Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Body Builders
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.adampiore.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist; contributing editor, Popular Science and Discover; former editor and correspondent, Newsweek.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Atavist, Business Week, Conde Nast Traveler, Discover, GQ, Mother Jones, Playboy, and Scientific American.
SIDELIGHTS
Science journalist Adam Piore’s The Body Builders: Inside the Science of the Engineered Human explores the new technology that promises to eliminate many of the limitations of the human body. “Piore says the new frontier that intrigues scientists and engineers today is the human body,” stated Bill Buchner in the introduction to an interview with the author on the web site WSHU. “He says amazing work and research is underway that melds technology with biology. These innovations can heal devastating injuries or even rewire the brain. Piore tells us about this evolving science through the stories of the people who develop the technology and the people who are transformed by it.” His work, wrote Nancy R. Curtis in Library Journal, focuses on “innovative researchers, clinicians, and adventurous patients who venture together into the search for cures for disease and disability.”
The Body Builders looks, not at long-term implications of developing technologies, but at technologies that already exist and are being used on people today. “In my book, I try to tell stories about things that are going on now,” Piore explained to Angelo Young in an interview appearing in Salon. “There are a lot of books that vaguely talk about the future, but I wanted to explain how the science works and what’s actually happening now so that people can evaluate these claims and see what’s sensationalistic and what’s not.” “We can now decode a human genome for under $1,000,” Piore told Young. “But the fact is a lot of human diseases and human qualities like intelligence grow out of the interaction of many different genes and environmental factors. We’re still learning how to decode those.” “It’s hard to finish the book,” said a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “without feeling excited about the possibilities for new science to profoundly help patients with debilitating conditions lead connected lives.”
Piore points out that these new techniques are not poised to turn people into cyborgs; in fact, he states, they are meant to make people more human rather than less, giving them the ability to function despite serious injury or life-threatening illnesses. “I don’t think technology has changed who we are at the core or what it means to be human,” the journalist said in a 52 Insights interview. “But I do think technology can enhance our ability to do the things that make us feel most human, like Hugh Herr who lost both legs below the knees. After losing his legs, he used to dream every night about running through corn fields with the wind in his hair. Then he’d wake up, see the stumps of his legs and remember doctors had told him he would never be able to run again. Today he jogs around Walden Pond every day on prosthetic legs.” “David Jayne started to lose the ability to speak from ALS,” Piore continued. “Then he got a new machine that allowed him to communicate again and clown around with his kids.” “At one point this researcher Gerwin Schalk sat me down in front of speakers and played me the sounds translated from neuronal firing patterns recorded from the auditory cortex of patients listening to music,” the journalist explained in his 52 Insights interview. “It was Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall. I could make out the thumping base, and the echoing guitar solo. It sounded a little like it had been recorded under water, but it was the song. And it was the song reproduced and extracted basically from the patient’s brain waves.” “They’ve discovered that when you speak, you send signals not just to the brain’s motor cortex to tell your muscles how to make the sound but also to the auditory cortex as an error-correction mechanism,” Piore told Young. “And even when you’re not speaking, just thinking the words, the words still go to your auditory cortex.”
While some reviewers expressed concern that Piore de-emphasized the ethical concerns posed by these new accomplishments, all recognized his enthusiasm—and the hard work of the scientists that have developed them. “Piore writes gracefully, and with deep insight,” declared a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “about complex scientific endeavors that … are fraught with myriad ethical perils.” Piore “explores the creation of artificial limbs, memory-enhancing drugs and deep brain stimulation to help people who have medical problems,” explained Ezekiel J. Emanuel in the New York Times Book Review. “The stories are engaging, and some are even engrossing, but Piore seems a bit too admiring of his scientists and indifferent to any concerns…. By his own admission, Piore is mesmerized by new technologies and unfazed by any larger concerns such as the ethics of enhancement and whether these technologies might be available only to the well-off.” “Piore,” concluded Lauren O’Brien in Shelf Awareness, “has crafted a fascinating foundation for discussion, while highlighting the dedication of our scientists and the resilience of the human spirit.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2016, review of The Body Builders: Inside the Science of the Engineered Human.
Library Journal, January 1, 2017, Nancy R. Curtis, review of The Body Builders, p. 122.
New York Times Book Review, March 19, 2017, Ezekiel J. Emanuel, “Tinkers and Tailors,” p. 17.
Publishers Weekly, December 12, 2016, review of The Body Builders, p. 134.
ONLINE
52 Insights, https://www.52-insights.com/ (April 6, 2017), “Adam Piore: More Human than Human.”
Adam Piore Home Page, https://www.adampiore.com (October 25, 2017), author profile.
Shelf Awareness, http://shelf-awareness.com/ (October 25, 2017), Lauren O’Brien, review of The Body Builders.
Salon, https://www.salon.com/ (April 17, 2017), Angelo Young, author interview.
WSHU, http://wshu.org/ (May 1, 2017), Bill Buchner, “Interview: Adam Piore and the Jaw-dropping Science of Bioengineering.”
ABOUT ME
Adam Piore is an award-winning journalist based in New York. A former editor and correspondent for Newsweek Magazine, his narrative features have appeared in Conde Nast Traveler, GQ, Discover Magazine, Mother Jones, Playboy, Scientific American, the Atavist, BusinessWeek and many others.
Piore, Adam. The Body Builders: Inside the
Science of the Engineered Human
Nancy R. Curtis
Library Journal.
