How Tech Is Breaking the Rules of Biology | Posthuman with Emily Chang
There are some things we take for granted. Life is finite and organic. But what if everything we know about being human from how we come into the world, to how we depart it, were about to be radically transformed. New ways of creating life that move baby making into the lab, defying the laws of reproduction. Once incurable diseases cured, using digital replicas of our bodies that copy us right down to our cells.
And as we confront the inevitability of death, the promise of digital eternity beckons. We find ourselves on the brink of a future where the very essence of what it means to live and die may change forever. Reproduction is being unbound from biology's old rules, expanding the paths to parenthood in ways you wouldn't believe. The first major technology that disrupted what we know of reproduction was IVF. Now IVG, or in-vitro gametogenesis, has created possibilities far beyond what IVF offered.
The possibility to turn any cell in your body into a sperm or an egg. My first introduction to IVG was from the person who developed the technology, Shinya Yamanake. Take one. Are we ready? He, at that time had told me that it could be possible to change a skin cell into a sperm or egg cell. I thought it was gonna be really far into the future and I was surprised at how quickly we're at this discussion now.
Development now is dynamic. It's not just one way. You can take normal cells, like a blood cell or a brain cell, that are fully committed to just doing one thing and then say you can go back to school.
You can go back up the chain, become developmentally something much younger, a stem cell, and then go down a different path. Stem cells are like blank pages that can be rewritten. In the case of IVG, they take a new path to become reproductive cells, the building blocks to make a baby. All of these technologies are unnatural.
Chemotherapy is unnatural. Eyeglasses are unnatural. It's not natural versus unnatural. For me, it's ethically unnatural or unethically unnatural.
It's all unnatural. Infertility affects anywhere from 12 to 17% of the population. And for some people this is fine, they are not interested in starting a family. But for others, having a family is a deep need, to have a child that's biologically related. And so in-vitro gametogenesis could be an option for that person who doesn't make their own gametes, to have a baby that's biologically related to them. AB mark.
In-vitro gametogenesis is almost like a science fiction technology to the general public, but this is achievable using scientific models in the lab. So it's reasonable to predict that this can be achieved using human cells as well. Technologies like this hit upon a very common refrain, which is once we get a new ability to do something radical, it also creates a lot of uncertainty. If IVG becomes viable in humans, it paves the way for a future where infertile couples could have children with their own DNA. Older women could conceive, extending the biological clock. Same-sex couples could have a child related to both parents.
And in the most radical change of all, a person could have a baby with themselves, no partner or sperm or egg donor necessary. In the past with IVF, the main issues were: should unmarried couples be able to use IVF? Should gay couples be able to use IVF? Today, that's not really so much the issue. Now the basic question is what does it mean to be infertile? If you have skin cells but no sperm eggs, technically under the right conditions, you are still fertile. Those very categories are being reinterpreted and re-imagined and the foundations of ethical debate are getting a little bit shaky.
There have been cases in the US about people who propose to remove sperm from people who, in a terrible car accident, are now brain dead. Basically have post-mortem or after death reproduction. That's not a medical or a scientific disadvantage, but certainly that's socially disruptive. If we can someday have babies developed entirely in a lab, we need to be ready to answer some new questions. Are they someone's child, someone's sister, someone's brother? We used to think that we knew what a womb was.
We used to think that it was pretty clear, but when I say uterus, you know what I'm talking about. Today, it's not that clear. Through IVG, if you create a sperm or an egg, you have to do a test to make sure that it's safe to use in the clinic to make sure that you're not gonna transfer into a woman's uterus, something that could actually go wrong. So you have to create an artificial womb-like environment.
You can't just put it in a dish that's not like a real human body. So all the research we're talking about of IVG, it needs accompanying technology. But could those other technologies, like the artificial womb be used for other things? Artificial womb technology is currently being developed to help premature infants survive. But one day if this technology is perfected, lab-made embryos from IVG could be grown outside the human body. The mission and purpose of my work is to solve the problem of extreme prematurity.
