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Here's a question that matters.

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[Is it ethical to evolve the human body?]

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Because we're beginning to get all
the tools together to evolve ourselves.

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And we can evolve bacteria
and we can evolve plants

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and we can evolve animals,

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and we're now reaching a point
where we really have to ask,

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is it really ethical
and do we want to evolve human beings?

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And as you're thinking about that,

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let me talk about that
in the context of prosthetics,

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prosthetics past, present, future.

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So this is the iron hand

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that belonged to one of the German counts.

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Loved to fight, lost his arm
in one of these battles.

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No problem, he just made a suit of armor,

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put it on,

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perfect prosthetic.

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That's where the concept
of ruling with an iron fist comes from.

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And of course these prosthetics
have been getting more and more useful,

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more and more modern.

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You can hold soft-boiled eggs.

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You can have all types of controls,
and as you're thinking about that,

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there are wonderful people like Hugh Herr

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who have been building
absolutely extraordinary prosthetics.

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So the wonderful Aimee Mullins
will go out and say,

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how tall do I want to be tonight?

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Or Hugh will say what type of cliff
do I want to climb?

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Or does somebody want to run a marathon,
or does somebody want to ballroom dance?

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And as you adapt these things,

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the interesting thing about prosthetics
is they've been coming inside the body.

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So these external prosthetics
have now become artificial knees.

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They've become artificial hips.

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And then they've evolved further

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to become not just nice to have

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but essential to have.

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So when you're talking
about a heart pacemaker as a prosthetic,

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you're talking about something
that isn't just, "I'm missing my leg,"

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it's, "if I don't have this, I can die."

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And at that point, a prosthetic
becomes a symbiotic relationship

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with the human body.

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And four of the smartest people
that I've ever met --

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Ed Boyden, Hugh Herr,
Joe Jacobson, Bob Lander --

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are working on a Center
for Extreme Bionics.

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And the interesting thing
of what you're seeing here is

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these prosthetics
now get integrated into the bone.

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They get integrated into the skin.

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They get integrated into the muscle.

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And one of the other sides of Ed

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is he's been thinking
about how to connect the brain

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using light or other mechanisms

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directly to things like these prosthetics.

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And if you can do that,

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then you can begin changing
fundamental aspects of humanity.

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So how quickly you react to something
depends on the diameter of a nerve.

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And of course, if you have nerves
that are external or prosthetic,

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say with light or liquid metal,

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then you can increase that diameter

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and you could even increase it
theoretically to the point where,

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as long as you could see the muzzle flash,
you could step out of the way of a bullet.

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Those are the order of magnitude
of changes you're talking about.

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This is a fourth
sort of level of prosthetics.

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These are Phonak hearing aids,

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and the reason
why these are so interesting

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is because they cross the threshold
from where prosthetics are something

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for somebody who is "disabled"

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and they become something
that somebody who is "normal"

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might want to actually have,

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because what this prosthetic does,
which is really interesting,

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is not only does it help you hear,

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you can focus your hearing,

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so it can hear the conversation
going on over there.

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You can have superhearing.

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You can have hearing in 360 degrees.
You can have white noise.

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You can record, and oh, by the way,
they also put a phone into this.

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So this functions as your hearing aid
and also as your phone.

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And at that point, somebody might actually
want to have a prosthetic voluntarily.

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All of these thousands
of loosely connected little pieces

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are coming together,

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and it's about time we ask the question,

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how do we want to evolve human beings
over the next century or two?

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And for that we turn
to a great philosopher

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who was a very smart man
despite being a Yankee fan.

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(Laughter)

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And Yogi Berra used to say, of course,
that it's very tough to make predictions,

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especially about the future.

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(Laughter)

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So instead of making a prediction
about the future to begin with,

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let's take what's happening in the present
with people like Tony Atala,

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who is redesigning 30-some-odd organs.

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And maybe the ultimate prosthetic
isn't having something external, titanium.

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Maybe the ultimate prosthetic
is take your own gene code,

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remake your own body parts,

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because that's a whole lot more effective
than any kind of a prosthetic.

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But while you're at it, then you can take
the work of Craig Venter and Ham Smith.

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And one of the things
that we've been doing

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is trying to figure out
how to reprogram cells.

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And if you can reprogram a cell,

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then you can change the cells
in those organs.

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So if you can change
the cells in those organs,

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maybe you make those organs
more radiation-resistant.

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Maybe you make them absorb more oxygen.

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Maybe you make them more efficient

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to filter out stuff
that you don't want in your body.

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And over the last few weeks,
George Church has been in the news a lot

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because he's been talking about taking
one of these programmable cells

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and inserting an entire human genome

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into that cell.

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And once you can insert
an entire human genome into a cell,

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then you begin to ask the question,

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would you want
to enhance any of that genome?

