New Scientist: The new incredibles: Enhanced humans

**chshkt** · 05-29-2006, 03:14 PM

Life transformed
Some futurologists, notably Ray Kurzweil of Kurzweil Technologies in
Wellesley, Massachusetts, argue that exponential growth and
technological convergence will lead to a "singularity", a time when
change becomes so rapid and pervasive that human life is
irreversibly transformed (New Scientist, 24 September 2005, p 32).
Even if that doesn't happen - and in Schwarz's 2050 scenario it
hasn't - exponential growth still holds out the prospect of
extraordinary technological progress in as little as 20 or 30 years:
brain implants that allow direct mind-to-mind communication; memory
chips that let you upload new knowledge directly into your brain;
genetic upgrades that can be reversibly slotted into all the cells
in your body; custom-made replacement body parts; and so on.

From a human perspective, that means having almost limitless power
over our own biology - the power to end disease, abolish pain and
suffering, endow ourselves with superhuman levels of beauty,
athleticism and brains, and radically slow down or maybe even halt
ageing (see "Towards immortality"). "I believe our descendants will
look on our lives with pity, in the same way we look on the lives of
our Pleistocene ancestors," says bioethicist James Hughes of Trinity
College in Hartford, Connecticut.

For many people that future cannot come soon enough, and no wonder:
human enhancement promises to fulfil some of our deepest-held
desires. Suppose you were offered an extra 50 years of life, endowed
with what Schwartz calls "superhealth", physical and mental
capabilities that exceed the ones you were born with, not to mention
the prospect of an even better life for your children. Would you
turn it down?

Liberation or slavery?
Of course, "better" is always subjective. If the prospect of a world
full of youthful centenarians, drugged up to the eyeballs, bristling
with brain implants and possessed of the power to engineer the
genetic future of our species makes you feel vaguely uneasy, you're
not alone. Human enhancement might promise liberation, but it will
bring its own peculiar difficulties, which is why we need to start
thinking about it now.

Imagine it's 2026 and your 17-year-old daughter or granddaughter has
decided she wants to go to Harvard. She works hard at school but her
grades are not quite good enough. Then a technology comes along - a
memory-boosting drug, say - that would significantly increase her
chances of getting in. She begs you for it. She tells you all her
classmates are taking it and if you say no you will be jeopardising
her chances not only of getting into Harvard but of getting into
higher education at all. What do you do?

Perhaps you decide that if she's going to get into Harvard, she has
to do it using the brainpower she was born with. On the other hand,
what's the difference between buying the drugs and paying for extra
tuition? Maybe you can't afford it anyway, which is a relief as
you're not convinced it's safe. If you can afford it, perhaps you
worry that if she gets in off the back of a performance-enhancing
drug, she won't feel an appropriate sense of achievement. And what
happens when the next enhancement technology comes along? Will you
have to buy that one too, just so she can keep up? Perhaps the
easiest thing to do would be to start a campaign to get cognitive-
enhancing drugs banned in schools...

As more and more enhancement technologies become available, these
dilemmas will grow increasingly familiar. Is it safe? Should it be
regulated? Will it lead to an "enhancement divide" between the haves
and have-nots, or even conflict between the "enhanced" and
the "naturals"? Would people feel pressured or even coerced into
using them simply to keep up?

"They're legitimate concerns," says Hughes, who has argued that the
enhancement divide is a real enough worry that some such
technologies ought to be made available through the public health
system. Then again, says Hughes, they're arguably nothing new.
Society already faces such problems in spades. According to
bioethicist Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania in
Philadelphia, none of these issues are showstoppers for human
enhancement. "They're not good arguments about why we shouldn't try
to improve ourselves," he says.

Enhancement does, however, bring one new and potentially explosive
question: what will it do to our sense of being human? If your
daughter takes the drug and gets in to Harvard, she has arguably
missed out on an essential human experience - striving for success
and learning to deal with failure. Similarly, if you knew you could
live to be 150, would you bother working hard on your career right
now? How would you decide when it was time to settle down and have
kids? If you could download knowledge onto a memory chip, why bother
to learn anything, or value knowledge and experience? If life was
free of pain and disease, would you have any idea what happiness is?
If everyone was enhanced, would the world be a dull and homogeneous
place?

These are tough questions, but they all boil down to the same thing:
by enhancing ourselves would we somehow throw away our humanity? For
many opponents of these technologies, the answer is an emphatic yes.
To them, a world of enhanced humans would be a world that has lost
all meaning. The President's Council on Bioethics likened it to
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World: its technologically enhanced
inhabitants live cheerfully, without disappointment or regret, the
council's report points out, but lead "flat, empty lives devoid of
love and longing, filled with only trivial pursuits and shallow
attachments". Some opponents of enhancement argue that these dangers
are so great that the only safe course of action is to put a stop to
the whole enterprise. Bioethicist George Annas of Boston University,
for example, has proposed a global treaty making human genetic
modification a crime against humanity.

