Cyborgs and enhanced humans - should we worry?

Humani Victus Instrumenta: Ars Coquinaria (1569)

Five or so years ago Nigel Ackland was involved in a terrible accident while working as a smelter. His  forearm was crushed, and eventually had to be amputated. He's had a series of prosthetic limbs, but the most recent version - the bebionic3 myoelectric hand - is by far the most advanced. The mechanical hand is so sensitive that he can now use it perform everyday tasks such as washing his hands, typing, peeling vegetables, and driving.

The video of Ackland using his hand shows how impressively well this technology works - and presumably more advanced hands are currently under development:



It's not just human limbs that can be replaced. For the vision impaired there are artificial retinas and plastic polymer replacement lenses under development. And hundreds of thousands of electronic cochlear ear implants have allowed the deaf or severely hearing impaired to hear.  Hip and knee joint replacements are almost routine.

Most of us, I think, agree that the restoration of physical or sensory abilities is a good thing. I know if I lost mobility or started to go blind I would seriously consider human-made body part replacements if they were available. That doesn't seem that different to me than wearing glasses.

But for me the ethics get murkier when you start considering modifications that change the way the brain works. While I think it would be great if there were an implant that prevented memory loss for Alzheimers sufferers, I'm conflicted by the thought that similar devices could be used to control someone's behavior.

And once the technology is readily available and affordable, a merely average human being will be able swap their working legs or heart or eyes with artificial replacements that could make them stronger or faster or able to hear or see better than their natural bodies could. But would that be ethical? Should we worry about the creation of cyborgs?

In science fictional futures featuring cyborgs, mechanical modification often come with a price: from Frederic Pohl's man engineered for Mars to Star Trek's Borg, something essentially human may to be lost when one's body parts or sensory inputs are enhanced. And Asimov played with the same idea in his story The Bicentennial Man, in which a robot gradually has his mechanical parts with more human-like ones, and eventually is legally declared a man.

Personally I don't believe that implanted electronics or mechanical parts are likely change our essential humanity.  But I think there are ethical concerns beyond the philosophical sorts of speculation about personhood. A recent New York Times story about bioengineering ethics points out that who has access to technology could become a serious issue:

Ethical challenges for the coming Age of Enhancement include, besides basic safety questions, the issue of who would get the enhancements, how much they would cost, and who would gain an advantage over others by using them. In a society that is already seeing a widening gap between the very rich and the rest of us, the question of a democracy of equals could face a critical test if the well-off also could afford a physical, genetic or bionic advantage. 

Already there are disparities between access to the latest and greatest medical technologies. It's not a stretch to think that such disparities would extent to voluntary modifications too. If ones place in society is dependent on one's health and physical prowess, technological innovation could increase the gap between the haves and have-nots.

And beyond that, there may be pressure on athletes, soldiers and even physical laborers to undergo modifications even if there is a potential risk to their health or well-being. Should biomechanical enhancements be banned the same way steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs are today?

I don't think there are any easy answers to these questions. But I do think that we should try to grapple with these issues as a society while the technologies are still in their infancy.

Perhaps the solution will be implants for everyone, and we wouldn't even recognize our descendents  a century or two from now.

Related non-fiction from Amazon.com (affiliate links):

Repo Men

For a price, any organ in your body can be replaced.
But it can also be repossessed.

That's the premise of Repo Men, a new movie staring Jude Law and Forest Whitaker.  Unlike the transplanted human organs in Repo! The Genetic Opera*,  the organs in Repo Men are state-of-the-art artificial replacements - and they are very very expensive.

You can take a peek at The Union's organ replacement catalog, where an artificial eye runs $345,000 and a shiny new Jarvik heart will set you back $975,000. They offer financing at a near usurious APR of 25%-30% - and get behind on your payments and you can expect a visit from the repo men.

*Financing Terms and Conditions: Action will be taken after the sixth day of the fourth month of non-payment. Repo Men will retrieve the property at your own expense."

Ouch!

When repo man Remy (Law) is injured on the job and fitted with a brand new heart - apparently not covered by his worker's comp -  he ends up on the run from his former repo partner Jake (Whitaker).  The story is based on the novel Repossession Mambo by Eric Garcia, which was just listed as a finalist for the 2010 Phillip K. Dick Award.

It's not clear if the movie will have much science mixed in with the action. There is the nod to the real-life artificial Jarvik heart, but that may be simply product placement.

While the premise of a law enforcer ending up on the run from his colleagues is a pretty common plot - science fiction movies Logan's Run and Minority Report immediately spring to mind - and even repossession of transplanted organs isn't a novel idea either - see Repo! The Genetic Opera - I have high hopes that Repo Men will put it's own twist on it. There is the slightly humorous take on consumer culture which has the replacement organs for sale on the Home Shopping Channel, for one. And then there is Jude Law, who is, well, Jude Law (and Whitaker isn't bad either). 

Watch the official trailer.


There is a bloodier restricted trailer on the official site. It didn't seem that bad to me, perhaps because I've been watching too many bloody hospital and forensics dramas. 

Repo Men opens April 2 in the United States.

Repossession Mambo is available for purchase from Amazon.com (affiliate link)

* The other difference between the movies is that Paris Hilton doesn't sing in this one.

(Poster is one of several posted on Bloody Disgusting.)

Greg Egan Idea Man

At Tor.com Jon Evans speculates on why Australian science fiction writer and computer programmer Greg Egan isn't a superstar. He says:

If you haven’t read any Egan, you so should. He takes the wildest frontiers of today’s science and turns them into truly brainbending speculative fiction that continually challenges the reader’s ideas of both reality and humanity. He’s also a terrific sentence-by-sentence writer.

Egan writes hard science fiction that is frequently based on mathematics, physics and computer science. For example, his short story "Wang's Carpets" involves the discovery of truly alien aliens that are living embodiments of Wang tiles.

Evans speculates that one reason Egan's writing doesn't enjoy more popularity is because his stories are actually too focused on complicated scientific ideas. It's hard to know how much of a role that has played in his writing career, but I do know it affected my interest in his novels. I've read a few of his short stories, including "Wang's Carpets" and "Border Guards", and enjoyed them, but I don't have a particular interest in quantum physics or mathematics, and his novels just didn't sound that appealing to me - at least not appealing enough to seek them out.

