Has anybody read the book [1]? Want to post a review?
Udhay
[1] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385509650/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/15/AR2005051501092_pf.html
Inventing Our Evolution
We're almost able to build better human beings. But are we ready?
The surge of innovation that has given the world
everything from iPods to talking cars is now
turning inward, to our own minds and bodies. In
an adaptation from his new book, Washington Post
staff writer Joel Garreau looks at the impact of the new technology.
Some changes in what it means to be human:
· Matthew Nagel, 25, can move objects with his
thoughts. The paralyzed former high school
football star, whose spinal cord was severed in a
stabbing incident, has a jack coming out of the
right side of his skull. Sensors in his brain can
read his neurons as they fire. These are
connected via computer to a robotic hand. When he
thinks about moving his hand, the artificial
thumb and forefinger open and close. Researchers
hope this technology will, within our lifetimes,
allow the wheelchair-bound to walk. The military
hopes it will allow pilots to fly jets using their minds.
· Around the country, companies such as Memory
Pharmaceuticals, Sention, Helicon Therapeutics,
Saegis Pharmaceuticals and Cortex Pharmaceuticals
are racing to bring memory-enhancing drugs to
market before the end of this decade. If clinical
trials continue successfully, these pills could
be a bigger pharmaceutical bonanza than Viagra.
Not only do they hold the promise of banishing
the senior moments of aging baby boomers; they
might improve the SAT scores of kids by 200 points or more.
· At the Defense Sciences Office of the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in
Arlington, programs seek to modify the
metabolisms of soldiers so as to allow them to
function efficiently without sleep or even food
for as much as a week. For shorter periods, they
might even be able to survive without oxygen.
Another program seeks to allow soldiers to stop
bleeding by focusing their thoughts on the wound.
Yet another program is investigating ways to
allow veterans to regrow blown-off arms and legs, like salamanders.
Traditionally, human technologies have been aimed
outward, to control our environment, resulting
in, for example, clothing, agriculture, cities
and airplanes. Now, however, we have started
aiming our technologies inward. We are
transforming our minds, our memories, our
metabolisms, our personalities and our progeny.
Serious people, including some at the National
Science Foundation in Arlington, consider such
modification of what it means to be human to be a
radical evolution -- one that we direct
ourselves. They expect it to be in full flower in the next 10 to 20 years.
"The next frontier," says Gregory Stock, director
of the Program on Medicine, Technology and
Society at the UCLA School of Medicine, "is our own selves."
The process has already begun. Prozac and its ilk
modify personality. Viagra alters metabolism. You
can see deep change in the basics of biology most
clearly, however, wherever you find the keenest
competition. Sport is a good example.
"The current doping agony," says John Hoberman, a
University of Texas authority on performance
drugs, "is a kind of very confused referendum on
the future of human enhancement." Some athletes
today look grotesque. Curt Schilling, the
All-Star pitcher, in 2002 talked to Sports
Illustrated about the major leagues. "Guys out
there look like Mr. Potato Head, with a head and
arms and six or seven body parts that just don't look right."
Steroids are merely a primitive form of human
enhancement, however. H. Lee Sweeney of the
University of Pennsylvania suggests that the
recent Athens Olympics may have been the last
without genetically enhanced athletes. His
researchers have created super-muscled
"Schwarzenegger rats." They're built like steers,
with necks wider than their heads. They live
longer and recover more quickly from injuries
than do their unenhanced comrades. Sweeney sees
it as only a matter of time before such technology seeps into the sports world.
Human enhancement is hardly limited to sport. In
2003, President Bush signed a $3.7 billion bill
to fund research at the molecular level that
could lead to medical robots traveling the human
bloodstream to fight cancer or fat cells. At the
University of Pennsylvania, ordinary male mouse
embryo cells are being transformed into egg
cells. If this science works in humans, it could
open the way for two gay males to make a baby --
blurring the standard model of parenthood. In
2004, a new technology for the first time allowed
women to beat the biological clock. Portions of
their ovaries, frozen when they are young and
fertile, can be reimplanted in their sixties,
seventies or eighties, potentially allowing them to bear children then.
The genetic, robotic and nano-technologies
creating such dramatic change are accelerating as
quickly as has information technology for the
past four decades. The rapid development of all these fields is intertwined.
It was in 1965 that Gordon E. Moore, director of
Fairchild's Research and Development
Laboratories, noted, in an article for the
35th-anniversary issue of Electronics magazine,
that the complexity of "minimum cost
semiconductor components" had been doubling every
year since the first prototype microchip was
produced six years before. And he predicted this
doubling would continue every year for the next 10 years.
Carver Mead, a professor at the California
Institute of Technology, would come to christen this claim "Moore's Law."
Over time it has been modified. As the core faith
of the entire global computer industry, it is now
stated this way: The power of information
technology will double every 18 months, for as far as the eye can see.
