Perfecting the Human

JOEL GARREAU / Fortune 30may2005

Picture a future in which your children won't need sleep or food and will be able to stop pain at will.  That future is in the works 

Look at your second-grade daughter. Now flash forward a decade and a half from today. She is just home for the holidays. You were so proud of her when she not only put herself through Ohio State but also graduated summa cum laude. Now she has taken on her most formidable challenge yet: competing with her generation's elite in her fancy new law school. Of course you want to hear all about it. It is her first time home in months.

"What are your classmates like?" you ask innocently.

"They're all really, really smart," she says. Then she thinks of some of the students in contracts class. And she stops.

How does she explain to you what these classmates are like? She knows her dear old parents have read in newsmagazines about cutting-edge ways of enhancing human capability. But actually dealing with people who have the desire and wherewithal to get themselves augmented is decidedly strange.

Her classmates have amazing thinking abilities. They're not just faster and more creative than anybody your daughter has ever met but faster and more creative than anybody she has ever imagined. They have photographic memories and total recall. They can devour books in minutes. They're physically beautiful. Although they don't put much of a premium on exercise, their bodies are remarkably ripped. They talk casually about living a very long time, perhaps being immortal. They're always discussing their "next lives." One fellow mentions how, after he makes his pile as a lawyer, he plans to be a glassblower, after which he wants to become a nanosurgeon.

One of her new friends fell while jogging, opening a nasty gash on her knee. Your daughter freaked, ready to rush her to the hospital. But her friend just stared at the wound, focusing her mind on it. Within minutes, the bleeding simply stopped. This same friend also has been vaccinated against pain. She never feels acute pain for long.

These new friends are always connected to one another, sharing thoughts no matter how far apart, without phones or handheld devices. They call it "silent messaging." It seems almost like telepathy. And they have this odd habit of cocking their head in a certain way whenever they want to access information—as if waiting for a delivery to arrive wirelessly. Which it does.

For a week or more at a time, they don't sleep. They joke about getting rid of the beds in their cramped dorm rooms, since they use them so rarely. Her new friends are polite to your daughter when she can't keep up with their conversations, as if she were handicapped. They can't help but condescend, however, when she protests that imbedded technology is not natural for humans.

That's what they call her—"Natural." In fact, that's what they call all those who could be like them but choose not to, the way vegetarians choose to abstain from meat. They call themselves "Enhanced." What about people who have neither the education nor the money even to consider keeping up with enhancement technology? Those they dismiss as simply "the Rest." They just keep falling further and further behind.

Your daughter and her classmates all take it as a matter of course that the law they are studying is changing to match the new realities. It will be upgraded, the Enhanced believe, just as they have new physical and mental upgrades installed every time they go home. The technology is moving that fast.

In fact, the paper your daughter is working on over the holidays concerns whether a Natural can really enter into an informed-consent relationship with an Enhanced—even for something as simple as a date. How would a Natural understand what makes an Enhanced tick if she doesn't understand how he is augmented? Our law is based on the Enlightenment principle that we hold a human nature in common. Increasingly, the question is whether this still exists.

I have no crystal ball, alas. But this scenario isn't as far-fetched as you may think. It is factually grounded in technologies being developed today in labs, hospitals, and universities worldwide and is a faithful rendition of what life will be like if some of that engineering turns out to work.

For all previous millennia, we have aimed our technologies outward, toward controlling our environment. Starting with fire and clothes, we looked for ways to ward off the elements. With the development of agriculture we controlled our food supply. In cities we sought safety. Telephones and airplanes collapsed distance. Antibiotics kept death-dealing microbes at bay.

Now, however, we have started a wholesale process of aiming our technologies inward. They have started to alter our minds, our memories, our metabolisms, our personalities, our progeny, and perhaps our souls. The shift is so profound that serious people are calling it radical evolution. Says Gregory Stock, director of the Program on Medicine, Technology, and Society at the UCLA School of Medicine: "The next frontier is our own selves."

This isn't fiction. You can see the outlines of the future in headlines now. At the University of Pennsylvania, male mouse cells are being transformed into egg cells. If this science works in humans, it opens the way for two men to make a baby, each contributing 50% of his genetic material—and blurring the traditional definition of parenthood. Last year technology debuted that promises women unprecedented flexibility in timing motherhood. It is possible to freeze surgically removed pieces of the ovaries while women are young and fertile, enabling them to have full careers without fretting about the biological clock. They can then have the fragments transplanted back into their bodies. Theoretically that would enable them to bear children in their 60s, 70s, or 80s.