Now maybe I've been wrong - I really enjoyed Robert Charles Wilson's Spin, which seems to have some superficial similarities to Egan's Quarentine - and I'll probably give Egan's work a chance next time I run across it. But that points to another problem Evans points out: Egan's novels can be hard to find in bookstores and libraries. For example, the nearest library copy of his latest novel, Incandescance, is 60 miles away in the next county over. It's obviously not something I'd find by browsing the shelves.

It's nice, then, that a number of Egan's short works are available online. I've been downloading some of them for future reading, and discovered is that some of his stories are based on bioscience too. I haven't read them all so I don't really have anything to say about the actual science in them. All I can suggest is that you read them for yourselves. Here are a few links for your weekend reading pleasure:

• "The Moral Virologist" (1990)
  
• "The Vat: A Romantic Comedy" (1990)
• "The Demon's Passage" (1991)
• "The Extra" (1990)
  
• TAP (1995)
  

And it's not biological at all, but definitely read "Border Guards". It both has weird science and a very touching ending.

Tags:Greg Egan, biology

Biology in Science Fiction Roundup: November 1 Edition

Here are a few biology in science fiction-related links from the past couple of weeks.

Written Word

Jennifer Rohn of Mind the Gap has another post about the best way to write about science in your fiction. Her lab-lit novel Experimental Heart was released today.

Jo Walton writes at Tor.com about "Telepathy and Tribulation: John Wyndham's The Chrysalids"

Wyndham really was a terrific storyteller. He manages to evoke his oppressive world of “Watch Thou For The Mutant” and burning the blasphemous crops is evoked in impressively few words. I have no idea what I’d think if I was reading this for the first time now. As a child I identified totally with David and his telepathic mutation. I felt that Sophie, Rosalind and Petra were solidly characterised, whereas now I see them as barely more than plot tokens. Wyndham’s attitude to women is exceedingly peculiar. It goes way beyond the times he lived in. But the book does pass the Bechdel test, which is pretty good for a first person male novel—the narrator overhears two women have a conversation about a mutant (female) baby.

Television

The complete series of the dinosaur-time portal show Primeval will be released on DVD on November 4.

The Science Not Fiction blog continues its series on the Eleventh Hour by looking at the the latest episode that features children with Heller's Syndrome.

Movies

Cash @ Science and Super Models explains "Everything I Need to Know About Science I Learned From Watching "The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra"

Amazon.com has a portal for Repo! The Genetic Opera (affiliate link), with video clips and an interview with director Darren Lynn Bousman. Apparently there is more to it than gore, singing and Paris Hilton.

Amazon: The movie depicts a bleak dystopian future – do you think that something like this reality is possible in our lifetime?
Bousman: Yes, I do. A big portion of this movie is about perfecting our bodies, and what measures we would go to to reach perfection. Isn't that what is happening now. We all our guilty. Rather that mean tanning, or going to the gym. We all want to look good. We all want to feel good. But how far would you go? Would you get breast implants? Botox? How about a new heart? A better looking FACE? And in the end, what would you be willing to pay?

SciFi Scanner has a slide show that looks at "how The Fly has morphed over the years"

Bloody-Disgusting has posters for the film Infected.

Cool Bioscience

Japanese scientist Makoto Nakamura is developing a printer that sprays cells rather than ink droplets. His ultimate goal is to be able to print 3-dimensional organs like the heart. (via Discoblog)

SES: Science, Education & Society explains the difference between "genetic" and "heritable".

The European Space Agency's Huygens probe has found new evidence that life could have arisen on Saturn's moon Titan.

Scientists are recreating the circuits that regulate amoeba behavior in an attempt to understand primitive "intelligence":

Di Ventra's team thinks there is an intrinsic memory storage device within the amoeba. As with the human brain, that device can strengthen and store memories for some time. But if the memory isn't used, it gradually fades away. Now they have identified a potential storage device. Now they have identified a potential storage device. The amoeba's interior contains a watery sol – a solid suspended in liquid – within a thick viscous gel. The sol flows through the gel like water through a sponge, creating a network of low-viscosity channels. Those channels are strengthened as long as the amoeba continues to respond to a static environment, but if that environment changes the channels gradually break down and a new network appears as the amoeba adapts. For a short while, though, the amoeba retains a “memory” of those earlier conditions. Di Ventra's team took advantage of the development this year of memristors – electrical resistors that retain a memory of earlier voltages or currents applied and vary their resistance accordingly – to design a simple circuit that models the amoeba's gel-sol system.

The ASU School of Life Sciences Podcast Series has some episodes of scifi interest:

• Collective Intelligence, Science Fiction or Science Fact?
• Giant Insects: Not Just in B Movies
• Clinicians and Cyborgs
• Iridescence: Nature and emergent technology
• Biosensors and Biocomputers

John Horgan debated Ray Kurzweil at the Singularity Summit in San Jose:

I reiterated my old argument that the lack of progress in treating cancer and mental illness reflects the primitive state of biology, genetics, neuroscience and hence the improbability of Kurzweil’s claims. Ray reiterated his old argument that neuroscience and other fields will soon reap the benefits of exponential progress in information technologies. I added that the Singularity is hurting the credibility of science at a time when science is already under attack. Ray shrugged off this complaint, because of course his vision rests on reasonable projections of current scitech trends, not on faith.

Tags:science fiction, biology

Biology in Science Fiction Roundup: October 25 Edition

A few collected links from the past couple of weeks:

On Biology as "Hard" Science

Fantasy & Science Fiction interviewed women science fiction writers, and Nancy Kress commented:

From a personal standpoint, the only time I have felt gender discrimination in SF has been in sometimes not being taken seriously as a "hard SF writer," partly because I write about biology rather than astronomy or physics, but also perhaps because I'm female. However, I think even that prejudice has lessened over the years.