142.1 (Jan. 1, 2017): p122.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Piore, Adam. The Body Builders: Inside the Science of the Engineered Human. Ecco: HarperCollins. Feb. 2017.384p.
notes. ISBN 9780062347145. $26.99; ebk. ISBN 9780062347169. SCI
Journalist Piore (contributing editor, Popular Science, Discover) expands previous articles about human limb
regeneration and "telepathic" soldiers (among other topics) and examines additional uses of technology to improve
movement, sensation, and thought. The author dispatches commendably accessible (and much-needed) background
information on physiology, human development, and neuroscience. But his primary emphasis are the innovative
researchers, clinicians, and adventurous patients who venture together into the search for cures for disease and
disability. Some comments may come across as ageist or ableist. Compared to Malcolm Gay's more focused The Brain
Electric: The Dramatic High-Tech Race To Merge Minds and Machines, this title is considerably weaker in coverage of
political, social, and economic issues. Ethical questions are better addressed by Michael Bess's Our Grandchildren
Redesigned: Life in the Bioengineered Society of the Near Future. Surgical patients and their caretakers may feel Piore
downplays the significant risks associated with various medical procedures (particularly invasive brain operations).
Nevertheless, this is an upbeat and appealing overview of cutting-edge biomedical research. VERDICT For popular
science and consumer health readers. [See Prepub Alert, 8/26/16.]-Nancy R. Curtis, Univ. of Maine Lib., Orono
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Curtis, Nancy R. "Piore, Adam. The Body Builders: Inside the Science of the Engineered Human." Library Journal, 1
Jan. 2017, p. 122+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476562440&it=r&asid=d731e16d42196458852eeebb67bee2a1.
Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A476562440
9/30/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Piore, Adam: THE BODY BUILDERS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Dec. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Piore, Adam THE BODY BUILDERS Ecco/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $26.99 3, 14 ISBN: 978-0-06-234714-5
An exhilarating look at the cutting edge of bioengineering and how science and medicine are pushing the boundaries of
human potential. At the heart of journalist Piore's story are the people driving this biomedical revolution--both the
scientists and the patients who benefit from their innovative problem-solving. The insight, perseverance, and resilience
of both groups drive the field's rapid progress and reveal something profound about the elasticity of the mind and its
relationship with the body. A figure such as the Olympic runner Oscar Pistorius, who lost both legs as an infant yet
achieved success as an athlete in ways that would have been impossible even 25 years ago, is just one example of the
astounding progress that has been made in compensating for devastating injuries. By merging discerning science
reporting with capable storytelling, the author--a former editor and correspondent for Newsweek who has written for
Conde Nast Traveler, Mother Jones, and other publications--goes beyond external physical augmentation or repair and
investigates how scientists are "hacking into the body itself and rewriting or redirecting the body's cellular instruction
manuals...coercing the body to rebuild or transform itself." Consequently, ideas typically limited to science fiction are
becoming reality: a blind person "seeing" with her ears; extrasensory perception; editing the genome to cure disease; a
"memorization pill"; and the potential for deep brain stimulation to correct neurological conditions are just a few of the
very real current advances in biomedicine. Even creativity is implicated in the potential to engineer our abilities. Such
progress is not without some heady ethical considerations, which Piore handles deftly, but it's hard to finish the book
without feeling excited about the possibilities for new science to profoundly help patients with debilitating conditions
lead connected lives. A mind-bending read that will expand your perception of self.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Piore, Adam: THE BODY BUILDERS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473652197&it=r&asid=9a932103ca2b16a2a098c252eaff2583.
Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A473652197
9/30/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506833038141 3/3
The Body Builders: Inside the Science of the
Engineered Human
Publishers Weekly.
263.51 (Dec. 12, 2016): p134.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Body Builders: Inside the Science of the Engineered Human
Adam Piore. Ecco, $26.99 (400p) ISBN 978-006-234714-5
In this accessible work on bioengineering, former Newsweek editor Piore documents where humans stand in our
attempt to borrow--and build on--nature's "sublime" healing solutions, which have been "refined by evolution over
billions of years." Piore's aim is not to offer a clinical tome on scientific progress, but to reveal the "human spirit" that
undergirds the search for ways to heal an array of debilitating physical and mental injuries and impairments. He checks
in with researchers exploring a number of new technologies, including electrical deep brain stimulation, bionics derived
from reverse-engineering the human body, and altering genetic details through "gene doping." Piore also speaks to
scientists tinkering with the human brain, "the world's most sophisticated pattern recognition machine," which plays a
role in "amazing feats of associative learning" such as intuition and the ability of blind people to "see" when exposed to
"sound-scapes." Piore makes a few overstatements, as when he writes that the human body "has been honed over
millennia for maximum efficiency," but his central conceit--that scientists may soon be successfully "hacking" the
human body--is on point. Piore writes gracefully, and with deep insight, about complex scientific endeavors that could
ease human suffering but are fraught with myriad ethical perils. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"The Body Builders: Inside the Science of the Engineered Human." Publishers Weekly, 12 Dec. 2016, p. 134+. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475225088&it=r&asid=1518b320de6f92203dbc9ed24eeff8b7.
Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475225088
We could be reading minds soon: Inside the research that’s moving us from sci-fi to sci-fact
Adam Piore, author of “The Body Builders,” talks to Salon about the science behind decoding brain waves
Angelo Young04.17.2017•6:58 PM
Billionaire magnate Elon Musk is trying to fill the world with electric cars and solar panels while at the same time aiming to deploy reusable rockets to eventually colonize Mars.
