Inventing Our Evolution

[Guest guest]

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 Garreau

looks at the impact of the new technology.

Some changes in what it means to be human:

· 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 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 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. , 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 " '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 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.

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.

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 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. "

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 , 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? "

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 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

Garreau, to be published May 17 by Doubleday, a division of Random House

Inc. © 2005 by Garreau. Reprinted with permission.