Also in 2004, a paralyzed man whose neurons were being monitored by computer sent the first e-mail using only his thoughts. If ongoing tests continue successfully, memory-enhancement drugs should be on the market within three years. They promise to banish baby-boomers' senior moments while improving their kids' SAT scores. Such an enhancement could prove a greater marketing blockbuster than Viagra. Keep a close eye on the clinical trials of companies such as Cortex Pharmaceuticals, Helicon Therapeutics, Memory Pharmaceuticals, Saegis Pharmaceuticals, and Sention.

These advances in what it means to be human don't count the capabilities of the clever machines with which we increasingly merge in order to project our powers over vast distances. In the last week of the first Gulf war, five Iraqi soldiers waved white flags at a U.S. Pioneer unmanned air vehicle—the first time in history somebody tried to surrender to a robot. When a U.S. Predator unmanned air vehicle successfully fired a Hellfire missile at an al Qaeda leader's SUV in Yemen in 2002, it had the distinction of becoming arguably the first robot to incinerate a human being.

You're going to see a lot more headlines like those in just the next few years. Four intertwining processes—call them the GRIN technologies, for the genetic, robotic, information, and nano methods—are advancing at exponential rates, regularly doubling and redoubling in power. By the arithmetic of their increase, the amount of change we have experienced in the past 20 years will be compressed into the next eight; the amount of change of the past 50 years will be collapsed into the next 14.

Many of the GRIN breakthroughs in human enhancement are coming from corporations that are household names, from Intel to Genentech. Sober, mainstream government institutions like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation are funding others. But you can see the emergence of these technologies most clearly where they are most urgently needed: in war. So it's not surprising that perhaps the most aggressive pursuer of human enhancement is DARPA, the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Few organizations in the world look as far into the future as DARPA. It regularly thinks 20 and 40 years out and invests its research dollars accordingly. President Eisenhower created DARPA after the shock of Sputnik in 1957; the agency's whole point is to "accelerate the future into being," according to its strategic plan. DARPA invests 90% of its $3-billion-a-year official budget outside the government, mainly funding universities and industry researchers who work at the forefront of the barely possible. By the time a technology is far enough along to attract venture capitalists, DARPA is usually long gone. Its program managers—it has about 140, mostly MDs and Ph.D.s—seek problems they call "DARPA-esque" or "DARPA-hard." Those are challenges verging on the impossible. "We try not to violate any of the laws of physics," says Steve Wax, a DARPA official. "Or at least not knowingly," adds Michael Goldblatt, his ex-boss, "or at least not more than one per program."

Despite its sometimes macho talk, DARPA has a track record. It has already changed your life. The Internet was once called Arpanet—DARPA funded its development. The agency also helped fund the creation of the computer mouse, the computer-graphics industry, very-large-scale integrated circuits, computers that recognize human speech and translate languages, the computer workstation, and head-mounted displays. DARPA was a key player in the creation of the global positioning satellite system, the cellphone, night-vision sensors, weather satellites, spy satellites, and the Saturn V rocket, which got humans to the moon. It has also helped create advanced fuel cells and telesurgery. All the military's airplanes, missiles, ships, and vehicles, including the materials, processes, and armor that went into them, and especially everything with the word "stealth" as part of its name, have "DARPA inside."

Today DARPA is in the business of creating better soldiers—not just by equipping them with better gear, but by improving the humans themselves. "Soldiers having no physical, physiological, or cognitive limitations will be key to survival and operational dominance in the future," Goldblatt once told a gathering of prospective researchers. Until mid-2003 he was head of the Defense Sciences Office (DSO), a DARPA branch that focuses on human biology. "Imagine if soldiers could communicate by thought alone," he went on. "And contemplate a world in which learning is as easy as eating, and the replacement of damaged body parts as convenient as a fast-food drive-thru. As impossible as these visions sound ... we are talking about science action, not science fiction."

DARPA first popped up on my radar in 2002 when I focused on human enhancement in a series of stories in the Washington Post. The stories told how all the powers of '30s and '40s comic-book superheroes were either in existence or under development in the lab—technologies that shut off the human trigger to sleep, "cures" for aging, and much more. Browsing the agency's website (www.darpa.mil), I could see DARPA was funding a wealth of human-enhancement projects. Yet my requests for interviews were always turned down. It wasn't until months afterward that I finally met Goldblatt, who after long negotiations agreed to give me access. I spent much of 2003 with the program managers and principal investigators who are pursuing the creation of better soldiers—guys like Joe Bielitzki.

A proud son of St. Sylvester's parish on Chicago's Near Northwest Side, Bielitzki has the broad shoulders of a triathlete—the endurance event that combines swimming, bicycling, and running. Though in his 50s, he still competes. Bielitzki is a research veterinarian who was NASA's top primate expert before DARPA recruited him. He managed the agency's Metabolically Dominant Soldier program and left DARPA this year.

