The Exuberance of the Flesh: visions of a bio-augmented humanity (Part I of II)
Large-scale engineering of complex biological systems has the potential to radically transform humanity, and the ways in which this may happen may not always be obvious
“The bridgers clearly retained an evolved acceptance of the constraints of embodiment, but it seemed that half the pleasure of being flesh came from pushing the limits of biology, and the rest from minimizing all other encumbrances. Maybe the maddest of the masochistic statics would relish every obstacle and discomfort Lacerta could impose on them, waxing lyrical about ‘the real world of pain and ecstasy’ while the ultraviolet flayed them, but for most fleshers it would do nothing but erode the kind of freedom that made the choice of flesh worthwhile.”
Greg Egan, Diaspora (1997)
I chose to start with a quote from a novel this time. Diaspora is a name that you may be familiar with if you have a deep-enough interest in science fiction. Written science fiction, that is, for this is a story that you will certainly never find in any other type of media. Most likely, you will never find anything like it, or even remotely close, in any other type of media.
Greg Egan is the type of writer who has managed to turn self-indulgence into a cult following (and I say this in the best possible way, as I count myself among that following). He has no time for plot, or characters or any of the things that are traditionally thought to make a good novel. Instead, his works read more like treatises on speculative and fictional science. They live and die on the beauty and grandeur of his wild and complex ideas. Some of these ideas form a good starting point for the conversation I want to have today.
For many in the transhumanist movement, Diaspora is a seminal work of fiction. It contains one of the most complete and radical elaborations of a post-human future to ever be written. It portrays humanity as divided into three groups:
The fleshers, who remain fully biological despite varying degrees of genetic engineering;
The gleisners, who have transferred their consciousnesses to robot bodies.
And the citizens, who have abandoned the physical world and now exist only as software running in computers (which they call “polises").
Most of the characters in the novel are citizens, and they are clearly the group that Egan is most interested in, but the fleshers feature prominently in an early part of the novel, as an important plot point involves the destruction of their world by a catastrophic astronomical event.
Hinted to be the most diverse of all three branches of humanity, the fleshers are said to be themselves divided into two large sub-groups, the statics, who are mostly (though not always fully) unmodified humans, and the exuberants, who have modified their biology to an oftentimes extreme degree. It is on the second group that I want to focus on here, hence the title of the post.
Egan tells us relatively little about them. We know at least that there are avian, amphibian and photosynthetic varieties. We also know that many exuberant clades have extensively modified their nervous systems for a variety of reasons. The most prominent flesher characters in the novel belong to a group called “the bridgers,” who are trying to “fill in the gaps” between exuberants with highly divergent neural architectures in order to keep humanity united.
My goal here is to “flesh out the fleshers,” in a way, meaning that I intend to explore the diversity of what a heavily bio-augmented humanity might be like.
01: Setting the Stage
While I did, in a way, start sketching these ideas as if they were Diaspora fan-fiction, I want to set myself free from Egan’s vision of future from the start. Consider this post to be something that exists in dialog with Diaspora, as well as other media that I will later introduce, but is not about Diaspora or any of the other media. If anything, I tentatively think of it as being set in the same “biopunk” world that I described in my previous blogpost, but I do not exactly want to be bound by that either. The only restriction here is that human augmentation must be mostly restrained to biological means. This may be because other strategies failed to produce results, or because they did produce results but the non-biological transhumans simply set off to space, or virtual reality, or another dimension, and left the Earth to their flesh-and-blood brethren.
We start by hypothesizing that the scientific and technological tools allowing for human bio-augmentation in our scenario come as the result of developments in four fields:
Bionanotechnology: As I discussed extensively in the previous blogpost, biological “wet” nanotechnology is orders of magnitude more likely to come about than Drexlerian “dry” nanotechnology. Proponents of drynano have so far failed to demonstrate what type chemistry could make their nanomachines possible, whereas biomolecules such as proteins and nucleic acids already exhibit machine-like behavior. Swarms of biological nanobots can be deployed to various parts of the human body and programmed to fulfill various enhancement-related functions.