Sure enough, in 2002, the 27th doubling occurred
right on schedule with a billion-transistor chip.
A doubling is an amazing thing. It means the next
step is as great as all the previous steps put
together. Twenty-seven consecutive doublings of
anything man-made, an increase of well over 100
million times-- especially in so short a period
-- is unprecedented in human history.
This is exponential change. It's a curve that goes straight up.
Optimists say that culture and values can control the impact of these advances.
"You have to make a distinction between the
science and the technological applications," says
Francis Fukuyama, a member of the President's
Council on Bioethics and director of the Human
Biotechnology Governance Project. "It's probably
true that in terms of the basic science, it's
pretty hard to stop that. It's not one guy in a
laboratory somewhere. But not everything that is
scientifically possible will actually be
technologically implemented and used on a large
scale. In the case of human cloning, there's an
abstract possibility that people will want to do
that, but the number of people who are going to
want to take the risk is going to be awfully small."
Taboos will play an important role, Fukuyama
says. "We could really speed up the whole process
of drug improvement if we did not have all the
rules on human experimentation. If companies were
allowed to use clinical trials in Third World
countries, paying a lot of poor people to take
risks that you wouldn't take in a developed
country, we could speed up technology quickly.
But because of the Holocaust -- "
Fukuyama thinks the school of hard knocks will
slow down a lot of attempts. "People may in the
abstract say that they're willing to take that
risk. But the moment you have a deformed baby
born as a result of someone trying to do some
genetic modification, I think there will be a really big backlash against it."
Today, nonetheless, we are surrounded by the
practical effects of this curve of exponential
technological change. IBM this year fired up a
new machine called Blue Gene/L. It is ultimately
expected to be 1,000 times as powerful as Deep
Blue, the machine that beat world chess champion
Garry Kasparov in 1997. "If this computer unlocks
the mystery of how proteins fold, it will be an
important milestone in the future of medicine and
health care," said Paul M. Horn, senior vice
president of IBM Research, when the project was announced.
Proteins control all cellular processes in the
body. They fold into highly complex,
three-dimensional shapes that determine their
function. Even the slightest change in the
folding process can turn a desirable protein into
an agent of disease. Blue Gene/L is intended to
investigate how. Thus, breakthroughs in computers
today are creating breakthroughs in biology. "One
day, you're going to be able to walk into a
doctor's office and have a computer analyze a
tissue sample, identify the pathogen that ails
you, and then instantly prescribe a treatment
best suited to your specific illness and individual genetic makeup," Horn said.
What's remarkable, then, is not this computer's
speed but our ability to use it to open new
vistas in entirely different fields -- in this
case, the ability to change how our bodies work
at the most basic level. This is possible because
at a thousand trillion operations per second,
this computer might have something approaching
the raw processing power of the human brain.
Nathan Myhrvold, the former technology chief of
Microsoft, points out that it cost $12 billion to
sequence the first human genome. You will soon be
able to get your own done for $10, he expects.
If an implant in a paralyzed man's head can read
his thoughts, if genes can be manipulated into
better versions of themselves, the line between
the engineered and the born begins to blur.
For example, in Silicon Valley, there is a
biotech company called Rinat Neuroscience. DARPA
provided critical early funding for its "pain
vaccine," a substance designed to block intense
pain in less than 10 seconds. Its effects last
for 30 days. Tests show it doesn't stifle
reactions. If you touch a hot stove, your hand
will still automatically jerk away. But after
that, the torment is greatly reduced. The product
works on the inflammatory response that is
responsible for the majority of subacute pain. If
you get shot, you feel the bullet, but after
that, the inflammation and swelling that trigger
agony are substantially reduced. The company is
deep into animal testing, is preparing reports
for scientific conferences, and has now attracted venture capital funding.
Another DARPA program, originally christened
Regenesis, started with the observation that if
you cut off the tail of a tadpole, the tail will
regrow. If you cut off an appendage of an adult
frog, however, it won't, because certain genetic
signals have been switched off. This process is
carried out by a mass of undifferentiated cells
called a blastema, also called a regeneration
bud. The bud has the capability to develop into
an organ or an appendage, if it gets the right
signals. Early results in mice indicate that such
blastemas might be generated in humans. The
program, now called Restorative Injury Repair, is
aimed at allowing regrowth of a blown-off hand or
a breast removed in a mastectomy. (Instances of
amputated fingertips regenerating in children
under 12 have long been noted in scientific
journals.) "We had it; we lost it; we need to
find it again" was Regenesis's original slogan.
Snooze and Lose?
There are three groups of people usually
attracted to any new enhancement. In order, they
are the sick, the otherwise healthy with a
critical need, and the enterprising. This became
immediately obvious when a drug called modafinil
entered the market earlier this decade. It is
intended to shut off the urge to sleep, without
the jitter, buzz, euphoria, crash, or potential
for paranoid delusion of stimulants such as
amphetamines, cocaine or even caffeine.