As if that weren't enough for his plate, Musk recently announced the launch of Neuralink, a neuroscience startup seeking to create a way to interface human brains with computers. According to him, this would be part of guarding humanity against what Musk considers a threat from the rise of artificial intelligence. He envisions a lattice of electrodes implanted into the human skull that could allow people to download and upload thoughts as well as treat brain conditions such as epilepsy or bipolar disorders.
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Musk’s proposition seems as outlandish and unlikely as his vision for the Hyperloop rapid transport system, but like his other big ideas, there’s real science behind it.
Figuring out what's really involved in efforts to sync brains with computers was part of what inspired Adam Piore to write “The Body Builders: Inside the Science of the Engineered Human,” which was released last month by HarperCollins.
Written in plain language that gives nonscientists a way to separate the science from the sensational, “The Body Builders” is a fascinating dive into what’s happening right now in bioengineering research — from brain-computer interfaces to bionic limbs — that will redefine human-machine interactions in the years to come.
Piore, an award-winning journalist who has written extensively about scientific advances, spoke to Salon recently about just how close we are to being able to read one another’s thoughts through electrodes and the processing power of modern computers. The transcript below was lightly edited for style and clarity.
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In your research, what were some of the innovations you learned about that blew your mind?
Most of them blew my mind at some point, but the one that really stuck out [dealt with] the things people are doing with reverse engineering the way the human leg works so they can build a bionic limb. In order to do that, Hugh Herr at MIT is building a mathematical model of the way that all of the constituent parts of the lower leg interact.
There’s only a few hundred muscles, ligaments, tendons and bones that constitute the lower leg, so that’s manageable to have the sensing power to characterize that, express it mathematically, put that on a computer chip and then build robotic parts that can do that or build some exoskeleton device that can work in harmony with that. If you take that to the extreme, one of the biggest challenges is the human brain where [the experimental technology involved is] basically doing the same thing except with billions of neurons.
One of the people that I profile was a guy by the name of Gerwin Schalk in Albany at the Wadsworth Center. He’s trying to decode imagined speech. That was pretty mind-blowing. They’ve discovered that when you speak, you send signals not just to the brain’s motor cortex to tell your muscles how to make the sound but also to the auditory cortex as an error-correction mechanism. And even when you’re not speaking, just thinking the words, the words still go to your auditory cortex, so Gerwin Schalk has been able to find a neural signature of this and identify different phrases.
Your book describes how Schalk re-created a muddled but clearly recognizable segment of the Pink Floyd song “Another Brick in the Wall” based solely on brain wave data collected from people who had listened to the sound clip. What is the practical application of this?
The ultimate goal is to be able to decode imagined speech. That was a demonstration showing that you could detect the music playing in somebody’s auditory cortex. But theoretically if you have the processing power and the sensing capabilities, you could detect something much more specific, like the actual words that somebody is thinking.
And if you could do that then you could help locked-in patients regain the ability to talk just by thinking. You could build a thought helmet, which was the original kind-of cockamamy scheme by the person who originally funded Gerwin Schalk. There was a guy in the Army Research Office who [provided funding for Schalk’s research] because he wanted to build a thought helmet that he had read about in science fiction books so that soldiers could communicate telepathically. It seemed outlandish at the time, but now it seems like someday it might be possible.
It seems like a Faustian bargain to have technology that could read people’s minds. Has anyone discussed the notion that someday authorities could prosecute people based on thoughts they have in their minds?
They’ve definitely explored the ethical dilemmas, but they’re a long way from being able to do that. If you are actually going to be able to have a thought helmet, even if you could do it the way it’s conceptualized for the military or to help locked-in people speak, you would need to train the pattern-recognition software.
It really wouldn’t work without the cooperation [of the subject]. The way words are encoded in each person’s brain differs from person to person. The software and the hardware would need to be trained on your own specific brain before it could actually pick out words and phrases.
But there are all sorts of ethical questions raised by these technologies, and one can imagine all sorts of "1984"-ish type mind-control issues, and they’re definitely worth exploring and discussing.
So what you’re saying is that the each human brain has a distinct “accent,” that we all process words differently in our minds?
The brain is the most complicated pattern-recognition machine out there, and the way that different words and patterns are encoded in our brains is the result of our experiences. The brain is very plastic. It can actually even change in a person over time.
You’ve said we need a technological breakthrough to decode language from brain waves. What do you mean?
So there’s a guy at Northwestern named Konrad Kording who published a paper in 2011 in Nature Neuroscience detailing what he called Stevenson’s Law, named after his graduate student Ian Stevenson; it’s like Moore’s Law for computing chips. [Stevenson] had looked at the number of neurons that scientists can record from, and basically it’s doubled about every seven years.
But it’s only about 500 [neurons] at this point. Kording said we’ll be dead before we can record even part of a mouse brain. So what they’re doing is there’s this program from [the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA] called Neural Engineering System Design. They’re doling out about $60 million trying to get some sort of breakthrough. They want a device that can record from at least 100,000 neurons and also stimulate them. But it’s hard to do. We need to develop a new way to do this.
There’s a group of people at Berkeley who have suggested that the solution is to have something called neural dust, which is nano-scale electrodes you can put in the brain. People have said the solution is to just shrink existing electrodes to make them smaller. Some people have compared [the current technology] to trying to play piano with your forearms. You can’t get the resolution you want. There’s a paralyzed woman who drank coffee with a robotic arm, controlling it just by thinking, and that was remarkable.
But as one of the neuroscientists said to me, there’s no [brain-computer interface] that you would want to use to control a wheelchair on the edge of a cliff or to drive a car in heavy traffic. It’s not precise enough.