Genetic engineering: With the CRISPR revolution in full swing for a number of years, it is now clear that gene-editing has becomes a much easier and less expensive process than it was before. Whereas previously it was necessary to engineer a custom endonuclease to sever DNA at every specific site, the Cas9 enzyme can now do it anywhere, as long as provided with a suitable guide RNA molecule. A very recent development (PASTE) promises another giant leap by fusing Cas9 with a reverse transcriptase and an integrase, allowing for the direct insertion of new DNA into the target organism’s genome. Previous tecniques (even CRISPR-based), relied on “tricking” the cell’s naturally occurring DNA repair mechanisms into incorporating the new genetic material, which was never very dependable.
Synthetic biology: Overlapping greatly with the first two, SynBio refers to our general ability to either re-purpose existing biological systems into machines, or create new ones from scratch to accomplish our ends. This can happen at all levels, from biomolecules like proteins and nucleic acids (as would be the case biotechnology), to the cellular and multicellular level. Engineered bacteria, artificial cells, organoids and xenobots are among the most interesting lines of research.
Systems biology and the omics sciences: Our current capacity to engineer biology is limited by our highly incomplete understanding of the workings of complex and highly interconnected living systems. Part of the problem is that until very recently molecular biologists and biochemists kept their research small in scale, focusing only on a single narrow aspect at a time and neglecting to look a the big picture. Systems biology and the omics approaches offer a way out of this reductionist paradigm, allowing scientists to finally do justice to the inherent complexity of living organisms and allowing us to engineer their higher order emergent properties.
I consider a substantial amount of progress in Artificial Intelligence to be necessary for most of these developments to take place. AI tools are already at the forefront of research in systems biology and most likely hold the keys to the purposeful design of new biomolecules. However, “substantial progress” does not necessarily mean that AGI will ever be achieved, or that computers will ever have enough power to simulate a full-fledged human mind, so this can still be a highly conservative scenario where it comes to information technology, perfectly compatible with the notion of a long AI winter after the current phase of rapid development wears off and with the indefinite stagnation of computer processing speed following the definitive death of Moore’s Law.
02: From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh…
…it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as though it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call the temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine is immortal… Even in death I serve the Omnissiah.
If you, dear reader, are even half as terminally online as I am, you have most likely come across this quote already. It is plastered all over the internet by the ubiquitous Warhammer 40K fandom, and appears often when the subject of transhumanism is mentioned.
The original source is a videogame set in that fictional universe, where players take on the role of the Adeptus Mechanicus, members of a cyborg cult that controls the planet of Mars. They see biology and humanity’s original flesh and blood constitution as self-evidently weak and seek to escape it through increasing degrees of cyborgization.
Influenced by cyberpunk, transhumanism frequently leans in the same direction, or, even more often, it seeks complete abandonment of corporeality in favor of an existence in the form of sentient software, as the citizens in Diaspora. But how weak is the flesh, truly?
For those willing to abandon embodiment and material reality, it would be hard to deny that becoming purely digital beings in a simulated environment would not offer some advantages. Likewise, if one really wants to colonize space or another extreme environment, it would be hard to argue that having a fully robotic body would not make this easier to achieve. This, of course, assumes that both of these things are possible and that they are good enough to afford comfort to the the humans who may opt for these types of existence (eg. they must provide a full human sensorium inside the simulated reality or through the robot body’s sensing components).
But what to say of a more mundane comparison? “Classical cyborgs” (still partly organic, but with chrome implants all around) vs. bio-augmented humans.
Is it clear in this case that cyborgization would be superior? Are the Adeptus Mechanicus - still part-flesh themselves - right to look down on fully flesh-and-blood humanity?
My position is that bio-augmentation would generally be able to achieve the same results as cyborgization with less complications and a few unique advantages. Consider, for a moment, the classical cybernetic implant. Made of a metal of some sort. It may be a powerful bionic arm or leg, or a computer processor strategically placed in the brain for cognitive augmentation and artificial telepathy.
