Biodigital Convergence: The Pandemic Started The Genetic Transformation Of Humanity

What if the organs found in humans and animals – kidneys, spleen, liver, heart, brain, et cetera – do not represent all possible configurations of cells, but only the narrowly defined ones selected by evolution? What if there is a giant unexamined blank spot where you can have things like thinking muscle tissue chock-full of neurons, or an all-in-one liver and kidney (lidney?) right under your skin that makes you sweat filtered toxins out? What if we could manufacture entirely new organs from scratch that never existed in nature before and have completely novel functions? What if a guy could have little brains implanted in every joint in his body and give his arms and legs a mind of their own, like an octopus?

This is something that has been explored in science fiction numerous times, in the past. In Warhammer 40,000, the highly augmented and superhuman Space Marines are implanted with numerous scratch-built organs, and if you’ve ever read Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl or the late Greg Bear’s Blood Music, then you know exactly how bizarre this sort of thing can get. There’s just one problem, here, and it’s that this stuff is getting alarmingly close to not being science fiction anymore, and there are basically no ethical frameworks in place to make sure it isn’t horribly abused.

This is just one example of what you can do with synthetic biology. Another thing you can do is design completely new enzymes from scratch, insert the genes coding for them into bacteria, and use them as reagents to produce entirely new compounds.

Still not convinced? If you go on the Government of Canada’s website, right now, this is one of the articles they have up. I recommend archiving it.

Policy Horizons Canada – Exploring Biodigital Convergence

I wake up to the sunlight and salty coastal air of the Adriatic sea. I don’t live anywhere near the Mediterranean, but my AI, which is also my health advisor, has prescribed a specific air quality, scent, and solar intensity to manage my energy levels in the morning, and has programmed my bedroom to mimic this climate. 

The fresh bed sheets grown in my building from regenerating fungi are better than I imagined; I feel rested and ready for the day. I need to check a few things before I get up. I send a brain message to open the app that controls my insulin levels and make sure my pancreas is optimally supported. I can’t imagine having to inject myself with needles like my mother did when she was a child. Now it’s a microbe transplant that auto adjusts and reports on my levels.

Everything looks all right, so I check my brain’s digital interface to read the dream data that was recorded and processed in real time last night. My therapy app analyzes the emotional responses I expressed while I slept. It suggests I take time to be in nature this week to reflect on my recurring trapped-in-a-box dream and enhance helpful subconscious neural activity. My AI recommends a “forest day”. I think “okay”, and my AI and neural implant do the rest.

I touched on this in the last Spartacast, but I don’t think I really got the point across. Biotech and information technology are completely intertwined, and they have been for decades, now. Anyone remember Folding@home, where people used their PlayStations to contribute processor power to a distributed supercomputer network?

That was back in 2007, and the actual software client itself has existed since 2000. They do everything on a computer, now. The whole idea behind mRNA vaccines is basically to digitize vaccines by reducing them to synthetic gene sequences and using human cells as bioreactors to make the actual protein, skipping over a bunch of manufacturing steps.

Okay, so you have CRISPR. You have DREADDs. You have nanotransducers. You have the ability to create engineered amyloids, like Ehud Gazit’s amyloid semiconductors. You have even more than that, too. A friend of mine on Twitter, C.M. (who currently goes by @CRISPR_Cas69), alerted me to a paper on implementing an entire von Neumann architecture in nothing but lipid nanoparticles:

Science Advances – Nanoparticle-based computing architecture for nanoparticle neural networks

The lack of a scalable nanoparticle-based computing architecture severely limits the potential and use of nanoparticles for manipulating and processing information with molecular computing schemes. Inspired by the von Neumann architecture (VNA), in which multiple programs can be operated without restructuring the computer, we realized the nanoparticle-based VNA (NVNA) on a lipid chip for multiple executions of arbitrary molecular logic operations in the single chip without refabrication. In this system, nanoparticles on a lipid chip function as the hardware that features memory, processors, and output units, and DNA strands are used as the software to provide molecular instructions for the facile programming of logic circuits. NVNA enables a group of nanoparticles to form a feed-forward neural network, a perceptron, which implements functionally complete Boolean logic operations, and provides a programmable, resettable, scalable computing architecture and circuit board to form nanoparticle neural networks and make logical decisions.

What happens if we integrate all of these disparate ideas together into a single platform? What could we create? Could we inject someone with a substance that generates wirelessly manipulated smart tissues in someone’s body? Think about it. Let’s say we use mRNA to produce Yamanaka factors in someone’s cells to turn them into stem cells in vivo, and then, let’s say we spliced new genes into those cells to generate an entirely new, synthetic cell line with entirely novel functionality. Then, let’s say these collections of cells were coaxed into performing specific tasks by manipulating their membrane potential with nanotransducers, or by using chemogenetics. What if these cells migrated throughout the body, divided, and formed colonies, like a symbiotic organism, all while evading the immune system by giving off signals identical to human cells? What if these cells could be made to secrete neurotransmitters or hormones into the extracellular space to manipulate the functions of the subject’s normal cells? What if they could be used to construct tissue scaffolds around the subject’s existing organs and manipulate or monitor their function, through extracellular matrix remodeling?

These are just a couple hypothetical examples. There are many more possible implementations, here, including using tissue engineering to make entirely new, 3D-printed “cybernetic” organs. Soldiers in the future might not wear gas masks at all. Why bother, when they’ve all been implanted with an organ that instantly secretes atropine the moment they get a whiff of VX, or when their acetylcholine receptors have been completely altered to resist binding by organophosphates? What if intelligence officers all had 200 IQ and perfect recall because their neural lace links their brains together into a hive mind with a bunch of printed brains in vats?

These sorts of questions, and many more, are being asked in top military think tanks in the US, Russia, and China. Nobody wants to lose strategic surprise by being the one country that didn’t make supermen in time for World War III. DARPA know that China’s track record for ethics is extremely poor, and that it’s likely that they’re engaging in human experimentation behind the scenes. That tempts our own leaders to do the same (and, indeed, they are).

That’s not all you can do with synthetic biology. Assassinations without the possibility for attribution, debilitating specific people by inducing chronic health issues, destroying enemy agriculture with novel plant pathogens, engineering scratch-made viruses and bacteria to produce hyper-lethal bioweapons, engineering obedience and docility into people by altering the balance of androgens and neurotransmitters in their bodies to blunt aggression and drive for reward, the list goes on and on.