Astounding innovations in medical technology are constantly being researched and developed. From machine learning AI that can predict patient lifespan to devices that can turn your skin cells into any organ — behind laboratory doors lie a breadth of ideas which can expand the limits of medicine and redefine public health strategy. However, unless your hobbies consist of scrawling through scientific journals and technology reviews, it’s pretty easy to miss out on the most promising tech from the health sciences. So here’s a list of some of the best recent breakthrough tech that could change the way we think about medicine and health. 1. A regenerative nanodevice that “heals in one touch.” Picture going to the hospital after a horrific accident where you’re at risk of losing your leg. You go the emergency room in full panic and the doctor applies a small chip on your skin, which then converts your skin into the necessary cells to heal and save that leg… (READ MORE)
EDITOR’S NOTE: In the countdown to the release of the highly anticipated documentary “INHUMAN: THE NEXT AND FINAL PHASE OF MAN IS HERE”(scheduled for release August-September), SkyWatch TV is running this exclusive online series on transhumanism and the dawn of the Human Hybrid Age.
With the advent of cell phones, iPods, iPads, and other “personal devices,” the ear-gates (that Sue Bradley discussed in the last entry) of an entire generation have been dangerously compromised. In addition to the obvious physical risks that associate cell phone use and texting while driving, effects have been measured on teenage language abilities and a markedly increased incidence of tinnitus, a chronic “ringing-in-the-ears.”
A recent ChildWise study found that one in four children under the age of eight had a mobile phone, a figure which increased to 89 percent by the time the child reaches eleven years.
“Teenagers: A Generation Unplugged” is a 2008 study which determined that four out of five teens carry a wireless device and found that their cell phones rank second, only to clothing, in communicating personal social status and popularity, “outranking jewelry, watches and shoes.” Additionally, over half (52 percent) view cell phones as a form of entertainment and 80 percent feel that a cell phone provides a sense of security while 36 percent dislike the idea of others knowing their exact location.
While a Who [World Health Organization] study determined that a cell phone-cancer link is inconclusive, the UN [United Nations] did acknowledge that the 2010 examination of thirteen thousand participants found up to 40 percent higher incidence of glioma, a cancerous brain tumor, among the 10 percent that used the mobile phone most. While there is near-unanimous agreement within the scientific community that it is simply too early to accurately project damage caused by radiation, even the most modest estimates acknowledge minimal consequences, the estimated 4.6 billion cell phone users “appear prepared to take the risk” without “firm assurances” that they are safe.[i]
As dire as these incidences for physical damage appear, the psychological and spiritual implications are the significantly more profound—and sinister.
“Thought reading” has come of age. First published in January 2009, cbs revealed technology conducted at Carnegie Mellon University that makes it possible to see what is happening within the brain while people are thinking. Using specialized magnetic resonance, neuro-activity can be recorded by analyzing brain activity.[ii]
While mainstream media carefully smudges the science fiction-actual science line, both government and private research groups charge the fields of neuro-fingerprinting, neuro-databases, and abject control neuro-control.
Following the Human Genome Project’s mapping of human dna, the Human Brain Project, hpb, was launched. The international research group hopes to provide a “blueprint of normal brain activity” to the goal of understanding brain function for improved health care, but inherent in the study is the very real possibility of threatening autonomous and unrestricted thought. If in 2002 the bbc was touting wireless sensors that record and generate brain waves and anatomical functions remotely,[iii] and in 2008, Scientific American reported that scientists can “selectively control brain function by transcranial magnetic stimulation (tms)” via the pulsing of powerful electromagnetic fields into the brain or a subject’s brain circuits,[iv] what might be a more current—and sinister—application?
UNBOUNDED EVIL
A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that electromagnetic currents directed at the right temperoparieto junction (tpj), located just above and behind the right ear (the same location mentioned above from Exodus 29:20 where the priests were to be anointed that they might hear from God), can impair a person’s ability to make moral judgments by inducing a current which disrupts this region of the brain.
By producing “striking evidence” that the right tpj is “critical for making moral judgments,” the lead author, Liane Young, also noted that “under normal circumstances, people are very confident and consistent in these kinds of moral judgments.” The researchers believe that transmagnetic stimulation, tms, interfered with the subject’s ability to interpret the intentions of others, suggesting that they are believed to be “morally blameworthy.”[v] Subsequent publications have proposed an interest by the U.S. military to use transmagnetic stimulation to enhance soldiers’ battle duration by reducing the need to stop for sleep.[vi]
With the acknowledged identification, documentation and cataloging of “brain-printing” via wireless devices, and the comparatively recent release of the morally consequential findings of transmagnetic stimulation, the premise of Stephen King’s 2006 novel, Cell, evokes a frighteningly possible scenario:
Mobile phones deliver the apocalypse to millions of unsuspecting humans by wiping their brains of any humanity, leaving only aggressive and destructive impulses behind.…
What if cell phones didn’t cause cancer? What if they did something much worse? What if they turned the user into a zombie killing machine?[vii]
Or perhaps just a glance at a keyboard before powering down: The message is clear: CONTROL ALTER DELETE
MIND GATES—FROM NIGHTMARES TO INCEPTION
From the chilling ramifications involving how the area of the right ear (which was to be anointed for priestly hearing of God in the Old Testament) is now being targeted by electromagnetic currents to illustrate how a person’s moral judgment could be impaired, to the work of neurologist Olaf Blanke that produced a “shadow person” by stimulating the left tpj at the left ear (discussed in an earlier entry), serious questions arrive in the upcoming documentary INHUMAN about the mysteries of the mind and what God may know that we don’t (and therefore why the priests were anointed there) about spiritual gateways existing in these regions. Once again, by interfacing with or manipulating the brain in this way, are we approaching a forbidden unknown?