Henry Gee writes about the "hardness" of biology:

I can’t help thinking that there is an implied value judgement here, stemming from the invasion of traditional biology by physicists that resulted in the birth of molecular biology in the 1950s. The result was a kind of replacement theology in which molecular biology was seen as an exact science (in other words, ‘hard’) whereas traditional biological pastimes were seen as so much vague stamp collecting (that is, ‘soft’).

Such prejudice carries on to the present day. It is the ‘hard’ biology, big on expensive laboratories and machines that go ping, that gets the funding and the grants, whereas ‘soft’ biology is usually seen as dispensible, and because it is much cheaper, it is thought that it can probably survive on nothing at all, and even then, it wouldn’t matter if it disappeared entirely — except, of course, when some big anniversary comes around, and biologists, hard or soft, come out and celebrate the legacy of Mr Darwin. But he’s a historical figure, and poses no threat.

Written Word

Mike Brotherton has a simple formula for putting more science in your science fiction: scan the science news to find a report that piques your interest, consider what the new technology or findings might mean in terms of unintended consequences or who might get hurt or marginalized, and remember:

SCIENCE IS FREAKING AWESOME! We figure out the coolest shit with science. If you’ve picked an article or topic that fascinates you, get that fascination into your story! If it’s about the methodology, focus there. Or the technology, or the potential, or the insight, or the dedication. Whatever you think is the coolest thing, that should be your focus.

Jennifer Rohn describes concerns about including technical details when writing "science in fiction" novels:

Interestingly, non-scientists are not as concerned as you might expect about “understanding” the science. For them, the experience of hearing about science – including the lingo – is part of the atmosphere, and is absolutely fine as long as they can follow the human story. Think of Scotty on the original Star Trek, babbling on about “plasma reflux in the warp core interfering with the delta configuration of the dilithium crystals”: we never needed to know what that meant: all we needed to know was that the ship was in danger and that Kirk had only ten hours to fix it. It is part of the setting, the scene, the milieu. Provided it’s made clear that this detailed content is not required for understanding the characters’ motivations and actions, it’s actually irrelevant whether they get it completely.

The Harry Potter's World: Renaissance Science, Magic and Medicine exhibit at the National Library of Medicine that explores the Renaissance science and medicine that inspired the magic in the novels. They also have an older online exhibition "Do Mandrakes Really Scream: Magic and Medicine in Harry Potter" (via bioephemera)

Television

LiveScience talks to to Rob Chiappetta and Glen Whitman the "science guys" behind Fringe. As JP at SF Signal put it:

I guess it shouldn't come as a shock that the science consultants don't have backgrounds in science. In fact, they're doing what anyone with a computer, a reasonable internet connection and a healthy sense of curiosity could do. But they get paid for doing it. The bastages!

Not coincidentally, there's a mini-industry in writing articles about how awful the science on Fringe is.

At Popular Mechanics: Scientists Debunk Personal Electromagnetic Fields on Fringe: Sci-Fi Fact vs. Fiction.

At SF Scope: Stupid Science - a review of Fringe's "The Cure"

At Popular Mechanics: On Fringe, Radioactivity is Real, But Cures are Junk Science

At the Discover Science Not Fiction blog: Eleventh Hour: Advanced Pest control and the troble with GMOs

Movies

Phil For Humanity has a bit of a rant about "How Science Fiction Misrepresents Cloning" (via SF Signal)

io9 has some cool artwork of alien parasites that are apparently part of an as-yet-unnamed independent horror film.

At io9 Charlie Jane Anders gave a mixed review of the movie version of Blindness: "Blindness' Dystopian Fable Becomes An Overwrought Movie"

Cool Bioscience

The Imagine Science Film Festival in New York included the short "A Fruit Fly in New York":

... a 12-minute flight over New York City, the laboratory and the history of fruit fly research. Beyond the informational content, the film also explores the personal rapport that a scientist may have with his model organism as a painter may have with his canvas. Through the microscope lens, the fruit fly appears human-like – a monstrously beautiful animal that has sacrificed itself in the pursuit of science.

National Geographic reports on a "bio-computer" created from "snippets of engineered RNA assembled inside a yeast cell." There's a slightly more technical post on the research at io9.

Scientists directly wired single neurons in the brain of monkeys to wrist muscles. The monkeys were able to teach themselves to use those new connections to move those muscles. The Knight Science Journalism Tracker rounds up the news reports.

Discover Magazine looks at the latest experiments "melding humans and machines" to create real-life cyborgs.

A study published last year compared the sequence of FOXP2, the so-called "language gene", in modern humans (us!) and Neanderthals, and found that we carry the same version. Greg Laden dug behind the hyperbole in the media to explain what that may actually mean for the possibility of Neandertal language.

It's 19th-century meets 21st-century in Second Life, where the University of Cincinnati is recreating the Galapagos islands and making it possible to retrace Darwin's voyage aboardthe Beagle.

In 1953 Stanley Miller showed that zapping a flask filled with simple chemicals thought to represent Earth's atomosphere billions of years ago- water, methane, hydrogen, ammonia - created amino acids, crucial components of life as we know it. Recently original samples from Miller's experiments were discovered and reanalyzed using more sensitive equipment than Miller had access to. It turns out that Miller ran the experiment using different conditions that are now thought to be closer to the conditions on early Earth, but condered the results "a dud". The new analysis turned up 22 amino acids, 10 of which had never been found before in similar experiments. Read the details in Wired and at NASA.gov. And for some background on the subject, check out this talk by Professor Jeffrey Bada on "Prebiotic Synthesis in Planetary Atmospheres."

Finally, it turns out that clever data diggers can figure out censored DNA sequences in publically posted human genomes.