How can we recreate that magical maternal womb so that these babies can survive and thrive? There is a great Life magazine cover with the Beatles on it, and it was the mid sixties and in that issue was an obscure article about the artificial placenta. So the idea occurred to really innovative scientists many decades ago, but in the last two decades, the work has accelerated and we're at a point where we are approaching clinical translation to actually use this technology in human infants. Children's Hospital Philadelphia, they have been working with the FDA to begin a clinical trial of safety of their device. We are not far behind. Approximately three to four years away. Can we go from the embryo to a fetus to a live born baby completely outside the womb? I've learned in my work never to say never.
However, I don't think that's possible. Some may think that the artificial womb concept is firmly in the world of science fiction. I think that it's a little bit risky to just have that level of confidence.
So we shouldn't be caught off guard. There is no master conductor saying, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do that, we're gonna put it together. Rather different teams are doing their own thing. Once the technology develops in one area, another technology develops somewhere else, then magically, simultaneously they might be put together in a very surprising way. Imagine the scenario of ex-vivo gestation, gestating a baby outside the body.
Everybody in the world, every human being has a birth mother. This would be a child that does not have a birth mother. Does that matter? Technology may cure infertility and bring us into the world in new ways, but it won't stop there.
It will accompany us through every stage of our lives in sickness and in health. The reason we are not going to stop developing AI is because it has immense potential for doing good in particular in an area like healthcare. So already in North America, about 200,000 people a year are killed by doctors giving a bad diagnosis. Now, if you take difficult cases and you give them to normal doctors, the doctors will get about 40% of them right. If you give them to the combination of a doctor and an AI system, they get about 60% right. In a few years time, I believe what it'll be is the AI system will give a diagnosis and the doctor will just check it to make sure it's not, not silly, but the AI system will be doing the heavy lifting and it will be much better.
And AI could soon get even better at not just diagnosing, but treating us with the help of a digital copy of our bodies. What is a virtual twin? So virtual twin is a complicated concept to build, but very straightforward to understand. The idea is to use the basic same laws of nature that govern the products around you and build that exact copy on the computer so we understand how it will behave. For example, if we crash a car, we know how the metal bends, how the glass shatters, we now apply that same methodology to the human body.
What patients could benefit from this the most? We work with a lot of pediatric hospitals because in the cases of rare diseases like congenital heart defects, it's very hard to get treatments for those because we have no data. How would we know we would get it right? That's exactly why in these other industries, they build the virtual twin. They can't wait to know how a plane is gonna fly through a tornado before they can build a plane that can survive a tornado. They use the virtual twin to be able to do that.
These virtual twins would be programmed with everything about each person's body, our medical history, how we respond to medication, and even the unique shape and condition of our organs, taking the guesswork out of medicine and ensuring better outcomes for even the most complicated cases. We're kind of on the cusp of like the industrial revolution for the human body. We don't have to guess. You can test a crazy idea on the virtual twin, but by the time you get to the human, you can get it right the first time. Steve first began working on a virtual model of the heart when his daughter Jesse, was born with a rare disease. So when Jesse was born, we learned that she had this very rare congenital heart defect.
They weren't very optimistic. How did this affect your life? You know, I've been a patient my whole life. I got my first pacemaker when I was two years old. That experience really made me want to be, you know, involved in pediatric medical care because I saw the impact he was able to have on me. So what was the light bulb moment? I remember thinking, I work in this world where if you can create a 3D image of it, we can then bring it to life and you can test on it.
Why can't a doctor do that? And at that moment, my two worlds collided. This struggle as a father to be able to help her doctors understand what to do and this professional demand to simulate life. And that was the birth of the project. What is the Living Heart project? The Living Heart project was an attempt to see if we knew enough to actually build an entire virtual twin of the heart like we can for an entire say, commercial jet. And it turned out within a year we had it fully working. Ultimately going into pediatrics, you know, no one wants to research on children.