Another example of how near-horizon neurosciences and human-machine integration may reconfigure human brains to allow borderline (or more than borderline) supernatural activity involves certain video games played before bedtime, which are being shown to allow people to take control of their dreams, to shape the alternate reality of dream worlds in a way that reflects spiritual warfare. According to LiveScience senior writer Jeremy Hsu, published studies on the dreams of hard-core gamers by Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada, found that gamers experienced reversed-threat simulation in nightmares, which allowed the dreamer to become the threatener instead of the threatened. In other words, a scary nightmare scenario turned into something “fun” for a gamer, allowing the player to assume the role of the aggressor or demon attacker. “They don’t run away; they turn and fight back. They’re more aggressive than the norms,” Gackenbach explained. “Levels of aggression in gamer dreams also included hyper-violence not unlike that of an R-rated movie,” and when these dreaming gamers became aggressive, “oh boy, they go off the top.”[viii]
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From learning to influence our private dreams via game-tech to having our dreams infiltrated and manipulated by outside forces, disquieting ideas deepen. In the 2010 movie Inception starring Leonardo DiCaprio, industrial spies use a dream machine called pasiv to steal corporate secrets by means of invasion and “extraction” of private information through a victim’s dreams. In a second scenario, the film depicts ideas planted in the person’s mind (inception) so that the individual perceives them as his or her own, thus allowing the victim to be steered toward particular decisions or actions—a modern upgrade on brainwashing a la the Manchurian Candidate. While the film Inception is fantasy, it is based in part on near-future technology. Electroencephalograms, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fmris), and Computed Tomography (ct) scans are already being used to “read and even influence the brain,” points out Aaron Saenz at the Singularity Hub. But could the fundamental science that the film Inception examines actually be setting the stage for making it a reality? “We’re certainly working towards it,” Saenz adds, continuing:
In the next few decades we could have the means to understand, perhaps in rather detailed terms, what a person is thinking. Once that barrier is passed, we may develop the means to influence what someone thinks by directly stimulating their brain. [So] while the mind is still a very mysterious place, it may not remain that way forever.[ix]
This trend toward technological mind invasion and mind control is or should be a frightening proposal for most people, especially those who value the concept of free will. That is because most secular neuroscientists view free will as an outdated religious notion related to “a fictional omnipotent divinity” (God) who chooses not to interfere with the choices of individuals, thus leaving them morally accountable for their actions and future judgment. There is even a concerted effort on the part of some neuroscientists to find proof against free will to illustrate that man is little more than an automaton whose decisions are predetermined by a complex mixture of chemical reactions, past events, and even nature, which work together to determine one’s course of action. In the 1970s, Prof. Benjamin Libet of the University of California in San Francisco claimed to have discovered proof of this theory through a series of tests in which a “time gap” between a brain’s decision to act and the person’s awareness of this decision led to the activity being carried out by the individual. His findings ignited a stormy debate regarding the ancient philosophical question of free will, says Naomi Darom for the online edition of Haaretz newspaper in Israel. “Are our decisions, the basis for our ostensible free activities, made before we are aware of them? In other words, does the brain ostensibly decide for us? And to what extent do we actually make our decisions consciously?” Prof. Hezi Yeshurun explained how those engaged in the brain research concluded “the question of free will is meaningless, because¼the fact that your brain has actually decided in your absence and that I can know what you’ve decided before you do, paints a picture of an automaton.”[x]
To insinuate that a section of the human brain makes decisions ahead of man’s independent awareness of them opens a wellspring of opportunity for civil or military arms technology to target that aspect of the brain and to develop methods for “inserting” ideas in minds. Darpa, American Technology Corp., Holosonic Research Labs, and others are working on methods to adapt this science, where thoughts and ideas can be projected or “implanted” in the brain and perceived by the individual as his or her own. A while back, Wired magazine reported on Darpa’s “sonic projector” as well as troops studying the Long Range Acoustic Device (lrad) as a modified “Voice of God” weapon:
It appears that some of the troops in Iraq are using “spoken” (as opposed to “screeching”) Lrad to mess with enemy fighters. Islamic terrorists tend to be superstitious and, of course, very religious. Lrad can put the “word of God” into their heads. If God, in the form of a voice that only you can hear, tells you to surrender, or run away, what are you gonna do?[xi]
Wired went on to acknowledge how, beyond directed sound, “it’s long been known that microwaves at certain frequencies can produce an auditory effect that sounds like it’s coming from within someone’s head (and there’s the nagging question of classified microwave work at Brooks Air Force Base that the Air Force stubbornly refuses to talk about).” It is also reported that the Pentagon tested similar research during the Gulf War of 1991 using a technology called Silent Sound Spread Spectrum (ssss), which evidently led to the surrender of thousands of Iraqi soldiers who began “hearing voices.”
People of faith, including church theologians and philosophers, should find the idea of using technology to read the minds and manipulate the thoughts of individuals indefensible, as the vanguard of free will is fundamental to our religious and philosophical ethic. To humans, autonomy of thought is the most basic of doctrines in which man is unrestrained by causality or preordained by mystical powers. Yet how these issues—neurosciences, brain-machine interfacing, cybernetics, mind control, and even free will—could actually represent a prophetic confluence of events that soon will combine in an ultimate showdown over the liberty of man may be an unavoidable and beastly aspect of end-times prophecy. Featured experts in the upcoming documentary INHUMAN agree with this assessment.