This sounds like a similar problem in robotics. Robots can do a lot of things, but some tasks are too intricate and detailed for a robot to do — at least not yet.
We’ve crossed the Rubicon, but we haven’t yet perfected the technology. That’s why in my book I also looked at technologies that are affecting people’s lives, like the [bionic leg research]. It’s the same kind of idea because you’re reverse engineering the human body and mind. There are a lot of remarkable stories of people being able to walk again.
It’s also the same with genetic engineering. We can now decode a human genome for under $1,000. But the fact is a lot of human diseases and human qualities like intelligence grow out of the interaction of many different genes and environmental factors. We’re still learning how to decode those. We’re able to do genetic therapy but not complicated genetic therapy.
What are researchers telling you about the science behind Elon Musk’s recent comments and predictions about merging human and artificial intelligence, about downloading and uploading thoughts?
In my book, I try to tell stories about things that are going on now. There are a lot of books that vaguely talk about the future, but I wanted to explain how the science works and what’s actually happening now so that people can evaluate these claims and see what’s sensationalistic and what’s not.
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But Gerwin Schalk, who’s working on imagined speech, believes his research is just one guidepost on route to an even grander endpoint. He believes that in the not too distant future that we’ll be able to seamlessly integrate the human mind and all of humanity with computers so that we won’t need a keyboard or a mouse to type something into the web to get an answer. We’ll be able to just think and we’ll have instant access to every fact available on the web as if it was a memory or something. He says you’d have a billion people all hooked in, and there’s no social media; everyone would just know what you’re about and who you are and suddenly you’d create this super society, and it would clearly transform not only human capacity but also what it means to be human.
I think that’s relevant to what Elon Musk is talking about. He’s worried about artificial intelligence, about machines destroying humanity. One of the reasons why he’s pushing for this neural lace, which would be to overcome that challenge that I was talking about earlier, which is the same kind of thing that DARPA is funding, [is] to try and find better sensors to overcome Stevenson’s Law. One of the reasons why Elon Musk wants to do this is so that we can link up to computers and have the same computational power and the same hive mind and the same type of intelligence that artificial intelligence would have so that we can basically protect ourselves.
Book Review | Nonfiction
Tinkers and Tailors: Three Books Look to the Biomedical Frontier
By EZEKIEL J. EMANUELMARCH 16, 2017
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THE GENE MACHINE
How Genetic Technologies Are Changing the Way We Have Kids — and the Kids We Have
By Bonnie Rochman
272 pp. Scientific American/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.
THE BODY BUILDERS
Inside the Science of the Engineered Human
By Adam Piore
376 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99.
TO BE A MACHINE
Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death
By Mark O’Connell
241 pp. Doubleday. $26.95.
Conventional wisdom has it that science is always outrunning our ethics, that new technologies overwhelm our ability to reason ethically and regulate breakthroughs. Should we permit — or require — whole genome sequencing of every infant? Should we promote radical life extension?
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In 1975, Paul Berg, a Stanford biochemistry professor, convened what came to be known as the Asilomar Conference to establish safeguards and prohibitions on the conduct of what then was cutting-edge biomedical research — recombinant DNA technology. Many people were worried that it could create bacteria with foreign DNA that might escape the laboratory, causing cancer in people or disrupting the Earth’s ecosystem. Today, Asilomar stands for one of the seminal moments in history when scientists and physicians showed what one scientist called “social responsibility in the face of strong intellectual temptation” to continue experiments. In the view of many, the conference succeeded only because Berg and other organizers focused on safety.
In subsequent years, it has become clear that safety is the only shared value that might pause the pursuit of biomedical research. Yet, as the three books under review illustrate, today’s big ethical issues in biomedicine are not about safety but often more profound questions of parental control over their children’s future; personal identity; and the importance of mortality to being human. And yet these books — and much of American culture — have a hard time engaging with these fundamental questions.
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In “The Gene Machine,” the journalist Bonnie Rochman explores a range of genetic tests from carrier screening to whole genome sequencing. “I am an information junkie,” she writes, and because of this predilection, she has a hard time explaining what might be called Huntington’s paradox: Before the gene for Huntington’s disease was found, about three-quarters of at-risk people wanted to know their genetic status. But after a test became available, only 25 percent wanted to know. In the abstract, more information always seems desirable. In reality, not so much. Why? Maybe because being able to imagine hopeful paths seems to be hard-wired. For most people, genetic tests that predict the future, especially when there is no intervention, provide oppressive, not liberating, information.
Rochman explains all manner of genetic tests, but don’t expect much enlightenment on the ethics. Many arguments are delineated by juxtaposing quotations from experts without any critical assessment of their merits. Are children really entitled to an “open future,” and what does it actually entail from parents in terms of genetics? Instead of a deep analysis, Rochman flippantly writes: “In actuality, no one’s future is truly wide open; everyone is made up of genes, and genes contain the imprint of generations past.” True, but surely there is much more to say about degrees of openness and how genetics might or might not fit into those different conceptions. The “openness” of futures for children born into closed Hasidic, Amish or strict Muslim communities is different from children born into typical Upper West Side households. And that qualitative difference makes a big ethical difference. Rochman never goes there.
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While Rochman acknowledges the ethical issues at the heart of genetic screening, Adam Piore dismisses all such concerns. In “The Body Builders,” he explores the creation of artificial limbs, memory-enhancing drugs and deep brain stimulation to help people who have medical problems. The stories are engaging, and some are even engrossing, but Piore seems a bit too admiring of his scientists and indifferent to any concerns. He is so enamored with the power of deep brain stimulation that when the F.D.A. required a randomized, placebo-controlled study of its use in depression — which revealed no benefit — he simply dismisses the problem by quoting a researcher as saying: “We ended up having a fairly high placebo effect. . . . But it definitely worked in some people.” And then Piore confidently predicts advanced technology will solve the problem.