Tags:science fiction, biology

Free Fiction: Start the Clock

Frankly, we were excited. This move was what our Pack needed—the four of us, at least, were sure of it. We were all tired of living in the ghetto—we were in three twentieth-century townhouses in Billings, in an “age-mixed” area full of marauding Thirteens and Fourteens and Fifteens. Talk about a people damned by CDAS—when the virus hit them, it had stuck their pituitaries and thyroids like throttles jammed open. It wasn’t just the giantism and health problems caused by a thirty-year overdose on growth hormones, testosterone, estrogen, and androgen. They suffered more from their social problems—criminality, violence, orgies, jealousy—and their endless self-pity.
~ "Start the Clock" by Benjamin Rosenbaum

Benjamin Rosenbaum's short story collection The Ant King and Other Stories is now free for download. Most of Rosenbaum's stories are more fantasy than science fiction, but "Start the Clock" takes place in a future where a virus has arrested development, resulting in a world full of chronological adults arrested at the physical age of 15 or 9 or 3. What might happen when it becomes possible to restart aging? Read the story:

• Read "Start the Clock" in The Ant King and Other Stories
• Listen to "Start the Clock" at Escape Pod

(via Boing Boing)

Tags:science fiction, biology

Biology in Science Fiction Roundup: August 16 Edition

Here are some biology in science fiction bits from the past couple of weeks.

Written Word

The Philadelphia Inquirer talks to Dorothy Hearst about her new fantasy novel Promise of the Wolves:

Hearst is no scientist; she's a fiction writer. But her debut fantasy novel, Promise of the Wolves, draws on research that suggests humans and canines (first wolves, then dogs) have a long, shared history.

"The book is based quite a bit on the theory of co-evolution," Hearst said, "which is the idea that wolves and later dogs are what made us the dominant species on the planet - that we evolved because of them, and they evolved because of us."

Like much of science these days, that theory is contentious. But it's been widely reported and discussed in the last couple of years, with some researchers asserting that humans grew stronger by taming wolves, then hunting with them. In turn, wolves began to look less like themselves and more like dogs as selective breeding for certain characteristics also gave rise to changes in the animals' appearance. In short, Hearst said: "We made dogs and dogs made us. Some of the genetic [research] is fairly controversial, but there is some evidence that wolves and humans have been together for 150,000 years - and other evidence that suggests it could have happened before we were even fully human."

The Guardian profiled John Wyndham, author of Day of the Triffids.

Although Wyndham was writing at the height of the cold war, his anticipation of the rise of genetic engineering means that the story remains just as relevant - and terrifying - today. Wyndham was also redefining the science fiction genre. Up until the late 1940s, sci-fi was almost exclusively set in space and involved what Wyndham himself described as "the adventures of galactic gangsters". By choosing instead to write about situations that were rational extensions of the present day, Wyndham pioneered a form of sci-fi that he labelled "logical fantasy" but which is widely known now as "speculative fiction".

I'm not sure I agree with their definition of speculative fiction, which I think of as including space opera as well as mundane science fiction, high fantasy and lots in between.

Television

Paul Levinson's The Genesis Virus has been turned into a TV series pilot.

Primeval debuted on BBC-America last Saturday night in the US. I enjoyed it. So did Annalee Newitz at io9.

Movies

At SFGate Peter Hartlaub lists his "favorite science movies of all time" - and by "science movies" he means science fiction, comedy or drama that features science themes.

The "classic" B-movie The Wasp Woman is now available as a DVD download from EZTakes.com.

Janice Starlin, purveyor of her own line of cosmetics, finds herself nearing middle-age (in a time when 38 was the new 94). A stranger with an accent and an unnatural love of wasps enters her life and promises her the elixir that will prolong her youth forever - until the wasp becomes the wasped.

io9 reports on the so-bad-its-funny movie based on the novel The Possibility of an Island and made by its author Michel Houellebecq, which is "a sci-fi movie about cloning, weird religious sects and human life after the apocalypse" that apparently includes a slapstick bikini contest.

Weird and Cool Bioscience

At Wired Science Brendan Keim reports on "Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies", a report compiled for the Department of Defense which evaluates the military potential of "brain science", including mind reading, various forms of cognitive enhancement, mind control and brain-machine interfaces.

Greg Laden reports on recent experiments in which a "blog of rat brain cells" was used to steer a robot that navigates via sonar.

There is the strange story of Bernann McKinney who spent tens of thousands of dollars having her pitbull Booger cloned by Korean scientists. In a very bizarre twist, McKinney may actually be a fugitive from justice in the UK.

Kwabena Boahen gives a TED talk about "Making a computer that works like the brain"

Weird Universe points out a breakthrough in organ transplants from animals to humans: a new chemical treatment process that strips the organ down to its scaffolding, and allows the transplant patient's own cells to fill in the holes.

Parasitic Plants Steal RNA, Spy on Their Hosts

There are viral parasites that attack other viruses "hijacking its genetic machinery and making copies of its victim's DNA".

The Knight Science Journalism Tracker takes a look at a US News & World Report article about human evolution and genetic engineering.

Wired reports on "galactic panspermia", which suggests that space might be teeming with microbial life.

Metafilter discusses Mike the Headless Chicken, who lived for 18 months after having most of it's head chopped off.

Neurophilosophy takes a look at kuru, the human prion disease that spread by ritual cannibalism.

Tags:science fiction, biology

The Science of Star Wars: Clones, The Force and a Galaxy of Humanoids

Scientific American has a series of articles in this month's issue that focus on the science of the Star Wars universe, presumably as part of the lead up to the release of Star Wars: The Clone Wars . SciAm interviewed Jeanne Cavelos, author of The Science of Star Wars: An Astrophysicist's Independent Examination of Space Travel, Aliens, Planets, and Robots as Portrayed in the Star Wars Films and Books*, to get an update on how the science in the series has fared since her book was originally published in 1999.

Not surprisingly, she talks about cloning, of which she has an optimistic view:

We have cloned many different animals at this point—cats, dogs, sheep—and there is very little holding us back from cloning humans except ethics and law. It's entirely conceivable that we will see humans cloned for medical or reproductive purposes in the coming decades. The link between genes and behavior has also become much better understood in recent years, and like the Imperial armies in Star Wars, human clones could probably be genetically altered to be obedient and programmable. One area of Star Wars cloning technology that is not very realistic according to today's science is the limited amount of time the clones have to grow and learn. Nevertheless, cloning technology is something in Star Wars that we will be seeing more of soon.