TO BE CONTINUED…
[i] Frank Jordas, “Study on Cell Phone Link to Cancer Inconclusive,” Associated Press (2010) http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=10668283.
[ii] “How Technology May Soon ‘Read’ Your Mind,” CBS 60 Minutes (June 2009) http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/12/31/60minutes/main4694713.shtm.
[iii] “Remote Control Brain Sensor,” BBC (November 2002) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2361987.stm.
[iv] R. Douglas Fields, “Mind Control by Cell Phone,” Scientific American (May 2008) http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=mind-control-by-cell.
[v] Liane Young, Joan Albert Camprodon, et al, “Disruption of the Right Temporo-Parietal Junction with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Reduces the Role of Beliefs in Moral Judgments,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (March 2010) http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-03/miot-mjc032510.php.
[vi] Mark Baard, “EM Field, Behind Right Ear, Suspends Morality,” Sci-Tech Heretic (March 2009) http://heretic.blastmagazine.com/2010/03/em-field-behind-right-ear-suspends-morality.
[vii]Stephen King, Cell (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2006).
[viii] Jeremy Hsu, “Video Gamers Can Control Dreams, Study Suggests,” LiveScience (5/25/10) http://www.livescience.com/culture/video-games-control-dreams-100525.html.
[ix] Aaron Saenz, “Is the Movie ‘Inception’ Getting Closer to Reality?” (7/15/10) http://singularityhub.com/2010/07/15/is-the-movie-inception-getting-closer-to-reality-video/.
[x] Naomi Darom, “Will Scientists Soon Be Able to Read Our Minds?” Haaretz http://www.haaretz.com/magazine/week-s-end/will-scientists-soon-be-able-to-read-our-minds-1.291310.
[xi] Sharon Weinberger, “The ‘Voice of God’ Weapon Returns,” Wired (12/21/07) http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2007/12/the-voice-of-go/.
EDITOR’S NOTE: In the countdown to the release of the highly anticipated documentary “INHUMAN: THE NEXT AND FINAL PHASE OF MAN IS HERE”(scheduled for release around August 15), SkyWatch TV is running this exclusive online series on transhumanism and the dawn of the Human Hybrid Age.
While positive advances either already have been or will come from some of the science and technology fields we examine in the upcoming documentary INHUMAN, learned men like Prof. Francis Fukuyama, in his book, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, warn that unintended consequences resulting from what mankind has now set in motion represents the most dangerous time in earth’s history, a period when exotic technology in the hands of transhumanist ambitions could forever alter what it means to be human. To those who would engineer a transhuman future, Fukuyama warns of a dehumanized “hell scenario” in which we “no longer struggle, aspire, love, feel pain, make difficult moral choices, have families, or do any of the things that we traditionally associate with being human.” In this ultimate identity crisis, we would “no longer have the characteristics that give us human dignity” because, for one thing, “people dehumanized à la Brave New World¼don’t know that they are dehumanized, and, what is worse, would not care if they knew. They are, indeed, happy slaves with a slavish happiness.”[i] The “hell scenario” envisioned by Fukuyama is but a beginning to what other intelligent thinkers believe could go wrong.
On the other end of the spectrum and diametrically opposed to Fukuyama’s conclusions is an equally energetic crowd that subscribes to a form of technological utopianism we will call the “heaven scenario.” Among this group, a “who’s who” of transhumansist evangelists such as Ray Kurzweil, James Hughes, Natasha Vita More (both Hughes and More are in the upcoming documentary INHUMAN), Nick Bostrom, and Gregory Stock see the dawn of a new Age of Enlightenment arriving as a result of the accelerating pace of GRINS (Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Nanotechnology, Synthetic Biology), technologies. As with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in which intellectual and scientific reason elevated the authority of scientists over priests, techno-utopians believe they will triumph over prophets of doom by “stealing fire from the gods, breathing life into inert matter, and gaining immortality. Our efforts to become something more than human have a long and distinguished genealogy. Tracing the history of those efforts illuminates human nature. In every civilization, in every era, we have given the gods no peace.”[ii] Such men and women are joined in their quest for godlike constitutions by a growing list of official U.S. departments that dole out hundreds of millions of dollars each year for science and technology research. The National Science Foundation and the United States Department of Commerce anticipated this development over a decade ago, publishing the government report Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance—complete with diagrams and bullet points—to lay out the blueprint for the radical evolution of man and machine. Their vision imagined that, following the year 2012, the “heaven scenario” would begin to be manifested and quickly result in (among other things):
The transhuman body being “more durable, healthy, energetic, easier to repair, and resistant to many kinds of stress, biological threats, and aging processes.”
Brain-machine interfacing that will “transform work in factories, control automobiles, ensure military superiority, and enable new sports, art forms and modes of interaction between people.
“Engineers, artists, architects, and designers will experience tremendously expanded creative abilities,” in part through “improved understanding of the wellspring of human creativity.”
“Average persons, as well as policymakers, will have a vastly improved awareness of the cognitive, social, and biological forces operating their lives, enabling far better adjustment, creativity, and daily decision making.