The FDA originally approved modafinil for
narcoleptics who fall asleep frequently and
uncontrollably. But this widely available
prescription drug, with the trade name Provigil,
immediately was tested on healthy young U.S. Army
helicopter pilots. It allowed them to stay up
safely for almost two days while remaining
practically as focused, alert and capable of
dealing with complex problems as the well rested.
Then, after a good eight hours' sleep, it turned
out they could get up and do it again for another
40 hours, before finally catching up on their sleep.
But it's the future of the third group -- the
millions who, in the immortal words of Kiss,
"wanna rock-and-roll all night and party every
day" -- that holds the potential for changing
society. Will people feel that they need to
routinely control their sleep in order to be
competitive? Will unenhanced people get fewer
promotions and raises than their modified
colleagues? Will this start an arms race over human consciousness?
Consider the case of a little boy born in Germany
at the turn of this century. As reported in the
New England Journal of Medicine last year, his
doctors immediately noticed he had unusually
large muscles bulging from his tiny arms and
legs. By the time he was 4 1/2 , it was clear
that he was extraordinarily strong. Most children
his age can lift about one pound with each arm.
He could hold a seven-pound dumbbell aloft with
each outstretched hand. He is the first human
confirmed to have a genetic variation that builds
extraordinary muscles. If the effect can be
duplicated, it could treat or cure muscle-wasting diseases.
Wyeth Pharmaceuticals is testing a drug designed
to do just that as a treatment for the most
common form of muscular dystrophy. Will athletes
try to exploit the discovery to enhance their abilities?
"Athletes find a way of using just about
anything," says Elizabeth M. McNally of the
University of Chicago, who wrote an article
accompanying the findings in the New England
Journal of Medicine. "This, unfortunately, is no exception."
Views of the Future
Ray Kurzweil, an artificial-intelligence pioneer
and winner of the National Medal of Technology,
shrugs at the controversy over the use of stem
cells from human embryos: "All the political
energy that has gone into this issue -- it is not
even slowing down the most narrow approach." It
is simply being pursued outside the United States
-- in China, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore,
Scandinavia and Great Britain, where scientists
will probably achieve success first, he notes.
In the next couple of decades, Kurzweil predicts,
life expectancy will rise to at least 120 years.
Most diseases will be prevented or reversed.
Drugs will be individually tailored to a person's
DNA. Robots smaller than blood cells -- nanobots,
as they are called -- will be routinely injected
by the millions into people's bloodstreams. They
will be used primarily as diagnostic scouts and
patrols, so if anything goes wrong in a person's
body, it can be caught extremely early.
As James Watson, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for
discovering the structure of DNA, famously put
it: "No one really has the guts to say it, but if
we could make better human beings by knowing how
to add genes, why shouldn't we?"
Gregory Stock of UCLA sees this as the inevitable
outcome of the decoding of the human genome. "We
have spent billions to unravel our biology, not
out of idle curiosity, but in the hope of
bettering our lives," he said at a 2003 Yale
bioethics conference. "We are not about to turn away from this."
Stock sees humanity embracing artificial
chromosomes -- rudimentary versions of which
already exist. Right now, the human body has 23
chromosome pairs, with the chromosomes numbered 1
through 46. Messing with them is tricky -- you
never know when you're going to inadvertently
step on unanticipated interactions. By adding a
new chromosome pair (Nos. 47 and 48) to the
embryo, however, the possibilities appear
endless. Stock, in his book "Redesigning Humans:
Our Inevitable Genetic Future," describes it as
the safest way to substantially modify humans
because, he says, it would minimize unintended
consequences. On top of that, the chromosome
insertion sites could have an off switch
activated by an injection if we wanted to stop
whatever we'd started. This would give future
generations a chance to undo whatever we did.
Stock offers this analysis to counter the
argument offered by some bioethicists that
inheritable genetic line engineering should be
unconditionally banned because future generations
harmed by wrongful or unsuccessful modifications
would have no control over the matter.
But the very idea of aspiring to such godlike
powers is blasphemous to some. "Genetic
engineering," writes Michael J. Sandel, a
professor of political philosophy at Harvard, is
"the ultimate expression of our resolve to see
ourselves astride the world, the masters of our
nature. But the promise of mastery is flawed. It
threatens to banish our appreciation of life as a
gift, and to leave us with nothing to affirm or behold outside our own will."
Stock rejects this view. "We should not just
accept but embrace the new technologies, because
they're filled with promise," he says. Within a
few years, he writes, "traditional reproduction
may begin to seem antiquated, if not downright
irresponsible." His projections, he asserts, are
not at all out of touch with reality.
Adapted from the book "Radical Evolution: The
Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our
Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human" by Joel
Garreau, to be published May 17 by Doubleday, a
division of Random House Inc. © 2005 by Joel Garreau.
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((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
