1 + 1 + 0.00001 ≠ 3

Also, in an article to The Times the Wellcome Trust’s director, Sir Mark Walport, wrote this very pithy sentence:

 If a child with donated mitochondria can be said to have three parents, then the recipient of a heart transplant could be said to have four.

Damn straight!

(image via Flickr by endofmorose)

Be friendly

Social interaction is vital for mental and physical health (Holt-Lunstad et al, 2009). Being isolated is just as bad for you as smoking or drinking. Humans evolved in small groups, with families and friends close almost all the time. So it’s good for you to be friendly. Talk to your family, make new friends and catch up with the old. You will be happier and healthier with more friends and family.

Sleep

If you’re reading this when you should be asleep, go to sleep and read this post in the morning. People who consistently sleep only 5 hours rather than the recommended 7+ hours are 70% more likely to die (Ferrie et al, 2007). Humans evolved with only fire and moonlight as lights at night, so make sure your bedroom is dark at night and if you do have to use a light, use a fire-coloured light because orange/red won’t wake you up as much (Brainard et al, 2001).

Eat healthy

You are what you eat, and if you want to be healthy and balanced you need to eat healthy and balanced. The human species first appeared 200,000 years ago, and humans would have fed themselves on whatever animals they could catch and whatever plants were in season. Only as recently as 10,000 years ago, humans started farming. But agriculture was not an enhancement, as evidence from skeletal remains indicate that human height declined by about 15cm due to an over-reliance on grain-based foods for nutrition. So for dietary advice, I say eat a variety of natural foods like vegetables, fruits and fish/meat. (Side note: humans have been eating saturated animal fat and fruit sugars for a lot longer than we’ve been eating wholegrain bread, don’t be afraid of including them in a balanced diet)

(image from motivationforfitness)

Exercise

For now, the only way to increase your strength, endurance, flexibility and even intelligence (exercise increases brain stem cells) is to keep your body and mind active. Like a diet, a variety of exercise is the key. Humans evolved in an environment where they’d spend a lot of time walking, but sometimes they’d run and swim and climb trees and lift heavy objects. So to be fit and healthy, you have to provide your body with this same variety of stimuli that your body has evolved to expect. A lot of time walking, some time running and some time lifting heavy objects. (Side note: for my female readers, note that the differences between the male and female body is determined by hormones and not by exercise routines. Working out ‘like a man’ will NOT make you look like a man)

(image from Flickr, by a.drian)

See your health care professional

People who visit the doctor for checkups live longer and are healthier than people who don’t (Hozawa et al, 2010). Even if you’re young and healthy, you still should have a checkup with your doctor, dentist and optometrist every 2 years (more frequently if you’re older or have a health issue). Furthermore, health care professionals can provide you with all the other enhancements you can get: contraceptives, vaccines, corrective eyeglasses/surgery, orthodontics and various pharmaceuticals.

Years from now, you will wish you did these things when I told you to.

Medical researchers in Britain have successfully treated six patients suffering from the blood-clotting disease known as hemophilia B by injecting them with the correct form of a defective gene, a landmark achievement in the troubled field of gene therapy. Hemophilia B, which was carried by Queen Victoria and affected most of the royal houses of Europe, is the first well-known disease to appear treatable by gene therapy, a technique with a 20-year record of almost unbroken failure [emphasis mine].

What a lie! As I’ve outlined previously, gene therapy has astonishingly high efficacy rates, 75-90% of patients in clinical trials have seen a therapeutic effect. It is a troubled field, for sure, but I would not call this a ‘record of almost unbroken failure’. Gene therapy has cured some cancers, successfully treated HIV, given sight to the blind and treated (or cured) potentially fatal immune conditions. And also has treated hemophilia, as the NYT article notes. 

But of course, these successes are downplayed:

Gene therapy has had minor successes in very rare diseases but suffered a major setback in 1999 with the death of a patient in a clinical trial at the University of Pennsylvania. Another gene therapy trial treated an immune deficiency but caused cancer in some patients.

Surely if causing one death is a ‘major setback’, then saving the lives of many more patients should not be dismissed as merely a ‘minor success’.

Gene therapy, though it has proved more dangerous than was first thought, still deserves all the hype it ever received.

There’s been a bit of talk recently about the bio-artist who managed to create a fabric of human skin and spider silk that managed to stop a .22 calibre round. Unfortunately the bullet didn’t ricochet off the skin, Superman-style. This skin acts a bit like a net stopping a soccer ball, in that it simply catches the bullet. Now imagine you kick the ball with superhuman strength into the net of soccer goal. If the net can’t stop the ball, one or both of two things will happen: either the net will break leaving a hole where the ball went through or the net will just tear right off the goalposts and both net and ball will keep sailing by.