“Factories of tomorrow will be organized” around “increased human-machine capabilities.”[iii]
Beyond how human augmentation and biological reinvention would spread into the wider culture following 2012 (the same date former counter-terrorism czar, Richard Clark, in his book, Breakpoint, predicted serious GRINS rollout), the government report detailed the especially important global and economic aspects of genetically superior humans acting in superior ways, offering how, as a result of GRINS leading to techno-sapien dna upgrading, brain-to-brain interaction, human-machine interfaces, personal sensory device interfaces, and biological war fighting systems, “The twenty-first century could end in world peace, universal prosperity, and evolution to a higher level [as] humanity become[s] like a single, transcendent nervous system, an interconnected ‘brain’ based in new core pathways of society.” The first version of the government’s report asserted that the only real roadblock to this “heaven scenario” would be the “catastrophe” that would be unleashed if society fails to employ the technological opportunities available to us now. “We may not have the luxury of delay, because the remarkable economic, political and even violent turmoil of recent years implies that the world system is unstable. If we fail to chart the direction of change boldly, we may become the victims of unpredictable catastrophe.”[iv] This argument parallels what is currently echoed in military corridors, where sentiments hold that failure to commit resources to develop GRINS as the next step in human and technological evolution will only lead to others doing so ahead of us and using it for global domination.
Not everybody likes the “heaven scenario” imperative, and from the dreamy fantasies of Star Trek to the dismal vision of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, some have come to believe there are demons hiding inside transhumanism’s mystical (or mythical?) “Shangri-la.”
“Many of the writers [of the government report cited above] share a faith in technology which borders on religiosity, boasting of miracles once thought to be the province of the Almighty,” write the editors of The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society. “[But] without any serious reflection about the hazards of technically manipulating our brains and our consciousness¼a different sort of catastrophe is nearer at hand. Without honestly and seriously assessing the consequences associated with these powerful new [GRINS] technologies, we are certain, in our enthusiasm and fantasy and pride, to rush headlong into disaster.”[v]
Few people would be more qualified than computer scientist Bill Joy to annunciate these dangers, or to outline the “hell scenario” that could unfold as a result of GRINS. Yet it must have come as a real surprise to some of those who remembered him as the level-headed Silicon Valley scientist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems (sm) when, as chief scientist for the corporation, he released a vast and now-famous essay, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” arguing how GRINS would threaten in the very near future to obliterate mankind. What was extraordinary about Joy’s prophecy was how he saw himself—and people like him—as responsible for building the very machines that “will enable the construction of the technology that may replace our species.”
“From the very moment I became involved in the creation of new technologies, their ethical dimensions have concerned me,” he begins. But it was not until the autumn of 1998 that he became “anxiously aware of how great are the dangers facing us in the twenty-first century.” Joy dates his “awakening” to a chance meeting with Ray Kurzweil, whom he talked with in a hotel bar during a conference at which they both spoke. Kurzweil was finishing his manuscript for The Age of Spiritual Machines and the powerful descriptions of sentient robots and near-term enhanced humans left Joy taken aback, “especially given Ray’s proven ability to imagine and create the future,” Joy wrote. “I already knew that new technologies like genetic engineering and nanotechnology were giving us the power to remake the world, but a realistic and imminent scenario for intelligent robots surprised me.”
(article continues below video)
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Over the weeks and months following the hotel conversation, Joy puzzled over Kurzweil’s vision of the future until finally it dawned on him that genetic engineering, robotics, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology posed “a different threat than the technologies that have come before. Specifically, robots, engineered organisms, and nanobots share a dangerous amplifying factor: They can self-replicate. A bomb is blown up only once—but one bot can become many, and quickly get out of control.” The unprecedented threat of self-replication particularly burdened Joy because, as a computer scientist, he thoroughly understood the concept of out-of-control replication or viruses leading to machine systems or computer networks being disabled. Uncontrolled self-replication of nanobots or engineered organisms would run “a much greater risk of substantial damage in the physical world,” Joy concluded before adding his deeper fear:
What was different in the twentieth century? Certainly, the technologies underlying the weapons of mass destruction (wmd)—nuclear, biological, and chemical (nbc)—were powerful, and the weapons an enormous threat. But building nuclear weapons required highly protected information; biological and chemical weapons programs also tended to require large-scale activities.
The twenty-first-century technologies—genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics¼are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups. They will not require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them.
Thus we have the possibility not just of weapons of mass destruction but of knowledge-enabled mass destruction (kmd), this destructiveness hugely amplified by the power of self-replication.