By his own admission, Piore is mesmerized by new technologies and unfazed by any larger concerns such as the ethics of enhancement and whether these technologies might be available only to the well-off. On the last page of the book, he simply says without any argument: “I am skeptical that technology will ever fundamentally transform us. . . . The most important story is the one about enhancing not our abilities, but our humanity.” This is not the end of an argument. It is just an assertion that seems to border on willful avoidance of any deep thinking about the influences of technology on people and society.
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“To Be a Machine” is Mark O’Connell’s gonzo-journalistic exploration of the Silicon Valley techno-utopians’ pursuit of escaping the body and ultimately mortality. Titans of technology — Peter Thiel, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and others — are obsessed by the desire for immortality, and their fixation leads them to pursue a host of science projects: uploading the brain’s contents into computers, cryopreservation, radical life extension.
We meet a multitude of colorful characters: Aubrey de Grey, with his two-foot beard, who runs the nonprofit SENS Research Foundation (SENS stands for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) dedicated to finding a way for people to live to 1,000 and then avoid death altogether; Max More, the proprietor of Alcor, a cryopreservation facility in Phoenix that for $80,000 will detach and store your head in “medical-grade antifreeze” — after you die, of course — “with a view to the later uploading of your brain, or your mind, into some kind of artificial body.”
The book is a wonderful, breezy romp filled with the beginnings of philosophical reflections on the meaning of the techno-utopians’ search for immortality, or as O’Connell puts it, “solving death.” He notes that underlying their view is a techno-mechanistic view of humans as simply “meat machines” that process information — information that can be extracted and exported to a computer or silicon-based robot.
But while O’Connell suggestively quotes Rilke, St. Augustine, Gnostic texts and Hannah Arendt in critiquing techno-utopians, he never goes very deep into understanding the pathology driving them. He feels no attraction to their philosophy and notes that his child playing horsy with his wife could not be “rendered in code. . . . Their beauty was bodily, in the most profound sense, in the saddest and most wonderful sense.” But he fails to translate that feeling into anything approaching a coherent social or ethical critique. This limitation may be most manifest in O’Connell’s failure to mention one of the most disturbing aspects of this immortality mania: its utter selfishness. If Thiel and others actually succeeded in achieving superlong lives, then reproduction would end. And with it, the possibility of creating new people with novel characteristics and perspectives. Life would become one long, boring rerun.
It would not, as one of O’Connell’s characters thoughtlessly says, be because childbirth would become “a thing of the past, . . . with babies being produced by ectogenesis and whatnot.” It would be because with all those old Peter Thiels living on and on forever, the Earth would lack the carrying capacity for more people; there would be total resource limits precluding adding one more infant, much less the 130 million currently added each year. Maybe this is why the titans of technology want so badly to escape to Mars.
Ezekiel J. Emanuel is chairman of the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the forthcoming “Prescription for the Future.”
A version of this review appears in print on March 19, 2017, on Page BR17 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Tinkers and Tailors. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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Science Writer • 6th/Apr/2017 • • •
Adam Piore
More Human Than Human
American writer Adam Piore has never shied away from reporting at the front line of technology and science. His latest literary endeavour, The Body Builders, details nine separate developments based around the augmentation of the future self. It may look like a sci-fi film, but this is a genuine glimpse into superhuman territory.
52 Insights
Adam Piore More Human Than Human • 6th/Apr/2017
From cases of people that can see with their ears to people functioning with bionic limbs, technology and science have afforded us a whole new era of metamorphosis, pushing the capacity of the human body to new heights. In this sometimes jaw-dropping interview, Piore walks us through a world where drug companies, scientists and courageous individuals are shaping this bioengineering revolution – a world where no disease is too great a challenge to cure or any disability too complex to overcome.
What does it mean to be human these days?
I don’t think technology has changed who we are at the core or what it means to be human. If you look at the Harvard Grant Study – perhaps the longest longitudinal study out there on how people grow and change over time – what really makes us happy, and I would extend that to say what makes us feel most human, is our relationships with other people, and whether we spend our time doing things that feel meaningful.
But I do think technology can enhance our ability to do the things that make us feel most human, like Hugh Herr who lost both legs below the knees. After losing his legs, he used to dream every night about running through corn fields with the wind in his hair. Then he’d wake up, see the stumps of his legs and remember doctors had told him he would never be able to run again. Today he jogs around Walden Pond every day on prosthetic legs.
I met a lady called Pat Fletcher. She loved nature, and then was blinded in a grenade explosion. Today she can “see” with her ears using a sensory substitution device, and she cried when she saw a mountain again for the first time in decades.
David Jayne started to lose the ability to speak from ALS. Then he got a new machine that allowed him to communicate again and clown around with his kids. The technologies behind Hugh’s legs can make exoskeletons for the able-bodied. Pat’s sensory substitution device can probably be transformed into something that would allow us all to have infrared vision. The technology that bioengineers are developing to try and give David Jayne the ability to speak again might one day be used by soldiers to communicate telepathically with a “thought helmet.”
The people and stories featured in this book are, as you said, almost ‘implausible’. Was there a particular technology or story that really amazed you?