And she also has an explanation for all those human-shaped aliens in that far far away galaxy:

It seems that the human species, or whatever its equivalent is in that faraway galaxy, either colonized all these worlds or was genetically "seeded" on many planets. This species became dominant somehow. It's unlikely though that one species could live on so many planets without some kind of respiratory assistance. Each atmosphere is a quirky mixture of ingredients found only on that planet; you wouldn't have the same mixture of oxygen and carbon dioxide as we do.

That's a pretty similar idea to the ancient humanoids that seeded our own galaxy in the Star Trek universe. Her ideas about how The Force works are necessarily more speculative, since it's pretty much indistinguishable from magic.

The best chance we have of explaining The Force is through the midi-chlorians, which were introduced in the new trilogy. Lucas explains these midi-chlorians as organisms that live within our cells and allow us to feel The Force. The element that seems scientifically based here is the sensing of someone strong in The Force. You can compare this to creatures living in water that generate small electrical fields. Some fish generate these fields, and these can sense when other fish come into these fields as well as the strength of the field put out by the approaching fish.

Or maybe The Force is similar to magnetism. Birds sense magnetic fields with cells in their beaks and eyes, called cryptochromes. Birds may actually "see" the magnetic field, so you can imagine a similar kind of thing happening in Star Wars. If Darth Vader is standing in the next room, maybe you can see the emissions of The Force like a magnetic aura around him.

Read the whole interview for more on the science of robots, space travel, light sabers, exoplanets and aliens.

You can also read several excerpts from her book, The Science of Star Wars:

• R2-D2 and C-3PO: Do Droids Dream of Electric Sheep? looks at the possibility - and possible necessity - of giving robots emotions and personalities.
• Darth Vader: The Six-Million-Dollar Sith speculates about Anakin Skywalker's lava-induced injuries and the prosthetic parts that allow him to live on as Darth Vader (note that some of the questions raised were answered in Revenge of the Sith)
• Might a Sarlacc Really Take a Thousand Years to Digest its Prey? In case you've forgotten, a sarlacc is a very big radially symmetrical desert creature that creates a teeth-lined pit.
  

Related post: Star Wars and the Midi-Chlorian Menace
Image: Young clones in training from Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

Tags:Star Wars, biology

Fantastic Contraption: The Interface Between Man and Machine

Device, an art gallery in La Jolla, opens a new show tomorrow: the Fantastic Contraption Group Exhibition, which explores the interface between animals and machines.

The exhibited artists include Ashley Wood, Christopher Conte, D. Hwang, Eduard Anikonov, Eric Joyner, Greg Brotherton, HR Giger, Joey Vaiasuso, John U Abrahamson, Kazuhiko Nakamura, Mike Libby, Nemo Gould, Stephane Halleux, Theo Kamecke, Viktor Koen, Wayne Martin Belger, William B Hand and Zoran Milivojevic. Even if you won't be able to visit the exhibition, it's worth spending some time browsing through the artists' web sites for some truly beautiful - and sometimes disturbing - works. I especially like Mike Libby's "Insect Lab", in which he combines gears and other machine parts with insects.

There's also a companion book (shown at right).

The opening reception is Saturday, July 19 from 6-9pm and the show runs through September 2.

(via Make)

Tags:Device Gallery, art

SF Stories that Inspire and Hinder Real Science

Many kids who read science fiction in their youth and teen years were inspired to pursue a career in science. But apparently some SF can have the opposite effect, scaring people away from the sciences. For example, MIT synthetic biologist Drew Endy told io9's Annalee Newitz that "his area of research has also suffered because so much science fiction portrays bio-hacking as horrific (think Frankenstein) or silly (think South Park's "four-assed monkey")." Newitz has rounded up a list of SF stories that either are "inspiring" or "hindering" science.

The inspiring stories show science as part of the progress of human society. Her list includes Ian M. Banks' Look to Windward ("synthetic biology is simply a logical way that humans extend their capabilities, but it does not turn them into monsters or make them authoritarian overlords"), China Mieville's The Scar ("human-animal hybrids are often less disturbing than so-called normal humans.") and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time ("potential world of eco-friendly, multicultural feminists is founded on many complex technologies including artificial wombs, green mass transit, a rapid internet-like communications system, and complicated bio-engineering and waste-recycling tech").

The hindering stories, on the other hand are tales of science run amok, with serious negative impact on society. She includes the movie Gattaca, Greg Bear's Blood Music, Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake.

I'd add to her list of hinderers most of Michael Crichton's science fiction output, which usually features scientists who cause great destruction by a combination of their arrogance and ignorance. That would include The Andromeda Strain (lethal strain of bacteria is brought to earth by a satellite trying to find microbes to create bioweapons), Jurassic Park and its sequels (scientists recreate lethal and clever dinosaurs that are unexpectedly able to reproduce), Prey (swarms of bacterially-produced predatory nanobots that escape the lab and run amok), and Next (unethical genetic engineering of humans and animals). It's harder to come up with stories that portray biotechnology positively. Brin's stories that take place in his Uplift universe (genetic engineering is used for the "uplift" of dolphins and chimpanzees) could be on that list.

I wonder, though how much of an effect the "hindering" stories really have on the study of science. Sure, they negatively portray science and scientists, but from Newitz's list it's pretty clear that that kind of mad science story isn't anything new. In fact, Frankenstein was published almost 200 years ago. It seems to me that while SF certainly can affect the perception of science by the general public, I'm not sure that it has that much of an effect on those who are interested in the science enough to read up on the facts behind the fiction. Or maybe it's because readers with a science bent tend to read widely, becoming exposed to stories that both "hinder" and "inspire".

In any case, the issue of public perception of science and scientists is an important one, if only because that public perception influences politics and funding. Part of the problem, as I see it, is that the anti-science stories actually ring true to many people who have a deep distrust (and dislike) of corporations, the government, and anyone who is an "expert". It can be satisfying to see arrogant establishment types who believe themselves to be very clever shown up as bumbling and foolish, even if it does mean death and disaster as a result. Hell, I often enjoy those kind of stories, and I like science.

So what's the solution? More positive SF? That certainly couldn't hurt. But there's no guarantee that any particular novel or movie will become popular enough to really make a difference in public perception. I suspect that education is really the key. Part of what feeds people's fear of scientific progress is that they don't understand it. I'm not sure how we can go about that, though, beyond ensuring kids get a thorough science education in school. Public lectures are a possibility, as are entertaining exhibitions at science museums, and maybe blogs too. I'd like to think that anyway.