There area few notable problems with the concept as it is usually presented. The first is the lack of biocompatibility, which is already a nightmare for the protheses makers of our day, let alone for an hypothetical cyberpunk society. Our immune system is a highly sophisticated machine, which evolved to expel from our body everything it deems foreign, it does not usually react too well to pieces of metal. Undesired immunity aside, many metals and other synthetic structural materials are cytotoxic, and the task of finding or developing new ones that are not can be quite daunting.
The second main problem with cybernetic implants is difficulty of installation. It would surely require highly invasive surgery, especially if we want to install them in places like the brain. This is unlikely to be safe or practical to do on a large scale, potentially placing limits on both the scope and availability of cyber-augmentation. Hypothetically, one could envision nanobots assembling the implants directly where they’re needed as a solution, but, as I have previously stated, practical nanobots are likely to be biological, so we will save that possibility for later in the article.
Finally, related to the previous one, there is also the issue of maintenance. All tech needs maintenance. Things fall out of place, parts fail and need to be tweaked or replaced. It’s expensive and cumbersome, and it will be particularly more so if the tech that needs to be maintained is located deep inside people’s bodies (which, by the way, are highly corrosive environments, so implants would need a lot of maintenance).
Biotechnology offers ways around most of these problems. Life is generally more compatible with itself (definitely do not take this as an absolute, though) and it has a remarkable ability to self-repair and make more of itself. Assuming it can be engineered to do the same things as cyberware would do, it would most likely hold a significant edge.
03: How people get bio-augmentation wrong
Biological augmentation in popular consciousness is usually restricted to genetic engineering. The most well-known media portrayal is likely the 1997 dystopian movie Gattaca, with its depiction of “genoism” as a new form of discrimination, and a hyper-hierarchical society where individuals are judged on the merits of theirs genes rather than their own. It is often cited by opponents of transhumanism as a kind of prophetic warning. It is a well-made movie, in my opinion, but flatly reactionary and rather incurious. It does not do justice to its subject matter. It lacks nuance, depth, knowledge, and most importantly, imagination.
The degree of augmentation portrayed in Gattaca is far from extreme. “Valids,” the dominant class of bio-engineered humans at the top of the new society, look and think much like ordinary humans, and are shown to be only slightly “better” (and this is highly relative and questionable) than the “In-Valids,” the underclass of natural-born humans who are relegated to menial labour in the world of the movie. The augmentation happens exclusively on the germline level, and is apparently limited to the selection (and possible occasional insertion) of desired genes in during an IVF process. Despite the crude technique and the underwhelming scope of the augmentations, society is seemingly obsessed with DNA, so much that it’s the only thing that matters. We could perfectly, like transhumanist sociologist James Hughes does in his classical book Citizen Cyborg, question why this society doesn’t simply legislate to protect the privacy of genetic information.
But I feel like there is a deeper, more radical critique to be made. Simply put, I think Gattaca, like most pieces of media that have explored the subject, gets bio-augmentation all wrong.
Out of all branches of biotechnology, human germline genetic engineering is the least promising and the least likely to see wide use and lead to substantial human augmentation in the not too distant future.
The reasons for this are both scientific/technological and social, and these two intertwine in many ways. Firstly, human cells are complex and so is the human genome, so it will often be more advantageous to achieve human augmentation through manipulation of other organisms or lower level biological structures. Secondly, while society's “yuck factor” against genetic engineering is more or less transversal, modifying embryos before they develop worsens things by inviting discussions of personal autonomy. Gene therapy intended for adults is comparatively less controversial, providing a rationale for believing that interventions that can be done on adults, even if at increased difficulty compared to embryos, are more likely to be greenlit by society and pursued by scientists.
Far different from what is predicted by science fiction, I envision the short to medium-term future of a biopunk transhumanist humanity to be dominated by bionanotechnology, human microbiome augmentation, artificial symbiont organisms, organic electronic or biocomputational implants, and genetic engineering of somatic cells and tissues in adult humans. Only after some very extreme modifications have been achieved will humans start passing them on to their decendents, and at that point what we will get is not a Gattaca-type scenario, but a more Diaspora-like one, with all manner of wild and increasingly divergent tribes of exuberants.
