross Douthat at the New York Times. Douthat’s eye-grabbing point is that technology itself helps to drive our moral shifts, in that often a new technology is able to disconnect two things that were once inextricable:

“Note, though, that I’m envisioning a technological leap as the catalyst for this shift. It’s true that deterministic arguments can go too far, and that human agency matters enormously to moral change … but it’s still the case that technological and economic trends play an enormous role in determining which moral arguments gain ground, which achieve dominance, and which slip toward eccentricity. The cotton gin launched a thousand pro-slavery polemics. The birth control pill convinced millions of people that the old moral consensus on sex and marriage was outdated and even absurd.”

Just which taboos will become tolerable in the future based on technology is, I think, grist for another post. What is worth discussing now is how technology enables these sea changes in our moral thinking. Bailey’s “yuck-to-yippie” thesis dovetails nicely with Douthat’s “tech can drive moral change” thesis. Let’s imagine a new example: designer babies. We first hear about a brand new technology and everybody from religious leaders to scientific experts to your grandmother stands up and denounces it—“Yuck!” says Grandma; “Eugenics will bring back Hitler armies!” says the politician who has no grasp of science (a redundant statement, I know); “God doesn’t approve!” says the Vatican; “all people will all be the same!” says the worried science philosopher. “The genetic engineering of people could have lots of things go wrong with it, and it’s just unnatural, so we probably shouldn’t do it,” says the general consensus.

But that breakthrough in genetic engineering technology doesn’t just go away. The knowledge, the scientific understanding, the ability to make designer babies, is now here, nagging at the back of everyone’s brain. Despite loud, angry protests, the FDA rigorously tests the process and a few babies are born using trait-selection techniques. Just as with IVF, the babies are shown to be as healthy as babies born without assistive reproductive technologies. Normalized and routine, thousands of children are able to be born free of genetic diseases. Twenty years after the fact, the research team that first successfully cloned a human being is finally given the Nobel Prize.

That little scenario describes Bailey’s trend, but what about Douthat’s social change? Consider the following: at our current point in history, no matter how one reproduces, good genes are still mixed in with bad ones. Even the healthiest couples could pass on genes that would make their child susceptible to high cholesterol, cancer, schizophrenia, depression, or whatever other diseases there are waiting to be triggered by the genetic demons perching in the family tree. Then, as described above, a process is developed that allows you to select only the healthiest genes from the mother and father when “designing” a new child. In a world where one can easily prevent a litany of genetic diseases and disorders, how would you look back on a society that paid no attention to the genetic health of the child? Would you consider it moral to leave a child’s genetic outlook to chance?

My argument is that technology can actually create new ethical problems and moral decisions because it allows events that were once impossible. In the case of vat grown meat, tech allows us to have our happy cows and eat them too, making our being moral all the easier. In the case of designer babies, tech gives us a big heaping batch of new problems to fret and argue over.

Original image via aussiegall on Flickr

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…”

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.

Image: alvi2047/Flickr

“Would you take a magic pill to make yourself straight?” asked an audience member at a GLBT forum at Winona State University in Minnesota. The concept is not pure fantasy: scientists have flipped a genetic switch to make female mice homosexual and rogue pediatric endocrinologist, Maria New, has been giving mothers dexamethasone to prevent lesbian daughters. Pre-implantation genetic diagnostics, combined with in-vitro fertilization, is making it possible to select out genetic defects and disorders, and to select for desirable traits. The science of sexuality is driving us towards a future in which we may have the option to choose our child’s sexual orientation. This scenario poses a few questions:

1. Is choosing the sexual orientation of a new child an ethical act, regardless of the orientation chosen?

2. Would it be ethical to make all of one’s children a single orientation? All homosexual? All attracted to women?

3. Is it ethical to cure pathological sexualities, such as pedophilia?

Our culture reserves some of the largest swaths of freedom for procreation and child-rearing. Where does one draw the line? I don’t have answers. I open it to you, dear readers.

Photo: Triplées by Raphael Goetter via Flickr

I felt compelled to give it a chance, however, after flipping to the authors’ page and realizing, to my great relief, that I was dealing with actual scientists. Scientists with a wry sense of humor and penchant for science fiction, as I soon found out. Having listened to (or slept through) my fair share of biology lectures during college, I was curious to see how they would approach such a complex topic–and, more importantly, how helpful their “tips” would turn out to be. I’m happy to report that not only have they written one of the most entertaining, succinct guides to biotechnology and cloning, they have also provided an exhaustive guide on how to best your clone—surely a pressing question for anyone reading this blog.Kurpinski and Johnson do a bang-up job of explaining the nitty-gritty of complex concepts like RNA transcription, epigenetics, and genetic variation in terms that are both easy to follow (without being insultingly simple), and a hoot to read–something I can’t say for the vast majority of textbooks that I’ve suffered through. It doesn’t hurt that they generously pepper their descriptions with clever analogies and examples from sci-fi favorites to help drive home the point.