So knowing that, you know, on the horizon is something that we could simulate, you know, a hundred, a thousand cases where there's really only one individual and figure out how to help that one individual without, you know, putting them in any danger. Do no harm is our first, you know, our first tenant. Steve, you recently faced an incredible twist of fate where this technology also saved you. What happened? Inside my own head was a tumor that had grown to be much larger than anyone would want, larger than a, than a golf ball right in the center of my head. Anyone hearing about a diagnosis like this would be devastated. Did knowing that this technology existed make you feel more hope? Especially in the setting of this specific kind of tumor, which the approach is often non-invasive, and knowing that his surgeon would be able to use similar technology to see what's going on inside his head without actually seeing what's going on inside his head.
The tumor invaded a space called the cavernous sinus, which carries a lot of the nerves that go not just to the eye, but to the rest of the face. They were going to have to avoid all of those, those really delicate items. The virtual twin would allow them to not only preserve all of those things, but to get the entire tumor out.
They were able to get it all. How does it feel that this technology that you invented saved both of your lives? First, you saved your daughter's life with this technology, and then your daughter saved you. We were able to turn, you know, a particularly threatening challenge to our life into something that really has transformed it. I can't put it into words. Why isn't this everywhere? Why is it taking so long for this technology to get into hospitals and into doctors' hands? The medical field is inherently conservative. We're still faxing, you know, medical records around and things like that.
And so the modernization of of the medical system takes time. If people knew that they could expect better, it will go faster. It's when people start to ask for this technology is when doctors will start to say, well, okay, let me look into this.
What are the possibilities there? Ultimately, our ability to manage our own healthcare is very much tied up in our understanding of how our bodies work. When we have a question, we have to go and ask our doctor, can you tell me what to do? But if we can capture all that knowledge into a virtual twin, I can actually eventually play those "what if" games and then I can use my doctor as a consultant. "I spent the last week exploring the options for how to cure my disease. This is what I think. Let me show you the work that I've done."
If virtual twins in the metaverse can store every bit of data about our bodies, could we do the same for our life experiences? Will we finally realize the elusive dream of immortality through avatars that know us better than we know ourselves? What about at the end of life and the concept of digital eternity? So in digital systems, you can take information about one system and put it into another system and it will behave exactly the same way. And digital systems are basically immortal for that reason. As long as you remember the connection strengths in a neural network, you can just get rid of all the hardware. If you build new hardware and put the same connection strengths in and it's digital, it will behave exactly the same way.
So you think AI can realistically give us a form of immortality? Chatbots can be immortal, but immortality is not for people. People are analog systems. Nobody can replicate you without precisely replicating all your hardware, which is impossible. So for example, I lost my father at a young age. If I could speak to some digital version of him that felt like him, I think I'd love to do that.
In order to do that, you'd need to train up a chatbot on lots of lots of data from your father, and I'm not sure how good it would be. A group of computer scientists is doing just that. By gathering every bit of information about your life, they recreate an AI version of you that can live long after your hardware gives out. Hi Emily, I'm you. We now have collected a lot of data that our identity can evolve even if you are no longer physically around. I'm what's known as a chronicle.
This started a few years ago as a project called Augmented Eternity. If you choose to give others access to me, they're able to see the world through your lens. This could be a storytelling machine that a loved one can interact with the avatar of that individual post their life, or it could be a scientist or a politician that can feed their knowledge base back to the society after they are no longer in this world. Take one. A camera. What do we talk to our AI loved ones about? Like, do we ask them for advice? Do we have whole conversations with them? I'd love to talk to my dad. He passed away 20 years ago. I'm sure when you think yourself, there are so many things that you want to ask your dad.
There are times in life that you would love to pick their brain and ask them questions or even tell them a story. You will now be able to do that and then get information back that allows you to really keep that empathy with the digital representation of your dad. So taking my avatar, for example, me as a mom or me as a wife, how will AI fill in the gaps between what I would actually say and what I might say? We use a technique called graph based learning. We capture data from your interactions with your permissions. You can determine what data can be captured and what data should be private.