I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment.[vi]
Joy’s prophecy about self-replicating “extreme evil” as an imminent and enormous transformative power that threatens to rewrite the laws of nature and permanently alter the course of life as we know it was frighteningly revived not long ago with the creation of J. Craig Venter’s “self-replicating” Synthia species (Venter’s description). Parasites such as the mycoplasma mycoides that Venter modified to create Synthia can be resistant to antibiotics and acquire and smuggle dna from one species to another, causing a variety of diseases. The dangers represented by Synthia’s self-replicating parasitism has thus refueled Joy’s opus and given experts in the field of counter-terrorism sleepless nights over how extremists could use open-source information to create a Frankenstein version of Synthia in fulfillment of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, which Joy quoted as, “the first moment in the history of our planet when any species, by its own voluntary actions, has become a danger to itself.” As a dire example of the possibilities this represents, a genetically modified version of mouse pox was created not long ago that immediately reached 100 percent lethality. If such pathogens were unleashed into population centers, the results would be catastrophic. This is why Joy and others were hoping a few years ago that a universal moratorium or voluntary relinquishment of GRINS developments would be initiated by national laboratories and governments. But the genie is so far out of the bottle today that even college students are attending annual synthetic biology contests (such as the International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition, or igem) where nature-altering witches’ brews are being concocted by the scores, splicing and dicing dna into task-fulfilling living entities. A growing list of such dna sequences are readily available over the Internet, exasperating security experts who see the absence of universal rules for controlling what is increasingly available through information networks as threatening to unleash a “runaway sorcerer’s apprentice” with unavoidable biological fallout. Venter and his collaborators say they recognize this danger—that self-replicating biological systems like the ones they are building—hold peril as well as hope, and they have joined in calling on Congress to enact laws to attempt to control the flow of information and synthetic “recipes” that could provide lethal new pathogens for terrorists. The problem, as always, is getting all of the governments in the world to voluntarily follow a firm set of ethics or rules. This is wishful thinking at best. It is far more likely the world is racing toward what Joel Garreau was first to call the “hell scenario”—a moment in which human-driven GRINS technologies place earth and all its inhabitants on course to self-eradication.
Ironically, some advocates of posthumanity are now using the same threat scenario to advocate for transhumanism as the best way to deal with the inevitable extinction of mankind via GRINS. At the global interdisciplinary institute Metanexus, Mark Walker, assistant professor at New Mexico State University (who holds the Richard L. Hedden of Advanced Philosophical Studies Chair) concludes like Bill Joy that “technological advances mean that there is a high probability that a human-only future will end in extinction.” From this he makes a paradoxical argument:
In a nutshell, the argument is that even though creating posthumans may be a very dangerous social experiment, it is even more dangerous not to attempt it.¼
I suspect that those who think the transhumanist future is risky often have something like the following reasoning in mind: (1) If we alter human nature then we will be conducting an experiment whose outcome we cannot be sure of. (2) We should not conduct experiments of great magnitude if we do not know the outcome. (3) We do not know the outcome of the transhumanist experiment. (4) So, we ought not to alter human nature.
The problem with the argument is.¼ Because genetic engineering is already with us, and it has the potential to destroy civilization and create posthumans, we are already entering uncharted waters, so we must experiment. The question is not whether to experiment, but only the residual question of which social experiment will we conduct. Will we try relinquishment? This would be an unparalleled social experiment to eradicate knowledge and technology. Will it be the steady-as-she-goes experiment where for the first time governments, organizations and private citizens will have access to knowledge and technology that (accidently or intentionally) could be turned to civilization ending purposes? Or finally, will it be the transhumanist social experiment where we attempt to make beings brighter and more virtuous to deal with these powerful technologies?
I have tried to make at least a prima facie case that transhumanism promises the safest passage through twenty-first–century technologies.[vii]
The producers of the upcoming documentary INHUMAN believe the “brighter and more virtuous beings” Professor Walker and others are arguing for possess supernatural elements and that the spirit behind the transhumanist nightmare will put the “hell” in the “hell scenario” sooner than most comprehend.
TO BE CONTINUED…
[i] Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Picador, 2002) 6.
[iv] “Carried Away with Convergence,” New Atlantis (Summer 2003) 102–105, http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/carried-away-with-convergence.
[v] (Summer 2003 issue of The New Atlantis, http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/carried-away-with-convergence)
[vi] Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” Wired (April 2000) http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html), emphasis added.
[vii] Mark Walker, “Ship of Fools: Why Transhumanism is the Best Bet to Prevent the Extinction of Civilization,” Metanexus Institute (2/5/09) http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/10682/Default.aspx.
EDITOR’S NOTE: In the countdown to the release of the highly anticipated documentary “INHUMAN: THE NEXT AND FINAL PHASE OF MAN IS HERE”(scheduled for release around August 15), SkyWatch TV is running this exclusive online series on transhumanism and the dawn of the Human Hybrid Age.
Synthetic biologists forecast that as computer code is written to create software to augment human capabilities, so too genetic code will be written to create life forms to augment civilization.
—Jerome C. Glenn
Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us. Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.
—Edward Osborne Wilson
Resistance is futile! You will be assimilated!
—the Borg
Not long ago, a writer for Wired magazine named Elizabeth Svoboda contacted me (Tom) to let me know she was writing an article about “research advances using transgenic animals to produce pharmaceutical compounds.” She had come across an editorial by me raising caution about this kind of experimentation and wondered if I might be willing to provide points for her article, elaborating in areas where I saw producing transgenic human-animals as potentially harmful. She stated that most of the scientists she planned to quote were “pretty gung-ho about the practice,” and said she thought it would be important to provide some balance. I thanked her for the invitation and sent a short summary of some, though not all, of the areas where concerns about this science could be raised.
When the article was finally published by Wired, I was surprised that none of my notes had made it into the story. I contacted Elizabeth and asked why, and she replied that they had originally been included in her article, “Pharm Animals Crank Out Drugs,” but in order to create a positive spin on the story, the editors had censored my cautionary notes during the editing process. Elizabeth apologized and said she hoped the experience had not soured me on dealing with the magazine.
