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Joined: 07 Aug 2008
Posts: 1853
Location: The Wild West
Posted: Fri Dec 02, 2011 11:38 am Post Subject: Get Ready for a New Human Species
EmTech: Get Ready for a New Human Species
Now that we can rewrite the code of life, Darwinian evolution can't stop us, says investor Juan Enriquez.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
By Emily Singer
The ability to engineer life is going to spark a revolution that will dwarf the industrial and digital revolutions, says Juan Enriquez, a writer, investor, and managing director of Excel Venture Management. Thanks to new genomics technologies, scientists have not only been able to read organisms' genomes faster than ever before, they can also write increasingly complex changes into those genomes, creating organisms with new capabilities.
Enriquez, who spoke at Technology Review'sEmTech conference on Tuesday, says our newfound ability to write the code of life will profoundly change the world as we know it. Because we can engineer our environment and ourselves, humanity is moving beyond the constraints of Darwinian evolution. The result, he says, may be an entirely new species.
Enriquez is the author of the global bestseller As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Life, Work, Health & Wealth. His most recent publication is an eBook, Homo Evolutis: A Short Tour of Our New Species.
Technology Review senior editor Emily Singer spoke with Enriquez after his talk.
TR: Why do you think there is going to be a new human species?
Juan Enriquez: The new human species is one that begins to engineer the evolution of viruses, plants, animals, and itself. As we do that, Darwin's rules get significantly bent, and sometimes even broken. By taking direct and deliberate control over our evolution, we are living in a world where we are modifying stuff according to our desires.
If you turned off the electricity in the United States, you would see millions of people die quickly, because they wouldn't have asthma medications, respirators, insulin, a whole host of things we invented to prevent people from dying. Eventually, we get to the point where evolution is guided by what we're engineering. That's a big deal. Today's plastic surgery is going to seem tame compared to what's coming.
How is this impending revolution going to shape the world?
Ninety-eight percent of data transmitted today is in a language almost no one spoke 30 years ago. We're in a similar period now. But this revolution will be more widespread because this is software that writes its own hardware.
People think this technology will just change pharma or biotech, but it's much bigger than that. For example, it's already changing the chemical industry. Forty percent of Dupont's earnings today come from the life sciences. It's going to change everything; it will change countries, who's rich and who's poor. It's going to create new ethics.
New ethics?
It will change even basic questions like sex. There used to be one way to have a baby. Now there are at least 17. We have decoupled sex from time. You can have a baby in nine months, or you can freeze sperm or a fertilized egg and implant it in 10 years or 100 years. You can create an animal from one of its cells. You can begin to alter reproductive cells. By the time you put this together, you've fundamentally changed how you reproduce and the rules for reproduction.
What does it take to make a new species?
We're beginning to see that it's an accumulation of small changes. Scientists have recently been able to compare the genomes of Neandertals and modern humans, which reveals just a .004 percent difference. Most of those changes lie in genes involved in sperm, testes, smell, and skin.
Engineering microbes alone might speciate us. When you apply sequencing technology to the microbes inhabiting the human body, it turns out to be fascinating. All of us are symbionts; we have 1,000 times more microbial cells in our bodies than human cells. You couldn't possible digest or live without the microbial cells inside your stomach. Some people have microbes that are better at absorbing calories. Diabetics have a slightly sweeter skin, which changes the microbial fauna and makes it harder for them to cauterize wounds.
One concern about human enhancement is that only some people will have access, creating an even greater economic divide. Do you think this will be the case?
In the industrial revolution, it took a lifetime to build enough industry to double the wealth of a country. In the knowledge revolution, you can build billion-dollar companies with 20 people very quickly. The implication is that you can double the wealth of a country very quickly. In Korea in 1975, people had one-fifth of the income of Mexicans, and today they have five times more. Even the poorest places can generate wealth quickly. You see this in Bangalore, China. On the flip side, you can also become irrelevant very quickly.
Scientists are on the verge of sequencing 10,000 human genomes. You point out this might highlight significant variation among our species, and that this requires some ethical consideration. Why?