Others turn the human nature question on its head. "To the extent
that we are born with impulses for aggression, racism and
selfishness or limits on our capacity for wisdom and compassion, we
may be morally obliged to modify human nature," says Hughes. Caplan
argues that all technologies are attempts to transcend human
nature. "That's what agriculture is. That's what plumbing is. That's
what clothes are. That's what transportation systems are. Do they
make us less human? Or are they one possible contender for what it
means to be human?"

Not everyone believes we will have to face these questions
imminently. Alfred Nordman, a historian of science at Darmstadt
Technical University in Germany, doesn't buy into the inevitability
of explosive technological progress leading to a post-human
future. "I don't have a sense that I'm living in an era of
accelerating technological change," he says. "I think my
grandparents saw more technological changes that I will." And even
if technology does make radical enhancement technology such as brain
implants possible, Nordman doesn't see much demand for it. "We need
a reality check," he says.

Nordman, however, is in a minority. According to Schwarz, it is
almost inevitable - "overdetermined", in the jargon of his
profession - that the next 20 to 30 years will see the rapid
progress that makes his 2050 scenario possible. "The problems are
really difficult," he says. "Really controlling genetic systems,
really understanding the brain. They won't be solved by 2010 or
2015. I think it will be slower than some people hope, but it's
inevitable that we will make great scientific progress."

If you accept that, the big question facing us now is whether we
want to go down the road towards an enhanced future. The President's
Council on Bioethics is clear that this is not a debate that can be
delayed. "Decisions we are making today - for instance, what to do
about sex selection or genetic selection of embryos, or whether to
prescribe behaviour-modifying drugs to preschoolers, or how
vigorously to try to reverse the processes of senescence - will set
the path 'beyond therapy' for coming generations," its report says.

**chshkt** · 05-29-2006, 03:15 PM

Chances are, of course, that human enhancement will lead neither to
utopia nor to the end of humanity. More likely each new technology
will be debated, tested and, if useful and not directly harmful,
eventually assimilated into everyday life. Already there are people
among us who possess what once seemed like superpowers: vision more
acute than anything anyone was born with thanks to laser surgery,
superhuman powers of concentration or the ability to go for days
without sleep thanks to psychoactive drugs, and the ability to
perform astonishing feats of strength, speed and endurance thanks to
steroids.

Even technologies that seem morally questionable at first soon
become socially acceptable. In 1969, a poll found that a majority of
Americans believed that IVF "violated God's will"; by 1978 a
majority said they would use it. In the 1960s many US states
outlawed the contraceptive pill for fear that it would be too
socially disruptive; few would do the same now. Most experts agree
that human enhancement is coming, and that there is no off button
for what we have already started. But the outcome is not
predetermined. It's time to start choosing your future.

Towards immortality
Woody Allen once said: "I don't want to achieve immortality through
my work. I want to achieve it through not dying." It won't happen
for him, nor for anyone else alive today, but many researchers
believe that we are at the start of a revolution that could deliver
if not immortality, then something resembling it.

A century ago, life expectancy in the developed world was around 55
years. Today it is nudging 80. "We have made tremendous advances -
by accident," says Sarah Harper, director of the Oxford Institute of
Ageing at the University of Oxford. "We weren't actually planning to
extend lives."

That is all changing. Harper says there is now a widespread belief
that we can "effect radical change, extending both maximum lifespan
and normal healthy lifespan". It will be slow and painstaking, but
some gerontologists are willing to bet that there are people alive
today who will still be alive in 2150.

One of those is Aubrey de Grey, a theoretical gerontologist at the
University of Cambridge. He will tell anyone who is prepared to
listen that in 20 to 30 years it will be possible to deliver radical
increases in longevity, largely by repairing cellular and molecular
damage. "I think the first person to live to 1000 might be 60
already," he says.

Among gerontologists, De Grey is almost universally regarded as a
maverick and a nuisance, but even some of his fiercest critics agree
that it now appears possible to deliberately intervene to increase
longevity. Among them is Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois
in Chicago, who with three colleagues recently called on the US
government to invest $3 billion a year into anti-ageing research
(The Scientist, vol 20, p 28). "The time has arrived to slow ageing
in humans," says Olshansky. His target: seven years.

HALVE YOUR RISK

Why seven? Olshansky says that the risk of death and age-related
diseases rises exponentially throughout your lifetime, starting at
puberty and with a doubling time of seven years. So if you could
delay ageing by seven years, you would halve everyone's risk of
dying at any given age. And when the end does come, he says, you
suffer a relatively short period of ill health and die quickly,
avoiding the nightmare scenario of a "nursing-home world" full of
decrepit old people.