“It doesn’t sour me,” I assured her. “I just think the reporting by most agencies is lopsided and missing the opportunity to thoroughly engage such an important issue.” The fact was, Wired magazine deprived the public of balanced treatment on an important subject and concluded instead with a scientist by the name of Marie Cecile Van de Lavoir saying that potential human health benefits from transgenic research “justify tinkering” with nature’s plan. “If a transgenic animal produces a great cancer therapy,” she said, “I won’t hear anyone saying, ‘You shouldn’t do that.’” Van de Lavoir’s comments were undoubtedly in response to some of my observations before they were pulled, because in offering caution, I had specifically used the phrase “tinkering with nature’s plan.” Van de Lavoir’s short-sighted approach, like too many bioethicists engaged in the current debate, is as scary as the science, in our opinion. We wanted to contact her to suggest that she watch the film I Am Legend starring Will Smith, which opens appropriately enough with a scientist announcing the cure to cancer using a genetically engineered vaccine that blends animal and human genetics. If you’ve seen the film, you know the “cure” results in a human form of rabies that wipes out most life on earth—a real possibility, given the scenario.
Because any attempt at covering each potential Grin-tech, catastrophic, I-Am-Legend possibility in the upcoming documentary INHUMAN would be impractical, and that film in particular focuses on the human-enhancement era dawning now, we summarize below a few of the most important areas in which conservatives, bioethicists, regulators, and especially Christians could become informed and involved in the public dialogue over the potential benefits and threats represented by these emerging fields of science:
GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOOD
Besides potential problems with transgenic animals, we have cited laboratory results in the past that were first reported by Dr. árpád Pusztai, repeat verified by scientist Irina Ermakova, and later substantiated by the International Journal of Biological Sciences that showed genetically modified (gm) food had surprisingly ill effects on the health of test rats, including the deterioration of every animal organ, atrophied livers, altered cells, testicular damage, altered sperm counts, shortened life spans, and cancer development. The laboratory findings led to the biotech industry suppressing the data and an eight-year court battle with monster corporations that did not want these results made public. Over the last year, the silenced information has been in the news again as Greenpeace activists published evidence from the Russian trials verifying the ramifications of the negative health issues related to genetically modified foods. The wider ramifications from these and similar controlled experiments suggest that as current technology inserts pesticides, insect genes, animal dna, and other modified organisms directly into crops, the threat of hybrid viruses, prion contamination and new disease strains—which man can neither anticipate or prepare for—may arise. The prospects of this having an impact on mammalian health is almost certain to be a “when,” not “if,” concern, because, as Momma always said, “you are what you eat,” and the fact that the food you consumed this week most likely contained genetically modified ingredients is a current reality. For example, a large portion of the soybean, corn, cottonseed, and canola in today’s human food supply and sold in most developed countries including the United States now has genes spliced in from foreign species—including bacteria and viruses—in its genetic makeup. These genetically modified organisms (gmos) have not only been linked to sickness, sterility, allergies, and even death among animals, but the Institute for Responsible Technology (irt) documents how the functioning genetically modified genes from these foods linger inside the human body, which could be future-catastrophic. “The only published human feeding experiment verified that genetic material inserted into gm soy transfers into the dna of intestinal bacteria and continues to function,” irt published. “This means that long after we stop eating gm foods, we may still have their gm proteins produced continuously inside us.”[i]
Among other things, irt says this means that: 1) If the antibiotic gene inserted into most gm crops were to transfer, it could create super diseases resistant to antibiotics; 2) If the gene that creates Bt toxin in gm corn were to transfer, it might turn our intestinal flora into living pesticide factories; and 3) Animal studies show that dna in food can travel into organs throughout the body, even into the fetus. Add to this the growing secrecy over the use of nanoparticles (eighty-four food-related uses are already on the market and in numerous consumer products such as sunscreens and cosmetics), which as a result of their size behave fundamentally different than other particles, and the possibility of health-related complications increases exponentially. Due to the large corporations (that stand to make billions of dollars from these products) having co-opted the fda into not requiring food labeling or package warnings on gmo foods and health products, you and I are now the biggest lab rats of all time in a “wait-and-see” experiment that will, feasibly within the decade, illustrate whether Pusztai and Ermakova’s rodent findings apply to us and our children.
SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY
Synthetic biology is one of the newest areas of biological research that seeks to design new forms of life and biological functions not found in nature. The concept began emerging in 1974, when Polish geneticist Waclaw Szybalski speculated about how scientists and engineers would soon enter “the synthetic biology phase of research in our field. We will then devise new control elements and add these new modules to the existing genomes or build up wholly new genomes. This would be a field with the unlimited expansion [of] building new¼‘synthetic’ organisms, like a ‘new better mouse.’”[ii] Following Szybalski’s speculation, the field of synthetic biology reached its first major milestone in 2010 with the announcement that researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (jcvi) had created an entirely new form of life nicknamed “Synthia” by inserting artificial genetic material, which had been chemically synthesized, into cells that were then able to grow. The jcvi Web site explains:
Genomic science has greatly enhanced our understanding of the biological world. It is enabling researchers to “read” the genetic code of organisms from all branches of life by sequencing the four letters that make up dna. Sequencing genomes has now become routine, giving rise to thousands of genomes in the public databases. In essence, scientists are digitizing biology by converting the A, C, T, and G’s of the chemical makeup of dna into 1’s and 0’s in a computer. But can one reverse the process and start with 1’s and 0’s in a computer to define the characteristics of a living cell? We set out to answer this question [and] now, this scientific team headed by Drs. Craig Venter, Hamilton Smith, and Clyde Hutchison have achieved the final step in their quest to create the first¼synthetic genome [which] has been “booted up” in a cell to create the first cell controlled completely by a synthetic genome.[iii]
The jcvi site goes on to explain how the ability to routinely write the software of life will usher in a new era in science, and with it, unnatural “living” products like Szybalski’s “new better mouse.” Better mice, dogs, horses, cows, or humans that grow from this science will be unlike any of the versions God made. In fact, researchers at the University of Copenhagen may look at what Venter has accomplished as amateur hour compared to their posthuman plans. They’re working on a third Peptide Nucleic Acid (pna) strand—a synthetic hybrid of protein and dna—to upgrade humanity’s two existing dna strands from double helix to triple. In so doing, these scientists “dream of synthesizing life that is utterly alien to this world—both to better understand the minimum components required for life (as part of the quest to uncover the essence of life and how life originated on earth) and, frankly, to see if they can do it. That is, they hope to put together a novel combination of molecules that can self-organize, metabolize (make use of an energy source), grow, reproduce and evolve.”[iv] Our good friend and host of SkyWatch TV, Gary Stearman and other biblical scholars are raising red flags over Synthia technology, warning that any biotech life application leading to modification of the human genotype for “improved” humans will be an inconceivable affront to God and could result in divine repercussions.