04: The unintuitive notion of the bio-cyborg
It might, perhaps, be useful to think of the bio-augmented human of an early age as a type of cyborg.
This naturally seems like a contradiction, considering that the word cyborg, a portmanteau of cybernetic organism, is almost universally thought to refer to a human who has incorporated inorganic technology. The truth, however, is that the word cybernetics actually refers to the study of self-regulated systems, capable of adjusting their function through mechanisms like feedback loops. It is often used when discussing biology.
What are some of the devices necessary for creating self-regulating man-machine systems? This self-regulation must function without the benefit of consciousness in order to cooperate with the body’s own autonomous homeostatic controls. For the exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic system unconsciously, we propose the term “Cyborg.” The Cyborg deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulatory control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments.
The above quote is, to my knowledge, the first ever recorded use of the word cyborg. Its authors were neurophysiologist Manfred E. Clynes and psychiatrist Nathan S. Kline, who originally conceived the concept as a strategy to facilitate space exploration and colonization by means of human enhancement. While they clearly envisioned the incorporation of inorganic mechanical elements, it is worth it to note that their primary concern, hence the use of the suffix cyber-, was with self-regulation and the seamless integration of human and machine.
The Cyborg must thus not be thought of exclusively as a being that incorporates biology with non-biological technology. It must be thought of as a being who incorporates biology with dynamically integrated technology, extending the natural self-regulatory functions of the body to a larger system. This definition makes no specifications as to the substrate that the technological exogenous components are made of. They can perfectly be biotechnological exogenous components.
The advantage of thinking of the biologically augmented human as a cyborg is that we can free ourselves from the restrictive notion that such a human would, inevitably, be the way they are because of unchangeable genetic programming - determined for them before birth. This thinking makes sense only if we assume that bio-augmentation is limited to germline genetic engineering.
I already listed some of approaches which I think would be more prominent. All of them point in the direction of bio-cyborgs rather than designer babies and genetically-informed eugenics. My intention is to go over all of them in more detail, but I will do so in a rather free-form manner, so do not expect me to go exactly point-by-point.
05: Human Microbiome Agumentation
An oftentimes popular factoid in biology is that the human body actually contains more bacterial cells than human cells proper. We are, in fact, largely made of bacteria, and that is a good thing. These organisms evolved with us and they perform numerous functions that are fundamental to human health.
It also has the underappreciated corollary that most of our cells are much easier to engineer than human cells. Bacteria have smaller genomes and much simpler regulatory mechanisms. The DNA is also freely available in the cytoplasm, rather than locked in a compact nucleus. We don’t even need CRISPR to effectively and cheaply modify their genomes, although it’s certainly still helpful. Rather than modifying the genome of an embryo, or going through the potentially troublesome process of doing the same to every single cell (or even just a subset of cells) of an adult individual, we could modify bacteria in a petri dish and then have them colonize our body, much like an infection, albeit a controlled and desirable one in this case.
Present day researchers are well-aware of the potential of engineering the human microbiome. Naturally, most of the discussion focuses on therapeutic applications to treat diseases, but it’s not difficult to imagine the same principles being applied for enhancement purposes further down the line. Treatments with recombinant commensal bacteria have already been shown to provide protection against both bacterial and viral infections in animal models. Scientists have also speculated on the possibility of harnessing other capacities of the human microbiome. In addition to providing protection against pathogens, it is also known to modulate immunity, metabolism, and even brain activity, opening the door to a series of interesting possibilities.