I would say the effort to reach inside the human brain and decode imagined speech was pretty mind blowing. Scientists have discovered that when we imagine speaking, our brains send a copy of how the words should sound to our auditory cortex as an error correction mechanism. This is true even if we simply imagine speaking, but don’t say anything out loud. So, I visited a guy trying to decode these words and sentences from the patterns of neurons firing in the brains of people when people imagine them. The whole concept is pretty wild. They are not totally there yet because we have billions of neurons.
But at one point this researcher Gerwin Schalk sat me down in front of speakers and played me the sounds translated from neuronal firing patterns recorded from the auditory cortex of patients listening to music. It was Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall. I could make out the thumping base, and the echoing guitar solo. It sounded a little like it had been recorded under water, but it was the song. And it was the song reproduced and extracted basically from the patient’s brain waves. That blew my mind.
“After losing his legs, [Hugh Herr] used to dream every night about running through corn fields with the wind in his hair.”
Your research shows that science could eliminate physical disability as we know it. With innovations as far reaching as this in the field of bioengineering, can we be hopeful that disease will similarly be eliminated by science in the near future?
I agree with Peter Thiel that computational power will be used more and more as a tool to decode the mysteries of biology, in fact that is what my book is about. It’s already having a huge impact on people’s lives and allowing us to unlock untapped resilience in the body and mind to augment people. But there’s a second part of that quote. Thiel says we will be able to “reverse all human ailments in the same way that we can fix the bugs of a computer program” and that “death will eventually be reduced from a mystery to a solvable problem.” While it’s certainly possible, I doubt that will happen in the ‘near’ future. There are simply too many ways that things can wrong—too many things to reverse engineer.
Our best shot is to unlock the secrets of ageing itself, because cancer, strokes and heart attacks—so many diseases—are diseases of ageing. But that’s a tall order, and the question of what happens to our cells when we age is one of the most complex questions in biology. It’s a systemic failure which we are only just beginning to understand.
Why do you think humans are so obsessed with progress? Do you think it is right to eliminate our natural limitations?
It’s just hardwired through evolution. We like challenges, always pushing to be better. It’s for you and other readers to decide whether you think it is right to eliminate our natural limitations. The answer I have come to believe is “it depends”. I asked a military scientist whether he thought all these technologies were good or bad, and he said, “Is a baseball bat good or bad? It’s a good thing if you use it to play baseball. It’s a bad thing if you use it to club somebody over the head. It depends.”
Having said that, there are all sorts of frightening scenarios that could play out. When I was in China, the Beijing Genomics Institute is involved in this controversial project trying to decode the genetics of intelligence, and some people are really alarmed that will lead to a genetics arms race. I asked one of the people there what they thought and he said, ‘Well I think that all parents should have the option to make their children as intelligent as they want.’ I asked him if there was any prospect that alarmed him and he said, ‘Yeah, like if some really ambitious tiger mom wanted to give her child perfect intelligence and also give them sociopathic tendencies that make them immune from altruism and empathy, that’s a scary thought.’
“Imagine some really ambitious tiger mom wanted to give her child perfect intelligence and also give them sociopathic tendencies that make them immune from altruism and empathy, that’s a scary thought.” – Adam Piore visits the Beijing Genomics Institute.
You’ve said, “Computers and medical technology have caught up to the point that we can look at things on the molecular level and hack the body.” What happens next, do you think there is a 5-10-15-20 year outcome plan?
I’d like to answer that question by telling you about the human leg. The human leg is like a giant network of springs. The human body itself has a little more than 200 bones, 350 joints, 700 muscles and 4,000 tendons, a couple hundred of which are in the leg. They form a complex web, capturing, juggling and recycling energy every time we walk or run. That allows us to reuse more than half the energy generated by a previous stride every time we take a new step. We now have the computing and sensing power to analyse how every constituent part of this web relates to one another – how a changing angle of the shin can affect the force with which the heel touches the ground, and how that changes when the knee moves back 3 cm. We can then put all that info into a mathematical formula on a computer chip and build robotic parts that behave the same way. This is allowing people to walk again.
But we don’t yet have the computing and signal processing power to instantly decode the interaction between billions of neurons in the brain multiple times a second, or the interaction between billions of nucleotides and environmental factors. Our ability to do this is improving every year. So, I don’t know how fast these technologies will go. Will it take 15-20 years to decode imagined speech, and hook us all up to a giant “hive” mind where we can all communicate over the internet just by thinking? Seems doubtful. But that is where we are headed.
People like the billionaire Paul G. Allen and Peter Thiel are part of this wealthy private sector funding these types of operations. Do you think the Silicon Valley elite etc. will change the course of these ventures?
Their contributions are significant and helpful but they are still far less than the money the government has traditionally provided. Where they help is in backing research that is outside the mainstream, bleeding edge explorations too risky for more conservative government grant writing panels. You see this especially in the area of efforts to reverse engineer the biology of ageing, but also in areas where the goal seems to be human augmentation. The effort I write about to try and invent a memory pill or “Viagra for the brain” is being funded by a billionaire Styrofoam magnate named Ken Dart. And they are giving grants to academics to study people with superior memory, something the NIH would be unlikely to fund because it’s not explicitly aimed at targeting a disease.
Do you think we’re starting to witness the end of diseases perhaps?
Some diseases. I’m sure as we knock old ones down, new ones will emerge for us to tackle. We have a lot of problems we didn’t have before because we have been so successful in extending human life.
But what about the big diseases like cancer, how far are we from eliminating it?