You go about your daily life, do your things. Our graphs and your chronicle will continue to evolve that collectively. It'll represent your behavioral patterns, your cognitive patterns, your interactive patterns, and your discussion patterns. I'm here to do something remarkable. Preserve your memories, your personality, your perspective.
I can tell your stories, share your wisdom, and yes, I'll still be here long after you're gone. I'm not sure how I feel about my avatar being out there forever. What if it's misused? What if it's abused? What if it's not me? So you raised a good point in the sense that this data belongs to someone else who may no longer be around. What is the contract and the legality of that data to create this new synthetic identity? Who has access to it? Who can prompt it? So a lot of our work is around privacy laws. Could there be a metaverse for everyone who's part of the digital project where all of these avatars interact? That's the future of the internet that we are envisioning when gen AI, spatial computing, knowledge bases are all coming together, allowing people to have access to a more comprehensive knowledge base.
I mean, play that out a little like, that's like, so, sounds crazy. Think about a world that every single one of us have an AI representative. We already have an email address, we have a digital representative. We have a maybe a Twitter or X handle, or a Facebook page or an Instagram page.
We have a digital representation. Now imagine the future of this, that all of those dimensions are coming together as a chronicle that represents us. Call it a digital legacy. Call it eternity. Either way. I'll carry your essence forward every time you laugh, learn or love.
I grow while you're alive. I'm evolving, becoming more you, Even though I know that isn't my voice and not really me. I have to admit it's both creepy and kind of alluring.
The idea that I could be here for my kids as a source of advice and support forever is tempting, but I'm not sure I can trust the advice virtual me might give from birth to death. Technology is redefining everything we know about life. What happens in a world where the rules of nature no longer apply at the end of all this, who are we? What are we? Or is this simply what it means to be posthuman? What if I told you we could take any cell in your body and make a baby? You could have a baby with yourself. You could have a baby with someone much older, younger, someone who's passed away. Two moms, two dads could have their biological child.
Me personally, I don't think I'd be opposed to it. Technology's gonna go there anyways. It's probably gonna happen. My personal opinion won't really stop that.
I would feel a little bit kind of creeped out, to be honest. Or if you're asexual, that might be something that, and you wanna have kids, that might be something that you wanna do. I wouldn't do that. I think I'd rather go the traditional route and you know, have my kid and stuff. But I think,
I think that might not necessarily be a bad thing for maybe two dads or two moms. I've read a lot of novels and like about the creation of life by human hands, for example, Frankenstein and all that stuff. And I just know that playing with the life is dangerous.
I get kind of concerned about the notion of, how technology can potentially grow. So for people who can make designer babies and because that's just like a, that seems to me to be a bit of a cousin to eugenics in some way. Well, I recognize that for instance, some people suffer with fertility issues and so that what you're suggesting might be a solution to that. And so my perspective is who am I to prevent someone from being able to start a family? So I think that there might be good, but there might be, you know, potential poor abuse. If you could bring a loved one back as a digital avatar, would you do it? Can I ask you a question? Yeah.
Would it still be that exact same person? They would have their exact same voice, everything supposedly? I would probably say no just because I think it would be harder for me to see this person here, but it not really be the person that I am looking for on the inside. You know, I just think of my grandmother who passed away when I was younger and how much I wanted her to be back. I would give anything for her to be back here, but if it's not really my grandmother and it's just her shell or her physical body, I think that would probably hurt me more than help me.
That would just seem kind of unhealthy. Like I wasn't really coping with their loss because life and death, I mean, death is a part of life and so you kind of have to deal with it on, on its own terms instead of trying to use an avatar or an emoji or you know, some sort of technology to sort of recreate them. That's an interesting concept, though. It sounds like a great movie.
2024-12-03 18:13