We can imagine a type of “parallel metabolome” engineering that would add new pathways for the breakdown and synthesis of bio-molecules without having to directly touch any of our own cells. This could allow us, for example, to diversify our diet by allowing us to digest things that we would normally be unable to, or simply by allowing us to get more out of each piece of food we ingest. To provide an easily intelligible if perhaps over-simplistic example, we might be able to feed on grass by infecting ourselves with bacteria engineered to reproduce cow metabolism. More extremely, we might imagine supplanting our skin microbiome with modified photosynthetic bacteria that would turn sunlight into nutrients for our consumption.
Photosynthetic humans are actually a relatively common occurrence in science fiction. For genre enthusiasts in the present day, the first thing that comes to mind is probably John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series, where retirees join the space armed forces and are given new bodies that look just like them when they were young, except for being fitter, more attractive, and, of course, green, owing to their ability to photosynthesize.
Now, in the series, the photosynthetic machinery is presumably located within the engineered human bodies’ own skin cells, but it would probably be easier to attain the same effect through transplantation of light-eating bacteria or even small multicellular organisms. A successful 2021 clinical trial already experimented with algae skin patches to treat oxygen deficiency. Imagine this but taken to an extreme degree, so much that it’s permanent and people’s skins become green. The photosynthetic organisms themselves would have to be extensively modified, though, in order to massively increase their energy-generating capacity. They would need to produce enough glucose to feed themselves and to give a substantial amount to their hosts. Humans have much higher energy requirements than bacteria, algae or even “higher” plants, and while some animals can photosynthesize, interestingly precisely by borrowing the chloroplasts of other organisms, they are invariably very small animals. In any case, it’s improbable that humans will ever be able to obtain all of their energy from the sun, no matter how efficient our microbial allies become at harvesting it, but for those that don’t mind becoming green, this approach may provide a complement, as it does to the brave geriatric soldiers of the Colonial Defense Forces in Scalzi’s interesting creation.
Neuromodulation by means of exploiting the interactions between the gut microbiome and the brain also sounds interesting (and funny, if a little bit gross). The brain is also thought to have it’s own microbiome, though this is not confirmed. If for some reason it proves not to exist, an artificial one can be created with GM microbes, allowing for a more direct approach. It may perhaps be an alternative to the notion of surgically implanting thousands of tiny electrodes in the brain, which honestly has seen better days.
But enough about things that microorganisms are already capable of doing! Here, at Scientific Schizoposting, we never shy way from thinking bigger. If one truly throws away the notion that there is any meaningful distinction between biology and technology, as one should in a biopunk world, then it becomes clear that a sufficiently engineered microbe can be far more than just a microbe, it can be a versatile and highly programmable biological microrobot.
This concept is most definitely taken seriously in present-day synthetic biology research. Bacteria are highly motile organisms, capable of directed swimming powered by their rotating flagella. Scientists seem currently very interested in exploiting this property to develop “biohybrid microswimmers” to deliver drugs to particular cells. Now, the direction in which bacteria swim in nature is usually determined by chemical/nutritional gradients (in other words, they follow the food), so a significant challenge from a bioengineering perspective is to learn how to steer that movement. A common theme in present day research is to make them responsive to magnetic fields, which we can direct quite well with our current physical technology.
More speculatively, we can imagine cells being equipped with their own full-fledged receivers and emitters of electromagnetic signals. Some scientists speculate that bacteria may already do that, using DNA much like an antenna, but this is a controversial assertion. Regardless, even assuming that such a thing doesn’t exist in nature, it could most likely be engineered. Proteins are also potential candidates for radio receivers, as some in animals and plants have shown themselves electromagnetically responsive. Once we are able to obtain genetically modified or synthetic bacteria that are able to receive radio signals from the outside, we can engineer genetic circuitry inside the cell to direct the flagella in a certain direction according to the received signal.
This would allow for remote control of the bacteria from an external computer, but also for potentially faster communication within local swarms of microbots. The swarms themselves could be capable of distributed computing, or even each cell itself might be a powerful biological computer.
With both the movement/positioning of biological microbots within the body and the workings of their inner cellular processes being fully programmable and even controllable in real time, these cellular machines would be able to do much more than just deliver things to different parts of the body. As previously mentioned, they could manipulate metabolism and immunity, now with the possibility of sophisticated real-time control being added. They could also build things within the body (artificial extracellular matrices that may be needed for some purpose, such as structurally reinforcing a certain tissue or providing scaffolds for some other process) and manipulate muscles/tissues or even neural connections.