PATENTING NEW LIFE-FORMS
Questions are evolving now over “patenting” of transgenic seeds, animals, plants, and synthetic life-forms by large corporations, which at a minimum has already begun to impact the economy of rural workers and farmers through such products as Monsanto’s “terminator” seeds. Patenting of human genes will escalate these issues, as best-selling author Michael Crichton pointed out a while back in a piece for the New York Times titled, “Gene Patents Aren’t Benign and Never Will Be,” in which he claimed that people could die in the future from not being able to afford medical treatment as a result of medicines owned by patent holders of specific genes related to the genetic makeup of those persons. Former special counsel for President Richard Nixon, Charles Colson, added, “The patenting of genes and other human tissue has already begun to turn human nature into property. The misuse of genetic information will enable insurers and employers to exercise the ultimate form of discrimination. Meanwhile, advances in nanotechnology and cybernetics threaten to ‘enhance’ and one day perhaps rival or replace human nature itself—in what some thinkers are already calling ‘transhumanism.’”[v]
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WATCH THE INHUMAN TRAILER
ANIMAL RIGHTS
Animal-rights activists have raised similar questions having to do with the ethics of altering animals in ways that could be demeaning to them—for instance, creating zombielike creatures that grow in feeder labs and gaze off into space from birth until death. Militarized animals that behave in unnatural, unpredictable ways. Humanized animals that become “self-aware,” or animals that produce human sperm and eggs, which then are used for in vitro fertilization to produce a human child. Who would the parents be? A pair of mice?
HUMAN CLONING
The prospect of human cloning was raised in the nineties immediately after the creation of the much-celebrated “Dolly,” a female domestic sheep clone. Dolly was the first mammal to be cloned using “somatic cell nuclear transfer,” which involves removing the dna from an unfertilized egg and replacing the nucleus of it with the dna that is to be cloned. Today, a version of this science is common practice in genetics engineering labs worldwide, where “therapeutic cloning” of human and human-animal embryos is employed for stem-cell harvesting (the stem cells, in turn, are used to generate virtually any type of specialized cell in the human body). This type of cloning was in the news not long ago when it emerged from William J. Clinton Presidential Center documents that member of the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, had opposed during the Clinton White House any effort by Congress to prevent humans from being cloned specifically for experimental purposes, then killed. A second form of human cloning is called “reproductive cloning” and is the technology that could be used to create a person who is genetically identical with a current or previously existing human. While Dolly was created by this type of cloning technology, the American Medical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have raised caution on using this approach to create human clones, at least at this stage. Government bodies including the U.S. Congress have considered legislation to ban mature human cloning, and though a few states have implemented restrictions, contrary to public perception and except where institutions receive federal funding, no federal laws exist at this time in the United States to prohibit the cloning of humans. The United Nations, the European Union, and Australia likewise considered and failed to approve a comprehensive ban on human cloning technology, leaving the door open to perfect the science should society, government, or the military come to believe that duplicate or replacement humans hold intrinsic value.
REDEFINING HUMANS AND HUMAN RIGHTS
Where biotechnology is ultimately headed includes not only redefining what it means to be human, but redefining subsequent human rights as well. For instance, Dr. James Hughes wants transgenic chimps and great apes uplifted genetically so that they achieve “personhood.” The underlying goal behind this theory would be to establish that basic cognitive aptitude should equal “personhood” and that this “cognitive standard” and not “human-ness” should be the key to constitutional protections and privileges. Among other things, this would lead to nonhuman “persons” and “nonperson” humans, unhinging the existing argument behind intrinsic sanctity of human life and paving the way for such things as harvesting organs from people like Terry Schiavo whenever the loss of cognitive ability equals the dispossession of “personhood.” These would be the first victims of transhumanism, according to Prof. Francis Fukuyama, concerning who does or does not qualify as fully human and is thus represented by the founding concept that “all men are created equal.” Most would argue that any human fits this bill, but women and blacks were not included in these rights in 1776 when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. So who is to say what protections can be automatically assumed in an age when human biology is altered and when personhood theory challenges what bioethicists like Wesley J. Smith champion as “human exceptionalism”: the idea that human beings carry special moral status in nature and special rights, such as the right to life, plus unique responsibilities, such as stewardship of the environment. Some, but not all, believers in human exceptionalism arrive at this concept from a biblical worldview based on Genesis 1:26, which says, “And God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.’”