In the case of this bulletproof skin/fabric, the skin wasn’t broken by the bullet. Instead, the bullet (now wrapped in spider silk and skin) still penetrated a couple of inches into the ballistics gel behind it.

For a visual, watch the video below (specifically the frame at 7:48).

Note that a Petri-dish sized piece of fabric was attached (through indeterminate means) to the ballistics gel. So as the bullet hits the middle of this circle of fabric, it pulls taut and in the case of the spider silk fabric, pulls off completely and envelopes the bullet. To go back to the soccer goal analogy, you can have a really strong net but if it’s poorly attached to the goalposts, it won’t stop a really fast ball. So while it’s possible that the tensile strength of the spider silk is enough that, if the fastening held, the bullet would be stopped completely, it is also possible that the skin would have broken had the fastening not broken first. More tests are needed, of course.

But anyway, if that gel was your heart, you’d still be very dead. So despite claims that the skin was ‘bulletproof’, the skin didn’t even stop a .22 bullet travelling at reduced speed. To be classified as a Type I vest (the lowest class of ballistic vest), the skin would have to completely stop a full velocity .22 round.

So, it’s not even bulletproof. And, it is just spider silk fabric covered in skin, it’s not really skin either. And so of course the press reports that bulletproof skin has been created and we transhumanists can rejoice at the promise of invulnerability.

That bastion of great reporting, The Daily Mail, quotes Dutch bio-artist Jalila Essaidi as saying:

“Now, let’s take this one step further, why bother with a vest: imagine replacing keratin, the protein responsible for the toughness of the human skin, with this spidersilk protein. This is possible by adding the silk producing genes of a spider to the gnome[sic] of a human: creating a bulletproof human. Science-fiction? Maybe, but we can get a feeling of what this transhumanistic idea would be like by letting a bulletproof matrix of spidersilk merge with an in vitro human skin.”

Yes, they said gnome. I lolled. But anyway, why would we bother with a vest? I don’t know, the fact that it actually works might be one reason. Or that it can be much tougher without having to also be nice and supple enough to allow you to move like skin does. And we can trade up to the newer models without having to have a new skin transplant or more genetic modification. The only disadvantage of a vest is not being bulletproof all the time.

Still, it’s kind of cool to have bio-artists out in the world experimenting with weird and wacky ideas like bulletproof skin, while all the ‘real’ doctors and scientists are trying to find ways to heal people with severe burns or gunshot wounds. Then again, it doesn’t mean much if the research is poorly tested and demonstrated on YouTube instead of at a scientific conference.

So will it ever be possible to have bulletproof skin? Probably not.

You see, our skin is flexible and can stretch pretty easily. If it didn’t stretch, we’d to moult and grow a new skin as we grow, get pregnant or gain weight. Also, we’d find movement difficult too (as anyone who has tried to squat in a pair of skin-tight jeans knows). Skin has to be this flexible even if we make it strong enough to stop a bullet. So despite a bullet not actually penetrating the skin, the skin will rapidly deform allowing the impact to cause severe underlying trauma, fracture bones or injure vital organs. (This happens with any soft body armour, and is called ‘behind armour blunt trauma’ or BABT). So although stronger, bulletproof skin might prevent penetrating injuries (and yes, save lives), bullets will still be potentially lethal. Bullet resistant skin? Possible. Nigh invulnerability thanks to bulletproof skin? Highly unlikely.

Or at least, it won’t look like skin. An hard exoskeleton like a crab, perhaps. But if we’re going for exoskeletons, I think Iron Man’s looks like a better option.

(And I know I totally glossed over the part where the spider silk was produced from the milk of a transgenic goat, but that’s because it’s 11-year-old news.)

All six patients showed some immune recovery, with five showing up to 6% of their cells modified, so that’s progress, I guess. Side effects were just a couple days of flu-like symptoms. In this study, the cells were removed from the patient and edited outside the body, probably because the ridiculous safety standards required for gene therapy that I recently blogged about pretty much rule out modifying the patient’s genes directly (i.e. in vivo). And I suppose the zinc finger nucleases probably aren’t as efficient as using a virus, so it wouldn’t really work in vivo just yet.

This is, however, the first time that human gene therapy has actually deleted a gene, rather than adding one. Pretty soon, addition, deletion, modification, replacement…it’ll all be possible.

Some scientists are, I think sensibly (with just 6% of cells modified), trying to avoid the work being overhyped as a ‘cure’. For example, Dr Michael Kolber, professor of medicine at the University of Miami:

“[This study] was a proof-of-principle that they could go in and do this. They demonstrated that the [genetically engineered] cells stayed in the patients, but the patients were not cured”

Of course this gets reported as:

Experts are reacting with cautious optimism…but they say the jury is out on whether the technique might ever spell an end to AIDS.