Earlier in this blogpost, as well as in the previous one, I have talked about engineering sub-cellular biological structures such as DNA and proteins to obtain biological nano (as opposed to micro) technology, which may seem preferable in all ways to bacterial cellular-scale machinery. But in reality a combination of the two would most likely be more powerful. Firstly, it would allow actuation at several different levels (you don’t always need to start from the bottom when you want to build something, and in fact it is oftentimes counterproductive to do so). And secondly, biological microbots could provide much needed support to nanobots in a number of ways. We can envision engineered bacteria in our body as millions of cellular nanofactories, providing the nanobots with the scaffolding and controlled environment necessary for the proper operation of their assembly lines. They could also produce the nanobots themselves, encoding the instructions for their construction in their own genomes, and they could act as deployers and controllers of nanobots intended for operations in human cells. Given that microbots would surely have a much higher computational capacity than nanobots, and also more ease in communicating with external computers, this set up appears quite logical.
06: Bio-implants
I will use the term “bio-implants” here to denote any organic or biological macroscopic external component added to the body. This means it excludes modified human cells, as well as engineered microbiota, but include organic electronics, some types of biological circuitry, and multicellular artificial symbionts.
This is the part of biological human augmentation that most closely resembles the classical cyborg archetype, the only different being that the implants are made from a different substrate. They may be softer and squishier (though not necessarily), and may even themselves be alive.
Organic electronics is a an active and promising area of research in engineering that uses organic polymers as semiconductors instead of the usual metal alloys. They hold numerous advantages when compared to conventional electronics , especially where it comes to biomedical applications. In a short 2014 article published in nature materials, Guglielmo Lanzani summarized some of these advantages:
The fundamental observation that promotes organic semiconductors as the material of choice for bioelectronics is their structural kinship to proteins, carbohydrates and nucleic acids, as Agneta Richter-Dahlfors […] suggests […]. From a structural point of view, organic semiconductors have a number of key enabling features, such as being biocompatible, biodegradable, soft and conformable. On the functional side, they support electronic as well as ionic transport, and can be easily functionalized to enable specific excitation, probing and sensing capabilities.
For the specific purpose of building brain-machine interfaces, Lanzni cited research that showed organic transistors were able to record brain activity with greater fidelity than inorganic electrodes:
Jonathan Rivnay and George Malliaras […] pointed out the potential advantages of organic electrochemical transistors, owing largely to their efficient transduction of ionic to electronic signals. In such devices, the poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene): poly(4-styrenesulphonate) (PEDOT:PSS) channel is directly exposed to a liquid environment, and the current flowing through it is modulated by local variations of ionic concentrations in the liquid due to neural activity. This transistor strongly amplifies the signal coming from the neurons, thus resulting in an improved signal-to-noise ratio compared with passive transducers that is proving advantageous also in in vivo electrophysiology.
To these advantages, I would naturally add the fact that electronics made of organic polymers could be more easily assembled in situ by biological micro and nanotechnology, eliminating surgery as a requirement for the installation or maintenance of neural implants.
Moving on to engineered multicellular symbionts, these certainly have less in the way of present-day research to back them as a concept, but I still find them interesting to speculate on. In addition to bacteria, there are also small eukaryotic organisms that naturally inhabit the human body. These are mostly simple fungi and protists, but they also count a few multicellular organisms among their numbers. The most well-known and studied ones are called helminths, or “parasitic worms”.
The second designation may not be entirely fair in all cases. While many are indeed known to be associated with diseases, others are found frequently in healthy individuals and no evidence indicates that are at all prejudicial to human health. In fact, there is research that indicates the contrary:
A positive role for helminths in the eukaryome is suggested by the negative correlation between their presence and incidence of immune-mediated disease and by studies documenting a rise in disease symptoms after clearance of parasites [10,20]. Indeed, direct introduction of helminths (helminth therapy) as a prophylactic or therapeutic agent has often been successful at preventing or treating autoimmune and inflammatory disease [10,11,20,21], with important counter examples.