Yes sure, well the human immune system, theoretically, should be able to defeat cancer; it is designed to detect threats to the body and things that don’t belong there, then deal with them. T cells are basically this molecular level defence force of security guards that go through the body to find threats and neutralise them. When you get cancer, partially it’s a failure of the immune system, and when you get older your body gets more and more mutations, making you more likely to get cancer because mutations are likely to result in cancer being able to elude the immune system.
Until recently, people had always been trying to boost the immune system, turbo charge it to go after cancer for a long time, but with mixed results. There was a drug called Interferon in the 70s and 80s that everyone thought would be the new wonder drug but you gave it to people and it attacked their own body and they’d be really sick. Then in the 90s they discovered something called a checkpoint, which is basically like a circuit breaker, and they found that certain kinds of cancers have these mutations that allow them to flip a switch and turn off T cells. So if you could develop an antibody that would bind itself to the switches on the T cells preventing them from being turned off, then the immune system would continue to attack the cancer. It was amazing when they first tested it around 2000, they had 14 melanoma patients who were heading for hospice about to die, and 3 of those patients survived and are still around today. Now they’ve found that other cancers have mutations that hit different checkpoints, and if you try and bind those checkpoints, those cancers will be killed.
So it’s the same thing as the augmentation technologies, in that, as we develop new technologies to analyse and counteract this battle that is going on at a molecular level, we can find ways to overcome some of these mutations that the cancer is using to elude the immune system. So this molecular level battle that has been going on recently is much more sophisticated and has more promise than what we have had before. It is the biggest advance in fighting cancer since chemotherapy and has got a lot of attention in the US because Jimmy Carter, the former President, announced he was going to die from cancer and then he was treated with immunotherapy and survived.
“At deCODE they found a mutation seeming to protect people from Alzheimer’s, stopping the brain from creating the plaque build up that occurs in Alzheimer’s sufferers. Now they’re trying to find a drug to replicate that.”
You recently wrote an article on the opioids crisis and potential solutions with new engineered drugs. There seems to be such a large buffer between what treatment you would receive in a typical doctors surgery and the theoretical existence of future medications. What do you think will be the wall collapsing to allow us to access these types of developments?
I guess the biggest obstacle is that it is very difficult to convert some of these technologies into mass market products; there’s a lack of funding and it’s slow to get it there. But if you look at Hugh Herr and the prosthetics, just a couple of weeks ago a huge German company bought Hugh’s bionics company and they’ve been consolidating and buying up all sorts of prosthetics companies. So there is something definitely happening there commercially that will increase the economies of scale and hopefully make some of these prosthetics more available to people. If Donald Trump slashes the budget for everything that would also slow things down a lot in the United States. I feel like the technology is expanding at a pace and it will continue to expand so the biggest challenge is the funding to get these things to market. Genetic engineering is happening, it’s gradually moving towards market – some of the first genetic therapies have already been approved.
And what do they look like, these genetic therapies?
They’re simple, very expensive and they target single mutations, but the fact is that most of the diseases we deal with are based on a combination of environmental factors and genetic mutations. Everybody is talking about CRISPR, which is a huge advance that will allow us to do gene-editing at a much more refined and precise level. But I guess another answer to your question on what obstacles we are facing is the continued increase of computing power, which I mentioned before but it applies to genetic engineering. I went to BGI in Shenzhen, China, and they had more genetic sequencing power than any place on the planet. Every genome is billions of nucleotides, so in order to understand how a complex trait like intelligence is determined, we have to understand how hundreds of genes interact, and in order to do that you need the computer processing power because you’re looking at 3 billion nucleotide genomes to see what is correlated with high intelligence. This extends to the exciting area of Deep Brain Stimulation and using targeted electricity to influence when and how certain neurons fire in the brains of individuals with psychiatric disorders, instead of using drugs that globally expand neurotransmitters like seratonin and are much less precise.
So pharmaceutical companies must be biting at the heels to make some profit from these areas?
Well there are a couple of drug companies in the US, one for example called Amgen doing fascinating work around drugs in the area of genetics. Amgen recently bought a company in Iceland called deCODE which is basically gathering information on the genetics of the entire Icelandic population. Iceland has a very homogenised population with similar DNA, so when you look at the people who have a disease there, it is much easier to find the mutations with these people because there is less variability throughout the gene pool. So they’re looking for people with rare mutations that have a strong effect and then they are trying to replicate that with drugs. In deCODE they found a mutation seeming to protect people from Alzheimer’s, stopping the brain from creating the plaque build up that occurs in Alzheimer’s sufferers. Now they are trying to find a drug to replicate that, and since they know this mutation exists in people they don’t need to do so much testing because they already know it doesn’t have a deleterious effect. So that’s how genetics is going to have a huge impact on the generation of new drugs.
You’ve documented the metamorphosis of renowned thinker Hugh Herr. I see his transformation as 1.0. What do you think 2.0 or 3.0 look like?
Well, Hugh himself has stated that he hopes to end disability, and he has teamed up with Robert Langer, a regenerative medicine pioneer, and Ed Boyden, one of the inventors of ontogenetics, to found what they call the centre for “extreme” bionics. In this stage, they will hook the prosthetics up directly to the nervous system, so that you could move, say, a prosthetic toe just by thinking, but also feel the sensation if you stick that toe in a warm bathtub. Perhaps that would be prosthetic 1.5. Of course, I think the ultimate goal is to be able to regrow human limbs. And there’s a guy in my book named Michael Levin who is trying to understand how to do just that.
What would 3.0 look like?
Bionics with superior performance for the once disabled. And for the rest of us, I like what Hugh Herr said: “At some point in this century we’ll have a class of human mobility machine that augment the biology of the body, augment walking and running,” Herr says. Fifty years from now when you want to go to see your friend across town, you’re not going to go in a big metal box with four wheels. You’ll just strap on some wild exoskeleton structure and you’ll run there.