Bielitzki jokes that the name made it sound as if he was trying to create Spider-Man. Not exactly, he explains. But the aim was high: to crank up every soldier's metabolism to the level of an Olympic endurance athlete. "We want every war fighter to look like Lance Armstrong," he says, with "strength and endurance that don't quit. The Energizer Bunny in fatigues kind of does it: keeps going and going."

Modifying muscle cells offers a promising solution, Bielitzki's researchers believe. One avenue of inquiry focuses on cells' mitochondria—inner parts that convert nutrients into chemical energy to power the cell. By finding ways to increase the number and efficiency of mitochondria, the military hopes to take individuals now formidably trained to perform 80 pull-ups before exhaustion and render them capable of 300. "Will such work have an effect on civilian life?" Bielitzki asks rhetorically. "Probably. My measure of success is that the International Olympic Committee bans everything we do."

Alan Rudolph, another ex-program manager, tried to boost combat performance by fusing humans and machines. Owner of patents in biological self-assembly, biomaterials, tissue engineering, and neuroscience, Rudolph has a Ph.D. in cell biology and an MBA and likes to describe himself as a "combat zoologist." When he ran DARPA's Human Machine Interface program, he jockeyed hundreds of principal investigators focused, he explains, on increasing "the number of interconnects between living systems and the nonliving world."

The DARPA-hard challenge is to wire brains directly to machines, bypassing control panels and displays. At the University of California at Berkeley, the U.S. Army already has a functioning prototype exoskeleton suit that enables a soldier to carry 180 pounds as if it were only 4.4 pounds. It works by sensing and amplifying its wearer's muscle movements. "But suppose," Rudolph says, "the exoskeleton is responding not to your muscle movements but directly to your brain. We've got our team of 70 crazed academics charging this dream."

DSO's researchers are also experimenting with using machines to provide new kinds of sensory experience. In principle, Rudolph explains, you should be able to pipe information from any sensor, anywhere, into your brain. "Can I alter what you see so you see what my camera sees?" he asks. For example, "I want to see over the hill and I send a micro air vehicle or a robot over. Now I'm experiencing the visual image of the robot. I see what it sees." There's no reason that such inputs have to be confined to the visible spectrum. If you want to see in infrared or ultraviolet or whatever else a machine can sense, patch those sensors right into your visual cortex.

Allowing the human brain to receive signals directly opens the door to telepathy. At Vanderbilt University, renowned neuroscientist Jon Kaas is using DARPA funds literally to wire together the brains of marmosets, small New World monkeys, in an effort to get them to communicate brain to brain. "Marmosets have distinctive calls associated with fear and threat, food, and familial identification," Rudolph explains. His plan is to have two marmosets wired together but out of earshot of each other; when one monkey makes a call, the researchers will monitor the other to see if its brain responds as though it has heard.

What you don't get at DARPA is much introspection. The program managers may see the technological steps that it would take to achieve, say, telepathy. But they don't talk much about what a world full of telepaths might be like. When I pointed out that technology has a history of biting back—delivering unintended consequences—and asked whether this worries the agency, Goldblatt said, "Yes, of course. It's our job. We even have a bioethicist on staff. But you can't let the fear of the future inhibit exploring the future."

— End —

Michael J. Goldblatt is President and CEO of Functional Genetics, Inc. a Rockville, Maryland biotechnology company whose function-based approach validates discovered genes as therapeutic or diagnostic targets during the process of discovery itself. Prior to joining Functional Genetics Michael was Director of Defense Sciences at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and responsible for programs creating fundamental advancements in Biology, Material Science and Advanced Mathematics and Computational Sciences. Michael's DARPA responsibilities included creating the foundational efforts to make biology a future historical strength for the Department of Defense. This included programmatic thrusts in defending against biological threats, leveraging biology to enhance defense systems and enhancing human performance. Prior to his work with the Department of Defense, Michael was the Science and Technology officer for McDonald's Corporation with broad responsibilities including nutrition, product development, food safety and corporate venture capital. Prior to McDonald's, Michael was with General Foods Corporation leading research efforts in the use of nutrients for pharmaceutical effects and a variety of regulatory and legal issues. He joined the eVionyx Board of Directors in February 2004. Education: Undergraduate work at Reed College; Ph.D., J.D., University of California, Davis.

Steve Wax, Deputy Director, Defense Sciences Office, DARPA. In a presentation he made in 2002, he used a quote of  Phillip Ball in Nature January 18, 2001, “Nature’s pool of ideas is only valuable if it can be translated into terms that the technologist can work with, particularly in terms of materials and processing methods.”

It is clear that there is no love of life as we know it in these people. But take one further look to see where this all started.