No, the jury isn’t out on whether the technique might ever work, just whether it has worked. It’s obvious beyond a reasonable doubt that gene therapy could provide both immunity and cures for HIV infections. And I’d say it’s obvious that gene therapy could cure all disease (and I’m not overhyping, just don’t expect these cures tomorrow and without side-effects during their early stages of development).

Gene therapy – the insertion, removal or modification of genes to treat or cure disease – has already saved lives. The blind have been made to see^1,2,  fatal brain diseases have been cured³, hemophilia treated⁴, metastisising tumours have been stopped in their tracks ⁵, children and adults have had compromised immune systems restored to normal^{6, 7}. The list should go on and on, but it doesn’t. Why?

Because gene therapy, as promising as it is, is held back in the very nations where we should be seeing more great advances in gene therapy. The technique is drastically underfunded and governments have harshly regulated it. It therefore requires more research to get approval for clinical studies, and the funding for such research simply isn’t available. For that reason, biotech industries and scientists have left the field.  There was, essentially, a gene therapy ‘recession’ ⁸.

Furthermore, inheritable gene therapy, which could prevent the need for future generations to seek gene therapy for their disease (and genetic conditions cause a large proportion of miscarriages and infant deaths), is prohibited in many countries, including Australia, Canada, Germany, India, South Korea and the United Kingdom ⁹. Why has such a promising medical treatment been held back?

Primarily, the hold up has been due to slanderously bad press and largely unfounded concerns about dangerous side-effects. Gene therapy killed teenager Jesse Gelsinger in 1999 and caused leukemia in several children treated for severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID). But the 17 other patients treated before Gelsinger did not show any severe symptoms as a result of the gene therapy (though one did show mild symptoms), and I believe they’re all doing fine today, and of the 9 children treated in the French SCID trial, only 1 died (3 others developed cancer but were successfully treated for that) and 7 of the 8 surviving children showed at least partial improvements in their immune function.  So even in the gene therapy “horror stories”, the treatment was 94% and 77%  effective. The fact is undeniable: gene therapy has always cured (or treated) the majority of patients who received it.

It makes no sense to expect gene therapy would have no side effects and it makes no sense to stop research into it due to those side effects. Doing nothing is not necessarily safe. We don’t know what the future will bring, whether gene therapy will be great or a disaster, so we don’t know which is the safer path: gene therapy or no gene therapy. All we know is that gene therapy has cured people and was more likely to cure you than kill you.

So imagine, for a moment, that you were diagnosed with one of the many rare genetic conditions that affect so many of the population. Gene therapy is your only option, there is no other treatment for this condition. You will die, very soon, and very painfully, without gene therapy. Gene therapy could not only cure your condition, but prevent your children from being born with the same condition. Would you consent to an experimental and high-risk treatment for that, even if it could kill you?

If you’re like me, you would not only consent to the treatment, but you’d campaign for the right to get the treatment even if the government wouldn’t approve it. After all, your choice is either certain painful death, or a possible cure that might cause another type of painful death.

And once scientists work out how to effectively replace genes for the most terrible of genetic conditions, they will be able to translate that knowledge into gene therapy for other conditions. First non-lethal but incurable diseases, and then even as a better treatment for otherwise treatable diseases. And then, genes could be inserted that prevent diseases like cancer, heart attack and neurological conditions. Ultimately, inserted genes could prevent all infections, improve healing from accidents, give faster reflexes and concentration to make accidents less likely and prevent age-related disease.

We need gene therapy. We need it as soon as possible. I don’t care if it kills me: if I’m going to die, I intend to die from gene therapy. I want my death to be an attempt to cling to life. Gene therapy is my choice method of suicide.

Read more at Biofortified.

Futurist Eliezer Yudkowsky has defined four properties of a singularitarian:

1. A Singularitarian believes that the Singularity is possible and desirable.
2. A Singularitarian actually works to bring about the Singularity.
3. A Singularitarian views the Singularity as an entirely secular, non-mystical process — not the culmination of any form of religious prophecy or destiny.
4. A Singularitarian believes the Singularity should benefit the entire world, and should not be a means to benefit any specific individual or group.

I fall short on point 1, because though I think the singularity is technically possible, I don’t think it’s probable or desirable.

The singularity is defined as a point in time where the future is inherently unpredictable because a smarter-than-human intelligence has appeared and we, currently being human, cannot predict anything beyond that. This point might involve exponential changes happening so fast we can’t keep up or might just be a superintelligence doing something so smart we can’t work it out, but the main point is this unpredictability or discontinuity. Hence the name, borrowed from the singularity of a black hole beyond which nothing can be observed.