The Body Builders: Inside the Science of the Engineered Human is out now through Harpers Collins
Feature image by http://paulbarbera.com/
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The Body Builders: Inside the Science of the Engineered Human
by Adam Piore
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In the 1970s, TV's Steve Austin was the stuff of kids' dreams. Rebuilt after a horrific accident, the Six Million Dollar Man had a bionic eye, could run alongside a car and leap onto tall buildings. Thanks to real-world bioengineering, the Steve Austin model has been left in the dust. Today we can regenerate tissue to grow new body parts, see using our ears, stave off degenerative diseases with enhanced muscle growth, and medically augment intuition.
It may still sound like television fantasy, but journalist Adam Piore's The Body Builders offers a behind-the-scenes peek into the astounding realm of human engineering. Steeped in heady principles, Piore uses examples of tragedy and indomitable human resilience to give life and depth to the subject. The science is complex, but his conversational style is captivating whether or not one knows how big a container you'd need to hold 2.4 million nucleotides.
Neither scientists nor Piore believe the story stops here. Our ever-advancing ability to hack bodies and minds to make "better" versions of ourselves has implications far beyond fixing broken or missing parts. Will the concepts be used for good? Who decides what that is? If we have the ability to engineer superhuman soldiers who are impervious to pain, should we?
The Body Builders raises these and many other difficult questions. The answers are unknown, but there is no denying Piore has crafted a fascinating foundation for discussion, while highlighting the dedication of our scientists and the resilience of the human spirit. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review
Discover: Journalist Adam Piore takes a fascinating look at the scientists and engineers working in the realm of human augmentation.
Interview: Adam Piore And The Jaw-Dropping Science Of Bioengineering
By Bill Buchner • May 1, 2017
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Journalist Adam Piore is interviewed by All Things Considered Host Bill Buchner in the WSHU studios on Friday.
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Journalist Adam Piore is interviewed by All Things Considered Host Bill Buchner in the WSHU studios on Friday.
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In his new book, The Body Builders: Inside the Science of the Engineered Human, author and award-winning journalist Adam Piore says the new frontier that intrigues scientists and engineers today is the human body.
He says amazing work and research is underway that melds technology with biology. These innovations can heal devastating injuries or even rewire the brain.
Piore tells us about this evolving science through the stories of the people who develop the technology and the people who are transformed by it.
Piore recently sat down with All Things Considered Host Bill Buchner. Below is a transcript of their conversation.
You are a journalist by profession, a foreign correspondent at one point. So how did you come to write this book?
I covered a lot of things, I covered Congress, I lived in Cambodia, and I went to Iraq, but one of the things that has always intrigued me in my journalism is stories of human resilience. It’s always fascinated me how people overcome adversity and are able to live with setbacks.
So a few years ago I came across the story of an incredible scientist named Hugh Herr. And his story so fascinated me that I sort of followed along that path and went sort of down the rabbit hole into these new technologies – bioengineering – which are unleashing untapped resilience in the human body. I found that the most exciting stories of human resilience in the United States are often being unleashed by these biotechnologies.
Speaking of Hugh Herr, he survived a rock climbing incident that led him to develop more advanced forms of prosthetic legs that he calls “wearable robots.” Would you tell us about that?
Hugh had a really remarkable story. He was not that great a student when he was a teenager, he was a C and D student, but he lived to rock climb and he was a nationally known athlete, one of the best up and coming rock climbers in the country. He went ice climbing with a friend in New Hampshire’s Mount Washington. They got stuck in a blizzard and they wandered into the wilderness, and they got lost and they almost died. They were saved at the last moment but not in time to save them completely. They both had frostbite and Hugh’s legs were amputated below the knees.
And the doctors told him he would never run or climb again. And every day, he would wake up dreaming that he was running through the cornfields behind his house, and then he’d wake up and his legs would be gone. But he didn’t stay in bed very long. He began tinkering with his prosthetics and he was back on the climbing wall. And he made them seven-feet long and he made blades that he could slip into crevices. And he became an even better rock climber than he had been before.
And this tinkering sort of led him to tinker when he was down on the ground because his prosthetics were so uncomfortable. He began taking engineering classes. And flash forward 20 or 30 years, he’s one of the leading bioengineers and prosthetic engineers in the world. He’s at MIT. And he has designed these bionic limbs that really kind of show what’s possible, that allow him to walk again.
Pat Fletcher is featured in the part of your book where you explore how bionics can enhance our senses. Fletcher survived an industrial accident which left her blind. Twenty-five years later, she was able to use new technology that allowed her to “see” with her ears. How likely are we to see more Pat Fletchers out there with this type of technology?
Where Hugh just wanted to climb and run, Pat loved nature and she was blinded in a grenade factory explosion and could no longer see and years later she is seeing mountains again. It’s an example of the incredible plasticity of the human mind. What she discovered online was this device that was created by this Dutch engineer, which they call a sensory substitution device and it’s based on this insight that we see with the brain and not the eyes.
If we can get the information from the outside world into our brain, it’s the world’s most sophisticated pattern recognition machine. What this device does is it takes the pixel in pictures and turns them into different tones, sort of like a wall of sound. Over time Pat’s brain learned to recognize these sounds and route them to her visual cortex. And she can actually make sense of the world. She’s regained depth perception. She can see the leaves on trees, she can see mountains. She can see the cracks on sidewalks. It’s pretty remarkable.
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