Indeed, much like microbes, it may be actually good to have worms inside you. It may even be justified eat them or transplant them to your body in some other way. If this is true of natural worms, then it may be even truer of genetically modified worms, which could be yet another, this time larger, organism to add to our assortment of sophisticated biological machinery. They would be harder to engineer than bacteria and fungi, but less so than more complex animals like humans. A major point in their favor is that, no matter if it’s parasitic, commensal or beneficial, there’s a worm that can install itself in just about every part of the body, including the brain. A fully programmable biological machine in the form a repurposed worm, could thus be a viable solution for macroscopic-level interventions in numerous human organs.
I realize that I must have probably already lost some readers to the “yuck-factor” by suggesting the possibility of worm-based human augmentation, but I have an even more outrageous possibility to share: tumor-based human augmentation.
Technically, tumors are human cells, so I am throwing my own definition of a bio-implant out of the window at this point, but I felt that the concept was a good fit for this section. So bear with me as I explain why this may actually be kind of a good idea.
Tumor cells are distinguished from normal human cells by their ability to grow and divide at a much faster rate. For mysterious reasons that are not very well understood, but most certainly differ significantly between different types of tumors, their cell cycles become disentangled from their neighbors’ and they become impervious to the chemical signals that usually regulate these processes. This ability is what allows them to take over entire parts of the body, and usually cause health complications by doing that. A tumor only becomes a cancer when it’s deemed “malignant,” meaning that it has capacity to spread to other parts of the body, but the two concepts share an underlying biological basis in the form of an abnormal pattern of uncontrolled and frenetic cell division.
What if we could learn to control the uncontrollable? What if we could somehow obtain programmable cancers and tumors. The cells could be injected into the bloodstream, make their way to the target tissue, and once there start proliferating. With their enhanced growth and division patterns, they would quickly gain the upper hand over the local cells, taking over that area of the body. Unlike a pathological tumor or cancer, however, they would be programmed to grow into a fully operational biological device, designed for whatever purpose the neoplasmic engineers had in mind. Also unlike a pathological tumor or cancer, the growth would stop once the desired structure had been formed, with no risk of spreading further and impairing any biological functions.
While this is a ridiculous proposition from any practical, contemporary science-based point of view, for the speculative schizo scientist it has a bizarre sort of appeal. If you’ve read the whole post until now without skipping much, you may be asking why I, having earlier complained about the difficulty of engineering human cells, am now proposing to engineer cancerous human cells, which are even more poorly understood and unpredictable than normal ones.
Well, just because it’s difficult that doesn’t mean it can’t be done (in fact, the next section will be entirely about engineering human cells), but there are actually some unexpected advantages to working with tumor cells. The first one is the already mentioned fast growth and division property. Tumor cells can establish themselves in the body more easily, making them ideal for a “living technological implant” sort of application. The second one is that tumor cells are actually easier to experiment on in a lab. Thanks to their immortality and fast-division properties, cancer cells form the basis of cell lines used in laboratories all around the world, to the point of being the default human cell models. It is thus not inconceivable that we may obtain a detailed understanding of the proliferation mechanisms of cancer cell before we do the same for healthy and normal human cells.
Again, it’s an outrageous idea, maybe even ridiculous, but it is not without it’s merits…
07: Adult genetic engineering and cellular modification
Anyway, returning to mainstream territory (comparatively speaking), I will now finally develop something that is closer to what biological human augmentation usually looks like in fiction. What can we do in terms of modifying actual human DNA in our own cells?
Hopefully, I have already provided enough of a justification for why I think modifications that can be done on adults have a greater transformative potential than embryonic or gamete-level ones. Even if they are harder to do, they can receive societal approval far more easily, which is important for both research and application. We see this even now, as while genetic modification of unborn children is almost universally condemned, some forms of gene therapy have already been approved and research on many others continues. I would not go as far as saying it continues unencumbered, but it is certainly far less controversial.