Tags:science fiction, biology, education

Biology in Science Fiction Roundup: June 7 Edition

Here's a roundup of biology in science fiction-related blog posts and articles from around the web:

Written SF

Nancy Kress writes about her concern that a story she is working on - which is told from the point of view of an anchondroplastic dwarf - might be culturally trespassing.

I still feel uneasy appropriating a culture not my own as a subject for fiction. Writers do this all the time, of course, and critics and readers then complain about it all the time. (Look up the controversy over Memoirs of a Geisha, written by a non-Asian man.) I don't want to step on anyone's sensibilities. But if I stuck to my own culture -- white, female, middle-aged and middle class -- I would have a very narrow range of stories.

It seems to me the important thing is getting it right.

At Making Light commenter Michael Roberts asked :

what science-fiction books would the assembly recommend for getting a good picture of alternate ecologies? A little perspective: we've just read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (aside: holy schemoley, what a great set of books!) and the alternate world with the wheeled creatures definitely caught her fancy.

I searched through the boxes, and came up with Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, Niven's Protector, Rainbow Mars, and Smoke Ring, Brin and Benford's Heart of the Comet, Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio, Forward's Flight of the Dragonfly, Orson Scott Card's Wyrms, and Brin's Glory Season. What am I not thinking of? This wasn't intended to be a survey of biologically-oriented SF, but there's got to be others. I didn't give her Dune, I suppose.

Making Light's knowledgeable commentariat comes up with some more suggestions (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and, well, just keep reading down the thread for more).

Nina Munteanu reviews Robert Sawyer's Neanderthal Trilogy.

Television

The Science of Battlestar Galactica takes a look at how Colonials and Cylons can interbreed . The conclusion: Earth “humans” must be a cross between Colonials and Cylons. Read part 1 and part 2.

Have we seen the "father" of the Cylons? Check out Michael Hinman's column at SyFy Portal to find out (SPOILERS!).

Eva at EasternBlot has an alternative explanation for the invisible non-humanoid life forms Doctor Who detected in the library.

Adam Hadhazy, Scientific American intern, liked A&E's Andromeda Strain - at least the first half.

A remarkable amount of the science in the 40-year-old original still holds up as compelling and has been wisely retained. Who doesn't get excited when the scrambling scientists, whisked away to a top secret laboratory, discover that the microscopic invader contains no DNA or RNA—making it unlike any other life-form on Earth? To try and wow science-savvy people, as well as inveigle the layman, A&E cranks its version up a notch by throwing in buckyballs and singularitywormholes, though somewhat unnecessarily.

Only somewhat? And I seriously doubt it was the "science-savvy" they were trying to wow.
Sarah Stegall has a positive review - at least of the The Andromeda Strain's science - for SF Scope.

The current research into the communities of chemosynthetic organisms is among the (ahem) hottest topics in ocean research today. More cutting edge science is threaded throughout this updated version: buckyballs, Archaea, DNA research, wormhole theory, messenger theory. We discover after a couple of hours that the Andromeda strain was picked up by a secret research mission to a secret wormhole that has since collapsed. Best of all, nobody stops to explain all this stuff. While it may leave some viewers in the dust, this is the best integration of actual science into a science fiction story I've seen in a long time. Apart from the wormhole itself (which is still part of respectable physical speculation), there is no hand-waving, no "Trek science" to insult the knowledgeable viewer. The science is real, and that makes the supposed threat more real.

I don't really agree that there wasn't any "Trek science" (wormhole from the future anyone?), but it definitely could have been worse.

Genevieve Valentine has a funny review of the very bad SciFi original movie Aztec Rex (Aztecs, a bewigged Cortés and great big dinosaurs) at Fantasy Magazine. No real science involved.

Fantasy Magazine also has a discussion of "SciFi movies we love to hate". See also io9's peek at the upcoming SciFi movie "Flu Birds".

Movies

SciFi Weekly reviewed Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds giving it a B-. You might do better reading the "far superior short story by Daphne du Maurier" that the movie is (very loosely) based on.

At Laughing Squid Scott Beale posts some anatomical cross-section diagrams of Gamera & Godzilla (via SF Signal).

On Science Friday, Ira Flatow talked to M. Night Shyamalan about The Happening and "the intersection between real-world environmental issues and Shyamalan's fantasy world" (to listen, subscribe to the podcast or check back next week when the archived audio is posted). If you want more, Bloody Disgusting has new widgets, trailers and clips of The Happening.

And if CGI monsters are your thing, io9 has information about the upcoming dinosaur scifi movie Reptisaurus. It stars former Buck Rodgers Gil Gerard, so how can it miss?

Will Ridley Scott be making an updated version of Brave New World?

On a more serious note, SciFi Scanner writes about a panel at the recent World Science Festival on "The Brain and Bourne: Neuroscience in the Bourne Trilogy."

Science bits

io9's resident Biogeek looks at bioengineered ecologies.

Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine created a brain-machine interface that allows a money to operate a robotic arm.

Scientists at Davidson College have created a simple living computer made from E.coli bacteria (via Metafilter).

“It’s kind of like that computer in ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,’ ” she said, referring to a popular novel by the late Douglas Adams. “It’s been working on a problem so long that by the time it comes up with an answer, everybody forgot the question.”

Athena Andreadis, author of To Seek Out New Life: The Biology of Star Trek, writes about transhumanism and the future of space travel. (via Sentient Developments)

Willamette Week interviewed Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story and the new book Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science.

When I was a kid I read a lot of science-fiction and read all these predictions of how the world would be in the future. So I love to think about things that seem small now but could become enormous later.... Global climate change is driving [infectious disease] invaders from one ecosystem to another. Dengue virus, which is carried by the Asian tiger mosquito, has begun to appear in areas very close to the Southern United States—most people feel dengue is going to be in the U.S. before too long. Dengue can make people die of hemorrhages flowing from all orifices of their body. And it can look like Ebola virus. It’s a grisly, scary disease for which there is currently no good vaccine.