Underpinning Olshansky's plan is animal research showing that mice
on severely calorie-restricted diets live around 40 per cent longer
than normal. They remain vigorous, healthy and alert deep into old
age, and then die quickly. According to Olshansky's colleague
Richard Miller of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, we now
know of 10 mutations in mice that accomplish the same effect as
caloric restriction, suggesting the possibility of anti-ageing drugs
that recreate these effects.

If the mouse results were translated into humans, Miller says, it
would mean a healthy lifespan of 112 years. "Learning how to do this
in humans would be a good idea," he says. Olshansky insists that
stopping or reversing ageing is not the issue. "We're not talking
about dramatic extension of life," he says. "The operative word is
delay. But if you want to achieve immortality, this is a good place
to start."

Designer children
In June 2003, Michelle Whitaker gave birth to a baby boy, James, in
a hospital in Sheffield, UK. During the birth doctors took a sample
of James's umbilical cord blood and banked it for later use. The
intended recipient wasn't James: it was his older brother Charlie,
who suffers from a rare form of anaemia and whose only hope of a
cure was an injection of tissue-matched stem cells.

James was a "designer baby", conceived by IVF and selected from
among many embryos to ensure that he would be a suitable donor for
Charlie, using a technology called pre-implantation genetic
diagnosis. PGD involves taking a single cell while the embryo is at
an early stage - just 4 to 10 cells - and scrutinising its genome.
It has been used thousands of times since its first success in 1990,
but the Whitakers' case broke new ground.

Until James, PGD had been almost exclusively used to reject embryos
carrying undesirable genes for diseases or disabilities including
Huntington's, cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anaemia and even a
predisposition to cancer. The Whitakers' case showed it can also be
used to positively select for desirable traits. And that, some
people believe, marks the beginning of a world where parents can
start to choose their children's genetic make-up.

SPECIFIC TRAITS

Of course, to select desirable traits you have to know which genes
you're looking for, and that is a big challenge. Even so, some
geneticists think it might soon be possible to specify relatively
uncomplicated traits such as height or leanness, and as our
understanding of the human genome improves, the possibilities are
going to expand.

Screening, however, is not the same as creating genuine designer
babies. To do that you would have to genetically engineer the
embryo. Some PGD researchers are already working on "embryo gene
therapy" to repair defective genes at a very early stage. Once you
can do that, it may be possible to alter perfectly healthy genes to
boost intelligence, height or other valued traits.

No one believes that will be easy, and many scientists think it is
unrealistic to expect anything like it. Traits such as intelligence
result from the interaction of hundreds, possibly thousands, of
genes, plus myriad environmental factors. Controlling the outcome
might prove to be nigh on impossible, as well as hugely expensive.
There are technical hurdles too, such as the need to create dozens
of embryos to have enough to screen. But as the President's Council
on Bioethics put it: "In this enormously fertile and rapidly
developing field, the future is unknowable... No one should
confidently bet against any form of scientific and technological
progress."

Smarter minds
In a lab at the University of Cambridge, Danielle Turner is turning
ordinary Joes into masterminds. She gets them to perform a test
called the one-touch Tower of London planning task, which measures
one aspect of intelligence (see Diagram). The harder the task, the
more mistakes her volunteers make, but when she gives them a dose of
the drug modafinil they suddenly find it easier. "You see quite a
dramatic improvement in their performance, particularly when the
problem gets more difficult," she says.

Modafinil was not developed to make people smarter. It is sold as a
prescription-only "wakefulness promoter" for people with narcolepsy
and other sleep disorders, but it has a remarkable effect on normal
cognition: it improves not only planning but also decision-making
and verbal and visual memory. This has made it the latest drug of
choice among people looking for a mental boost or competitive edge.

Barbara Sahakian, also at Cambridge, describes modafinil as
the "first true smart drug". It won't be the last. There are dozens
more "cognition enhancers" in the pipeline. Last year an expert
panel appointed by the UK government identified 15 molecular
pathways in the brain that are under active investigation as targets
for cognition enhancement. All are being developed to help people
with cognitive impairment such as memory loss due to Alzheimer's,
but many will turn out to have a positive effect on normal, healthy
brains, and end up being guzzled like coffee

**chshkt** · 05-29-2006, 03:16 PM

Sorry for the long read. I've pasted it all here, cause New Scientist requires a subsription

**chshkt** · 05-29-2006, 04:14 PM

edit:oops wrong window

**a1ka1ine** · 05-29-2006, 04:37 PM

thanks! i skimmed through and read a lot of it, nice article. mostly theory with some interesting and promising facts scattered through it

New Scientist: The new incredibles: Enhanced humans

New Scientist: The new incredibles: Enhanced humans

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