There are essentially two types of gene therapy. The oldest and most common one happens in vitro. The target cells are first harvested from patient, then modified externally, and then finally reinjected into the body. The second type, however, happens in vivo, with the cells being modified directly inside the body. Both types can be difficult to effect when the target cells aren’t located in an easily accessible organ such as the eye. For the second one in particular, the development of appropriate vectors for different organs, tissues and cell types remains a significant challenge, although engineered viruses are rising up to the task.
The traditional approach for both types involved supplementing the cells with an extra copy of the target gene, usually inserted in a plasmid (circular DNA fragments of bacterial origin). This meant that gene therapy could only add something to the cell that didn’t previously exist. It could not eliminate defective or unwanted gene products and replace them entirely with functional and desired ones. More recent approaches, however, driven primarily by the CRISPR-revolution have already changed that paradigm, allowing for gene editing to occur directly in the cell’s own chromosomes.
While editing and delivery methods still have a long way to go, recent progress has been heartening, and it appears that something quite impressive can be achieved in due time. Genetic modification in a adults in clearly possible, and if we posit a world where our already established tool kit of biological micro and nanotechnology comes into existence, the delivery problems just disappear. If we do not, significant development in viral vectors and other specialized delivery technologies will probably suffice.
Thus, the question becomes not so much about whether not we can perform genetic engineering on adults and more about what kind of limitations the inherent inflexibility of the adult body imposes on what can be achieved through genetic engineering.
This is especially relevant for large-scale morphological modifications, such as changing body proportions and giving humans new body parts. It should not pose much of a problem for metabolic or cellular interventions, and some organs like the brain are known for their plasticity, but if one wants to change bones or certain muscles, that should pose more of a challenge.
Could gene therapy give an adult human an extra pair of arms? Could it give them an extra heart? Gills so they could breath on water? Wings so they could fly?
These things sound outlandish even if we start from an embryo, which explains the almost complete absence of actual scientific research on them. But in embryos, one can at least hope to someday access “blueprint” for higher human morphology that is mostly certainly contained somewhere in the DNA. If this blueprint could be edited, the body would presumably develop into the desired shape. In adults, by contrast, something would have to be done to restart morphological development.
It’s unlikely that this is impossible, seeing we know that adult cells can revert to a embryonic-like stage when treated with a gene therapy cocktail. The fields of regenerative medicine and stem cell research probably also hold the key to achieve the kind of morphological modification of humans that we often see in science fiction. A particularly interesting concept is the Blastema, a mass of cells capable of differentiating into a full organ or body part.
If a collection of human cells can somehow be turned into a blastema by tweaking all the right genetic factors, it might also be possible to engineer that bastema to produce something entirely new, something that wasn’t part of the human body before. Something like an extra limb, or a pair of gills, or wings. Grown from a engineered mass of pluripotent cells on top of an adult organism, following a series of pre-programmed genetic instructions. If neural and blood vessel connections to the rest of the body prove challenging to make, biological micro and nano technology can intervene, and if some kind of scaffold is needed for the cells to develop into the right shape that can also be provided.
In case it proves easier, hearkening back to the previous section, a blastema may also be created non-human cells and implanted in the desire place. The modified human would thus become an artificial chimera, with extra-organs build from an entirely non-human genetic base.
To be continued…
Thanks for reading until this point. I originally intended for this post to be significantly smaller than my first, but once the ideas started flowing I realized that I had too much to talk about. I ended up making the decision to split The Exuberance of the Flesh.
While the first part dealt primarily with the methods through biological human augmentation may be achieved, the second part will focus more on the purposes for which we may want to bio-bioengineer humans, as well as on painting a clear picture of what bio-engineered humans and their societies might look like.
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Thanks a lot <3 and make sure not to lose part II!
Extremely out of my comfort zone but I’m obsessed and I got a friend hooked too. Please come back.