The issue of [genetic variation] is a really uncomfortable question, one that for good reason, we have been avoiding since the 1930s and '40s. A lot of the research behind the eugenics movement came out of elite universities in the U.S. It was disastrously misapplied. But you do have to ask, if there are fundamental differences in species like dogs and horses and birds, is it true that there are no significant differences between humans? We are going to have an answer to that question very quickly. If we do, we need to think through an ethical, moral framework to think about questions that go way beyond science.
Joined: 15 May 2007
Posts: 976
Location: north-east victoria
Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2011 9:40 am Post Subject:
The elite have been creating a super-race for some decades already
I met one of them about ten years ago, an astonishing looking young woman with knees like a steamtrains pistons, and a grumpy old manservant, climbing a remote hilltop very early on Christmas day. They had a rental car.
How can we begin to work on the moral implications of these technologies, when the facts are mostly suppressed? Can we trust the elite to do it for us?
Joined: 07 Aug 2008
Posts: 1853
Location: The Wild West
Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2011 11:23 am Post Subject:
Since when has "ethics" ever stopped anybody pushing way beyond the boundaries! LMFAO!
If you really want to get all "conspiracy theory" about this stuff would it not make the most sense to enhance your own genetic code with "improvements" if you see yourself as "elite" whilst at the same time doing a larger scale "devo" on the masses (and also "kill off" the uneeded ones in various ways over time)? This is the stuff of the majority of science "fiction" writing around the place & most of the popular theories about a future eugenical NWO scenario - the separation of the species into 2 - 1 supposedly superior "ruling" class and the other a sub-class "bred" for subservience. But it obviously goes way beyond that simple breakdown.
Let's not forget also the creation of all manner of "beings" designed for specific tasks. The new generation of robots for example are "soft" & "flexible". It's not hard to imagine the melding together of robotics of this nature & "created" living tissue being announced pretty soon down the track (already highly developed behind closed doors no doubt)! A crudish-looking flexible robot -
Soft Robot, Developed By Harvard's George Whitesides, Looks Alive ALICIA CHANG
11/28/11 10:33 PM ET
LOS ANGELES — Harvard scientists have built a new type of flexible robot that is limber enough to wiggle and worm through tight spaces.
It's the latest prototype in the growing field of soft-bodied robots. Researchers are increasingly drawing inspiration from nature to create machines that are more bendable and versatile than those made of metal.
The Harvard team, led by chemist George M. Whitesides, borrowed from squids, starfish and other animals without hard skeletons to fashion a small, four-legged rubber robot that calls to mind the clay animation character Gumby.
In recent years, scientists have been tinkering with squishy – sometimes odd-looking – robots designed to squeeze through hard-to-reach cracks after a disaster like an earthquake or navigate rough terrain in the battlefield.
"The unique ability for soft robots to deform allows them to go places that traditional rigid-body robots cannot," Matthew Walter, a roboticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in an email.
A team from Tufts University earlier this year showed off a 4-inch (10-centimeter) caterpillar-shaped robot made of silicone rubber that can curl into a ball and propel itself forward.
The Harvard project, funded by the Pentagon's research arm, was described online Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The new robot, which took two months to construct, is 5 inches (12.7 centimeters) long. Its four legs can be separately controlled by pumping air into the limbs, either manually or via computer. This gives the robot a range of motions including crawling and slithering.
The researchers tested the robot's flexibility by having it squirm underneath a pane of glass just three-quarters of an inch from the surface.
Scientists maneuvered the robot through the tiny gap 15 times using a combination of movements. In most cases, it took less than a minute to get from side to side.
Researchers eventually want to improve the robot's speed, but were pleased that it did not break from constant inflation and deflation.
"It was tough enough to survive," said Harvard postdoctoral fellow Robert Shepherd, adding that the robot can traverse on a variety of surfaces including felt cloth, gravel, mud and even Jell-O.
There were drawbacks. The robot is tethered to an external power source and scientists need to find a way to integrate the source before it can be deployed in the real world.
"There are many challenges to actively moving soft robots and no easy solutions," Tufts neurobiologist Barry Trimmer, who worked on the caterpillar robot, said in an email.
Robotics researcher Carmel Majidi, who heads the Soft Machines Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, said the latest robot is innovative even as it builds on previous work.
"It's a simple concept, but they're getting lifelike biological motions," he said.