Human fetal brain cells - stem cells - that were injected into mice were able to correct a nervous system defect. All of the control and untreated "shiverer" mice died within 150 days, while 4 of 26 injected mice were still living at 14 months.

The mice did better than just survive — as the myelin grew, the mice began to lose signs of being shiverers. They gained normal brain activity, no longer had seizures and lost much of the shakiness. “As they live longer, they slowly but surely get better,” says Goldman.

The treatment is not anywhere near ready to use on humans, but it's an important result nonetheless.

Tags:science fiction, biology

The Singularity: An IEEE Spectrum Special Report

The June issue of the IEEE Spectrum has a special report on "The Singularity". Is you'd expect from a journal by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, most of the stories are about machines and artificial intelligence. But the technology that would allow us humans to transcend our physical bodies likes at the interface between man and machine, so biology necessarily must be taken into consideration.

A few of the articles:

Computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge (and who's 1993 article "The Coming Technological Singularity", that introduced the term) introduces the special report and looks at Signs of the Singularity. Not surprisingly he sees the signs are there.

Spectrum editor Glenn Zorpette has his own, less glowing, intro, "Waiting for the Rapture."

The leading spokesman for the life-everlasting version of the singularity is the entrepreneur and inventor Ray Kurzweil, who’s also behind the movie The Singularity Is Near and a recent book of the same title. Why should a mere journalist question Kurzweil’s conclusion that some of us alive today will live indefinitely? Because we all know it’s wrong. We can sense it in the gaping, take-my-word-for-it extrapolations and the specious reasoning of those who subscribe to this form of the singularity argument. Then, too, there’s the flawed grasp of neuroscience, human physiology, and philosophy. Most of all, we note the willingness of these people to predict fabulous technological advances in a period so conveniently short it offers themselves hope of life everlasting.

University of Sheffield polymer physicist Richard A.L. Jones looks at "Rupturing the Nanotech Rapture: Biological nanobots could repair and improve the human body, but they'll be more bio than bot." The article points out that the science of molecular nanotechnology is still in its infancy.

It's not that the singularity vision is completely unrecognizable in today's work. It's just that the gulf between the two is a bit like the gap between traveling by horse and buggy and by interplanetary transport. The birth of nanotechnology is popularly taken to be 1989, when IBM Fellow Don Eigler used a scanning tunneling microscope to create the company's logo out of xenon atoms. [. . .] However, it is a very long way indeed from a top-notch tennis racket to smart nanoscale robots capable of swarming in our bodies like infinitesimal guardian angels, recognizing and fixing damaged cells or DNA, and detecting, chasing, and destroying harmful viruses and bacteria. But the transhumanists underestimate the magnitude of that leap. They look beyond the manipulation of an atom or molecule with a scanning tunneling microscope and see swarms of manipulators that are themselves nanoscale. Under software control, these “nanofactories” would be able to arrange atoms in any pattern consistent with the laws of physics.

CalTech professor of biology and engineering Christof Koch and University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Guilio Tononi ask Can machines be conscious?

Data from clinical studies and from basic research laboratories, made possible by the use of sophisticated instruments that detect and record neuronal activity, have given us a complex if still rudimentary understanding of the myriad processes that give rise to consciousness. We are still a very long way from being able to use this knowledge to build a conscious machine. Yet we can already take the first step in that long journey: we can list some aspects of consciousness that are not strictly necessary for building such an artifact.

They makes an interesting point: while consciousness requires brain activity, it doesn't actually require any input from or interaction with the environment. It doesn't require emotions, or attention, or memory, or language - all the things that seem to make us human. Instead consciousness has to do with integration of information, and that gives scientists a place to start for the development of conscious machines. They argue that trying to replicate the human brain is unlikely to happen "in the foreseeable future". Instead they suggest that it might work better to start with a simple "brain" and let it learn and evolve in the hopes it will develop consciousness on its own. In a related sidebar Koch asks "Do you need a Quantum Computer to Achieve Machine Consciousness? " The short answer: no.

IEEE Spectrum writer Sally Adee looks at "Reverse Engineering the Brain." Her focus is the work being done to map the fruit fly brain at Janelia Farm "a kind of Bell Labs for neuro-biology." Director Gerry Rubin points out that the basic wiring of the human brain should follow the same rules, so understanding the fruit fly's mind is a way of understanding our own. But that doesn't mean it's a simple task:

In Rubin's mind, solving the fruit-fly brain is a 20-year problem. “After we solve this, I'd say we're one-fifth of the way to understanding the human mind.”

In "Tech Luminaries Address Singularity" the Spectrum asked scientists and technologists their opinion on whether the singularity and/or machine conscious will occur. The interviewees include Douglas Hofstadter of Indiana University who studies computer modeling of mental processes, Jeff Hawkins of Numenta (and Palm Computing), John Casti - computer modeler of "complex human systems" like the stock market, writer and cofounder of the futurist Kenos Circle, TJ Rodgers of Cypress Semiconductor, software entrepreneur Eric Hahn, Microsoft's Gordon Bell, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, Gorden Moore of Intel, Jim Fruchterman of Benetech Initiative, and "commentator and evangelist for emerging technologies" Esther Dyson. Interestingly, only Casti, Hahn, and Fruchterman think the singularity will occur within 70 years. Maybe they should talk to the biologists.

Other articles in the report:

• Who's Who in the Singularity
  
• A Bit of Theory: Consciousness as Integrated Information
• Ray Kurzweil and Neil Gershenfeld: Two Paths to the Singularity
• Economics of the Singularity

The special web-only content is not online yet, but it looks interesting enough to check back later. It will include an interactive 3D model of a human showing where high tech body parts are already a reality. There will also be videos of Verner Vinge on "How to Prepare for the Singularity" and by Christof Koch on "Teaching Machines to Watch Blade Runner."