Even if you’re not too keen on the underlying science, the authors have plenty more on tap, including chapters debunking the most common misconceptions about cloning and biotech (and there are plenty) and outlining the merits of “bioenhancements” (think buffing up your physique or attaining extended life). As befits the general tongue-in-cheek tone of the book, these chapters are equal parts hard science and nerdy conjecture, trading laughs in some instances for hard looks at the moral implications of genetic engineering in others. Indeed, while the authors are generally bullish about the prospects for biotechnology to ameliorate our lives, they urge caution when it comes to taking genetic “tinkering” to its limits.

The book loses a little bit of steam, somewhat unfortunately (given the title), when it offers advice on how to actually defeat your clone. It’s not that it fails to make good on its promise; it actually does so to a fault. Where the other chapters consistently felt snappy and engrossing, this one sometimes felt a little more formulaic, even forced. While it is chock full of helpful suggestions on how to recognize and beat virtually every type of clone you might face, it can start to read like a long list of science-tinged “Fight Club”-esque tips. They could have easily eliminated half of the chapter without losing any of its potency.

How to Defeat is essentially a book about the myths, promises, and potential pitfalls of biotechnology (particularly the threat posed by a cantankerous clone), it also happens to be a solid, and solidly geektastic, primer on genetics, molecular, and synthetic biology. If you ever wanted to learn more about cloning and biotechnology without having to crack open a textbook or highbrow journal, you won’t find a more compact and enjoyable read.

Image: Amazon

Moore’s Law (the speed of computing per dollar doubles every 18 months), perhaps the representative concept of ever accelerating technological progress and the foundation of Ray Kurzweil’s prediction of a technological singularity, looks pretty pathetic. And genomics is still getting cheaper and faster:

The genome sequenced by the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium (actually a composite from several individuals) took 13 years and cost $3 billion. Now, using the latest sequencers from Illumina, of San Diego, California, a human genome can be read in eight days at a cost of about $10,000. Nor is that the end of the story. Another Californian firm, Pacific Biosciences, of Menlo Park, has a technology that can read genomes from single DNA molecules. It thinks that in three years’ time this will be able to map a human genome in 15 minutes for less than $1,000. And a rival technology being developed in Britain by Oxford Nanopore Technologies aspires to similar speeds and cost.

In terms of reductions in cost and speed, genomic sequencing has accomplished in a decade what took computing has been lurching towards for over half a century. Imagine going from the ENIAC to the iPad in fifteen years instead of sixty—that’s what genomic sequencing did. It’s hard to even imagine what will happen when a person’s genome can be sequenced in under an hour for the cost of a new computer. On its own, this news is amazing. Genomic sequencing’s progress is also frustrating, however, given the near non-existence of drugs and treatments based in genomic research. Only now, with the ability to sequence multiple genomes at a reasonable (if still rather steep) price, are researchers beginning to gain traction. While it’s well and good to be able to sequence a genome, we’re still a ways off from doing anything with the information.

The steep fall of costs and time for genomic sequencing mixed with the significant lack of real, medical applications like drugs or diagnostic tools has troubling implications for those committed to the futuristic prophesies of a technological Singularity. The technological Singularity, pushed by Kurzweil and his zealots at the Singularity University (recently profiled in the New York Times and rightly ridiculed at Scientific American) is based in an extrapolation of Moore’s Law to all of human technological progress. Kurzweil believes that, based on his calculations, technological change is accelerating at such a pace that by 2045 progress will become incomprehensibly rapid. Things like genuine artificial intelligence, self-replicating nanorobots, and human-machine hybrids will be effortless and prolific. Yet, in less than a decade, genomics has shown that improvements in the cost and speed of a technology do not guarantee real-world applications or immediate paradigm shifts in how we live our day-to-day lives.

Moore’s Law is moot and genetics (in terms of applications) is just beginning to boom. Back to the drawing boards, futurists: acceleration alone isn’t enough to build the future.

(image: The Economist)

We’ve just heard that we’re going back to Comic Con this summer, with a panel topic and line-up even bigger and better than last year’s event.