NANOTECHNOLOGY and CYBERNETICS
As discussed in the upcoming documentary, technology to merge human brains with machines is progressing at a fantastic rate. Nanotechnology—the science of engineering materials or devices on an atomic and molecular scale between 1 to 100 nanometers (a nanometer is one billionth of a meter) in size—is poised to take the development between brain-machine interfaces and cybernetic devices to a whole new adaptive level for human modification. This will happen because, as Dr. C. Christopher Hook points out:
Engineering or manipulating matter and life at nanometer scale [foresees] that the structures of our bodies and our current tools could be significantly altered. In recent years, many governments around the world, including the United States with its National Nanotechnology Initiative, and scores of academic centers and corporations have committed increasing support for developing nanotechnology programs. The military, which has a significant interest in nanotechnology, has created the Center for Soldier Nanotechnologies (csn) [which is] interested in the use of such technology to help create the seamless interface of electronic devices with the human nervous system, engineering the cyborg soldier.[vi]
TRANSHUMAN EUGENICS
In the early part of the twentieth century, the study and practice of selective human breeding known as eugenics sought to counter dysgenic aspects within the human gene pool and to improve overall human “genetic qualities.” Researchers in the United States, Britain, Canada, and Germany (where, under Adolf Hitler, eugenics operated under the banner of “racial hygiene” and allowed Josef Mengele, Otmar von Verschuer, and others to perform horrific experiments on live human beings in concentration camps to test their genetic theories) were interested in weeding out “inferior” human bloodlines and used studies to insinuate heritability between certain families and illnesses such as schizophrenia, blindness, deafness, dwarfism, bipolar disorder, and depression. Their published reports fueled the eugenics movement to develop state laws in the 1800s and 1900s that forcefully sterilized persons considered unhealthy or mentally ill in order to prevent them from “passing on” their genetic inferiority to future generations. Such laws were not abolished in the U.S. until the mid-twentieth century, leading to more than sixty thousand sterilized Americans in the meantime. Between 1934 and 1937, the Nazis likewise sterilized an estimated four hundred thousand people they deemed of inferior genetic stock while also setting forth to selectively exterminate the Jews as “genetic aberrations” under the same program. Transhumanist goals of using biotechnology, nanotechnology, mind-interfacing, and related sciences to create a superior man and thus classifications of persons—the enhanced and the unenhanced—opens the door for a new form of eugenics and social Darwinism.
GERM-LINE GENETIC ENGINEERING
Germ-line genetic engineering has been in the news recently due to development of “Crispr technology” – which is a more precise way of editing DNA than anything that has come before and is being hailed as the start of “a new era of genetics” involving a wide-range of experiments in thousands of laboratories currently that reopens questions about genetically modifying people. Germline gene editing has the potential to actually achieve the goals of the early eugenics movement (which sought to create superior humans via improving genetics through selective breeding) through genetically modifying human genes in very early embryos, sperm, and eggs, which then becomes heritable. As a result, germ-line engineering is considered by some conservative bioethicists to be the most dangerous of human-enhancement technology, as it has the power to truly reassemble the very nature of humanity into posthuman, altering an embryo’s every cell and leading to inheritable modifications extending to all succeeding generations. Debate over germ-line engineering is therefore most critical, because as changes to “downline” genetic offspring are set in motion, the nature and physical makeup of mankind will be altered with no hope of reversal, thereby permanently reshaping humanity’s future. A respected proponent of germ-line technology is Dr. Gregory Stock, who, like cyborgist Kevin Warwick, departs from Kurzweil’s version of Humans 2.0 first arriving as a result of computer Singularity. Stock believes man can choose to transcend existing biological limitations in the nearer future (at or before computers reach strong artificial intelligence) through germ-line engineering. If we can make better humans by adding new genes to their dna, he asks, why shouldn’t we? “We have spent billions to unravel our biology, not out of idle curiosity, but in the hope of bettering our lives. We are not about to turn away from this,” he says, before admitting elsewhere that this could lead to “clusters of genetically enhanced superhumans who will dominate if not enslave us.”[vii] The titles to Stock’s books speak for themselves concerning what germ-line engineering would do to the human race. The name of one is Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future and another is Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism.
Besides the short list above, additional areas of concern where readers may wish to become well advised on the pros and cons of enhancement technology include immortalism, postgenderism, augmented reality, cryonics, designer babies, neurohacking, mind uploading, neural implants, xenotransplantation, reprogenetics, rejuvenation, radical life extension, and more.
TO BE CONTINUED…
[i]Institute for Responsible Technology, http://www.responsibletechnology.org/GMFree/Home/index.cfm.
[ii] Waclaw Szybalski, In Vivo and in Vitro Initiation of Transcription, 405. In A. Kohn and A. Shatkay (eds.), Control of Gene Expression, 23–24, and Discussion 404–405 (Szybalski’s concept of Synthetic Biology), 411–412, 415–417 (New York: Plenum, 1974).
[iii] “First Self-Replicating Synthetic Bacterial Cell,” J. Craig Venter Institute, http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/first-self-replicating-synthetic-bacterial-cell.
[iv] Peter E. Nielsen, “Triple Helix: Designing a New Molecule of Life,” Scientific American (12/08) http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=triple-helix-designing-a-new-molecule&ec=su_triplehelix.
[v] Charles W. Colson, Human Dignity in the Biotech Century (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004) 8.
[vi] C. Christopher Hook, Human Dignity in the Biotech Century (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004) 80–81.