Tags:singularity, transhumanism, biology, neuroscience

Biology in Science Fiction Roundup: Spring Cleaning Edition

Spring is almost over, so I figured it was time to clean out some of the links I've been accumulating over the past couple of months:

Written SciFi

Damien G Walter blogs for The Guardian about mundane science fiction. And what is the apparent epitome of mundane? Biotechnology. (Caption from the associated image: "It may not look thrilling .. a scientist indicates an image of one of the first cloned human embryos at the Newcastle Institute of Human Genetics in 2005. ")

Mark Alpert writes in Scientific American about the need for more fiction that accurately portrays scientists (AKA Lab Lit). Allera Goodman's novel Intuition, which features the intrigues in a lab studying a genetically modified virus that might shrink tumors, is given a special mention.

Nancy Kress talked to SciFi Wire about her Nebula Award-winning novella "Fountain of Age:

Although the story is SF, there's minimal science in the story. "Cancerous tumors are cells that don't die (unless you poison them)," Kress said. "That became the basis for my anti-aging treatment in the story."

The Tor Books MySpace TV channel has an interview with Daniel Kalla his novel Resistance.

PZ Myers writes about Jay Hosler's comic book Optical Allusions:

Wrinkles the Wonder Brain is an animated, naked brain working for the Graeae Sisters, and he loses the one eye they share between them — so he has to go on a quest to recover it. I know, it sounds like a stretch, but it works in a weird sort of way, and once you start rolling with it, you'll find it works. Using that scenario to frame a series of encounters, Wrinkles meets Charles Darwin and learns how evolution could produce something as complex as an eye; talks about the sub-optimal design of retinal circuitry with a cow superhero; discovers sexual dimorphism with a crew of stalk-eyed pirates; learns about development of the eye from cavefish and a cyclops; chats with Mr Sun about the physics of radiation; there are even zombie G proteins and were-opsins in a lesson about shape changing. This stuff is seriously weird, and kids ought to eat it up.

Television

The Andromeda Strain miniseries is set to air this Monday and Tuesday nights on A&E. SciFiCool and Ain't It Cool News have reviews, and it isn't looking too good. I'll probably record and watch later, so I can fast forward through the dumb and/or boring parts (and commercials 'natch).

Eva at Easternblot writes about her "Facts Behind the Fiction" articles for the Canadian series ReGenesis.

Movies

At LabLit Jennifer Rohn looks at the portrayal of the scientists (and science) in I Am Legend.

io9 writes about Jurassic Park IV, which apparently has been "heavily reworked" from the leaked plot which involved gun-toting government-agent dinos. If you are interested in the science that likes behind the Jurassic Park movies, check out the "Science of Jurassic Park" FAQ created by the San Diego Natural History Museum.

Miscellaneous Bioscience

PLoS One published a paper last week that demonstrated the insertion of a gene from the extinct Tasmanian tiger into mice - the first time "DNA [...] from an extinct animal has functioned inside a living host." The PLoS blog rounds up the media coverage, which leaned heavily on Jurassic Park references.

If you've ever wondered why aliens haven't contacted us, check out Charlie Stross's post on the Ferm Paradox revisited. Robin Hanson has a slightly different take.

At io9 Annalee Newitz has a quick overview of science fiction diseases, sexually-transmitted and otherwise.

At Cocktail Party Physics Jennifer Ouellette references Connie Willis's The Doomsday Book in her post on the bubonic plague.

ScienceNews reports on scientific research within Second Life. Students could listen to microbiologist Joan Slonczewski "discuss science and science fiction" on the American Chemical Society's island, while at Second Nature 3 Drexel neurobiologist Corey Hart has created an evolving virtual ecosystem. Sounds pretty cool. I just worry that if I download the software I'll never get up from my computer! (via BoingBoing)

Ben Bova's March 8 column for the Naples [Florida] Daily News: "Evolution just a theory? That's just fine."

Scientific American looks at current research on human body part regeneration.

At Tetrapod zoology Darren Naish writes about dinosauroids and the intelligence of dinosaurs.

The Rockefeller University has posted videos of the lectures at it's recent symposium "From RNA to Humans: A Symposium on Evolution". There are a number of interesting talks from the big names in evolutionary biology, including Jack Szostak on "The Origins of Cellular Life", Luca Cavalli-Sforza on "Evolution of Human Populations", and Svante Pääbo on "A Neanderthal Perspective on Human Origins." (via Afarensis).

The Chinese are growing giant pumpkins, cucumbers, eggplants, chili peppers, watermelons and tomatoes from seeds that orbited the earth on the Shijian 8 satellite. (via Posthuman Blues)

How sending seeds into space produces such enormous fruit is yet not fully understood, but it is thought cosmic radiation, micro-gravity and magnetic fields may play a part.

The March issue of National Geographic has an interesting article on "Animal Minds".
The April issue of National Geographic has an interesting article on "Biomimetics".
Both have lovely animal photography.

CNET reports that IBM is experimenting on creating chips built on a DNA scaffold (via The World in a Satin Bag).

"These are DNA nanostructures that are self-assembled into discrete shapes. Our goal is to use these structures as bread boards on which to assemble carbon nanotubes, silicon nanowires, quantum dots," said Greg Wallraff, an IBM scientist and a lithography and materials expert working on the project. "What we are really making are tiny DNA circuit boards that will be used to assemble other components."

Seed Magazine took a look at the Blue Brain project, which is attempting to create a supercomputer that models real brain behavior.

It took less than two years for the Blue Brain supercomputer to accurately simulate a neocortical column, which is a tiny slice of brain containing approximately 10,000 neurons, with about 30 million synaptic connections between them. "The column has been built and it runs," Markram says. "Now we just have to scale it up."

Vaughan at Mind Hacks writes about Ray Kurzweil and conscious AIs.

Big Think has video of Methuselah Foundation founder, chairman and chief science officer Aubrey de Grey talking about his scientific ideas and answering questions. Futures in Biotech has an episode on "Aubrey de Grey on the Thousand Year Lifespan."

PhysOrg reported on Jim Mielke's wireless "Digital Tattoo Interface" that is literally fueled by blood.

Protein scientist David Baker has teamed up with game designer Zoran Popovic to create a protein-folding game called FoldIt. Humans are "better at seeing the big picture than computers are", so the game uses human brain power to improve computer-designed proteins. Play FoldIt yourself.

Tags:science fiction, biology