We are teaming up with Jennifer Ouellette and the crew at the Science and Entertainment Exchange to produce a panel on “MAD SCIENCE,” i.e. Science as a double-edged sword, ethically and morally neutral in and of itself, but dependent upon who wields it, and how.

Beloved Internet Personality Phil Plait is lined up to moderate (after he gets his tattoo) and we’re expecting guests from Eureka, Battlestar Galactica, Fringe, Stargate: Universe and more.  Watch this space for additional details.

The GQ layout, “The Rock Stars of Science,” introduces a public service campaign that matches musicians with leading researchers in different medical fields to highlight the need for additional research funding.  The featured scientists include Francis Collins,  Harold Varmus and Anthony Fauci, all of whom have been mentioned in DISCOVER recently, so we can’t quarrel with the science cast or the cause.

My beef is with the rock stars.  Joe Perry?  Sheryl Crow?  Seal?  It’ s beyond me why GQ couldn’t find anyone who had produced a meaningful hit in the last ten years.  How about Tunde Adebimpe from TV on the Radio (bonus: album is called “Dear Science“)?

The Louis Vuitton campaign features astronauts Sally Ride, Buzz Aldrin and Jim Lovell promoting a $1500 handbag called the “Icare” (presumably as in Icarus as opposed to caring about space or handbags).  What does the space program have to do with Louis Vuitton?  Beats the heck out of me.  Just enjoy the video and hope that LV dug deep to pay these guys to participate.

This week, an elaborately produced documentary from National Geographic Channel traces the path of the baby mammoth (“Lyuba”) from discovery in Siberia to analysis in Russia and Japan, as scientists try to piece together the details of its life and death.

Narrated by erstwhile Alias dad Victor Garber, the show makes impressive use of CGI animation and reenactments using the real-life participants to tell the story.

Globetrotting University of Michigan paleontologist Dr. Dan Fisher travels to Siberia to meet the reindeer herdsman who stumbled upon the mammoth and then to Japan to CT scan the find.  He later performs investigative surgery and forensic dentistry on Lyuba.  Along the way, he makes several breakthrough mammoth discoveries, including that baby mammoths ate their mothers’ feces(!).

Things only get dicey when the producers call on Dr. Fisher to “act” alongside the CGI.

So what about the cloning?

Despite teasing the possibility in the promotion of the show, the producers ultimately admit that cloning is still a remote possibility. While Lyuba’s DNA is the best preserved sample ever discovered, according to Fisher, “Cloning an animal as complex as a mammoth is far beyond our current technical capabilities, but there has been remarkable progress on various aspects of the problem. One day perhaps.”

Here at Discover, we’ll keep working on the dino-chicken.

Any Dream Will Do is a reality competition for aspiring West End actors/singers trying to land the lead in a new London production of Joseph and The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.  The host is a somewhat subdued (compared to his late night show) Graham Norton.  The judges include Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber himself and your very own Captain Jack Harkness.

Whether or not musical theater reality competitions are your cup of tea, one episode of this show will leave you wondering, “How does the BBC find a dozen talented singers in the UK, while American Idol can only produce one in a much larger country?”

BBC America has packaged the reality show premiere with a one-hour special, John Barrowman: The Making of Me, in which John explores the latest research on the origins of homosexuality and relates it to his own experience growing up.  [Related from DISCOVER: Is There a Gay Gene?]

Science-wise, the show is sort of a mishmash of different research from fMRI’s to the psychology of childhood gender roles to neuroscience, but is redeemed by Barrowman’s winning personality.

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.

Gene therapy works by rewriting a patient’s genetic code, an impossibility with conventional medicines, and could be used to combat diseases such as hemophilia, Parkinsons, and cancer. It’s a beautifully simple idea in concept, but the real world scientists that are working to make it a common-place reality are finding the execution to be a tough problem.

There are a number of tough nuts to crack: delivering the therapeutic DNA into a cell without triggering a massive immune response (such a response killed a participant in a gene therapy clinical trial in 1999); maintaining a therapeutic level of treated cells within the body, difficult to do when the body is replenishing old cells with new ones created with the body’s own non-modified genome; and making sure the therapeutic DNA doesn’t cause havoc with the healthy DNA in a cell, possibly provoking the creation of a tumor. However, after the very slow progress since 1990, there have been some gains made in recent years, with an Italian team announcing that they had found a way to deliver gene therapy without triggering an immune response–at least in mice–in 2006.