I think the most likely path to anything even remotely resembling a singularity is by increasing human intelligence to transhuman intelligence (and eventually to posthuman intelligence). But I think this will be a rather slow change, with diminishing returns (it might at first be easy to upgrade the human brain, but eking more smarts out of it will get harder and harder as we do, thanks to the limits of the biological systems). It isn’t that I don’t think exponential growth can happen, it’s just that it always hit a wall and paradigm shifts rarely occur just in time to keep up the changes, no matter what Raymond Kurzweil might think. So I think intelligence will likely linger at some pseudo-maximum value for a while, just as it’s been lingering at the human IQ for quite some time. So I think there will be slow changes and not a singularity.

I also don’t think this change will have anything to do with artificial intelligence. Not because artificial intelligence is impossible, but because I think by the time significant artificial intelligence can be created, it will be possible to merge human minds with machine minds, thereby blurring any distinction between artificial and human intelligence. I think humans are too greedy to let a machine outsmart them, especially in a way that defies possibility of prediction.

Not only do I think the singularity is probably not going to happen, I also think there’s a good chance it can never happen (and a chance I could be wrong too). After all, it’s possible that a brain can never be smart enough to fully understand itself, and making that brain smarter just makes it more incomprehensible. We don’t really know the limits.

Furthermore, I think it’s undesirable to ever seek a singularity. This is obvious in the very definition of it, which necessitates  an inherently unpredictable leap in intelligence. We shouldn’t do something if we have a good reason to suspect something bad might result, and I think being unable to know anything about the results is a good enough reason to suspect they might be bad. And if it is bad, we won’t even be able to fix it.

So I say, the singularity won’t happen. It’s unlikely to happen anyway, and even if it can, we should stop it. We should move forward carefully and cautiously, and indeed I think this is likely to be how it will happen anyway. We will slowly make ourselves smarter, and with our newly enhanced brains, analyse the future. The horse won’t bolt, because we’ll have our hands firmly on the reins (and besides it’s not a horse, it’s a snail).

(This post was written because I’ve been requested to write up about the Singularity Summit.  The program features some very interesting pieces, most of which fall broadly under the realm of transhumanism rather than the narrow and misguided realm of singularitarianism)

But, assuming the drug is safe and effective, would there be anything wrong with designing your child’s sexuality or gendered behaviours?

Obviously, nobody fully chooses their sexuality or how masculine/feminine they are. So on the face of it, it doesn’t seem there would be any difference between letting a random lottery of genetic and hormonal factors determine this, or letting parents have more control over it. A child born after such treatment would not have fewer freedoms than one born without.

Although it’s possible granting parents such power will simply exacerbate gender stereotypes and sexism, it’s equally possible it will not. If parents begin to realise that a child is simply born with particular preferences, they might then be less likely to try to force young boys to be masculine or force young girls to be feminine.

It’s also likely such an intervention will be embraced by bigots. But I think it would be better for even bigots to have children who will be minimally affected by such bigotry. Bigotry is terrible, to be sure, but forcing a homophobe to, possibly, have (say) a gay son as a lesson is simply causing unnecessarily miserable childhood and parenthood.

So…I can’t see anything wrong with it.

I’ve said it, and that’s also the conclusion of Kyle Munkittrick’s post “From Gears to Genes: A Sea Change in Transhumanism“:

Transhumanism is the idea of guiding and improving human evolution with intention through the use of technologies and culture. If those technologies are not robotic and cybernetic but, instead, genetic and organic, then so be it. And that seems to be the way things are going.

I totally agree. But for different reasons.

Yes, it’s totally true that genetics is advancing faster than cybernetics, nanotechnology or artificial intelligence. Unlike Kyle, I wouldn’t say those fields are without progress, but they are moving more slowly and, to top that off, are farther away from being able to produce an enhancement.

On the other hand, mice have already had their memories, strength, endurance and lifespan enhanced by genetic or pharmaceutical means. In fact, so have humans  - by evolution. The reason humans are smarter and longer lived in comparison to mice (and in comparison to the common ancestor between humans and mice) is entirely genetic. It seems stupid to come up with a different paradigm when you already have a proven technique for enhancing intelligence and lifespan.

I’ll concede that biology has its limitations (No gene can make you bulletproof), and for the fancy enhancements of posthuman sci-fi biotechnology won’t be enough. And this is probably why some let their fantasies cloud their judgment and continue to believe they will be able to upload themselves into a virtual reality powered by cold-fusion powered quantum computers implanted in their brain within a decade or two.

I can say with confidence that the first clearly enhanced humans, with really obvious improvements in intelligence/lifespan/athleticism will be a product of genetic enhancement alone.

Hattip to IEET: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/munkittrick20100611/