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Do you want to enhance a human body?

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How would you want
to enhance a human body?

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Where is it ethical
to enhance a human body

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and where is it not ethical
to enhance a human body?

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And all of a sudden, what we're doing

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is we've got this
multidimensional chess board

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where we can change
human genetics by using viruses

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to attack things like AIDS,

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or we can change the gene code
through gene therapy

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to do away with some hereditary diseases,

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or we can change the environment,

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and change the expression
of those genes in the epigenome

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and pass that on to the next generations.

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And all of a sudden,
it's not just one little bit,

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it's all these stacked little bits

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that allow you
to take little portions of it

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until all the portions coming together

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lead you to something
that's very different.

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And a lot of people
are very scared by this stuff.

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And it does sound scary,
and there are risks to this stuff.

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So why in the world would you
ever want to do this stuff?

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Why would we really want
to alter the human body

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in a fundamental way?

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The answer lies in part

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with Lord Rees,

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astronomer royal of Great Britain.

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And one of his favorite sayings
is the universe is 100 percent malevolent.

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So what does that mean?

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It means if you take
any one of your bodies at random,

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drop it anywhere in the universe,

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drop it in space, you die.

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Drop it on the Sun, you die.

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Drop it on the surface
of Mercury, you die.

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Drop it near a supernova, you die.

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But fortunately, it's only
about 80 percent effective.

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So as a great physicist once said,

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there's these little
upstream eddies of biology

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that create order
in this rapid torrent of entropy.

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So as the universe dissipates energy,

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there's these upstream eddies
that create biological order.

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Now, the problem with eddies is,

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they tend to disappear.

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They shift. They move in rivers.

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And because of that, when an eddy shifts,

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when the Earth becomes a snowball,
when the Earth becomes very hot,

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when the Earth gets hit by an asteroid,
when you have supervolcanoes,

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when you have solar flares,

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when you have potentially
extinction-level events

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like the next election --

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(Laughter)

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then all of a sudden,
you can have periodic extinctions.

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And by the way, that's happened
five times on Earth,

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and therefore it is very likely

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that the human species on Earth
is going to go extinct someday.

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Not next week,

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not next month,

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maybe in November,
but maybe 10,000 years after that.

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As you're thinking
of the consequence of that,

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if you believe that extinctions
are common and natural

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and normal and occur periodically,

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it becomes a moral imperative
to diversify our species.

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And it becomes a moral imperative

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because it's going to be
really hard to live on Mars

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if we don't fundamentally
modify the human body.

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Right?

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You go from one cell,

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mom and dad coming together
to make one cell,

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in a cascade to 10 trillion cells.

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We don't know, if you change
the gravity substantially,

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if the same thing will happen
to create your body.

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We do know that if you expose
our bodies as they currently are

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to a lot of radiation, we will die.

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So as you're thinking of that,
you have to really redesign things

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just to get to Mars.

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Forget about the moons
of Neptune or Jupiter.

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And to borrow from Nikolai Kardashev,

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let's think about life
in a series of scales.

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So Life One civilization

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is a civilization that begins
to alter his or her looks.

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And we've been doing that
for thousands of years.

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You've got tummy tucks
and you've got this and you've got that.

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You alter your looks, and I'm told

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that not all of those alterations
take place for medical reasons.

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(Laughter)

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Seems odd.

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A Life Two civilization
is a different civilization.

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A Life Two civilization alters
fundamental aspects of the body.

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So you put human growth hormone in,
the person grows taller,

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or you put x in and the person
gets fatter or loses metabolism

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or does a whole series of things,

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but you're altering the functions
in a fundamental way.

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To become an intrasolar civilization,

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we're going to have to create
a Life Three civilization,

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and that looks very different
from what we've got here.

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Maybe you splice in
Deinococcus radiodurans

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so that the cells can resplice
after a lot of exposure to radiation.

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Maybe you breathe by having oxygen
flow through your blood

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instead of through your lungs.

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But you're talking about
really radical redesigns,

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and one of the interesting things
that's happened in the last decade

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is we've discovered
a whole lot of planets out there.

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And some of them may be Earth-like.

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The problem is, if we ever
want to get to these planets,

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the fastest human objects --

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Juno and Voyager
and the rest of this stuff --

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take tens of thousands of years

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to get from here
to the nearest solar system.

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So if you want to start exploring
beaches somewhere else,

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or you want to see two-sun sunsets,

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then you're talking
about something that is very different,

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because you have to change
the timescale and the body of humans

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in ways which may be
absolutely unrecognizable.

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And that's a Life Four civilization.

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Now, we can't even begin
to imagine what that might look like,

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but we're beginning to get glimpses

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of instruments that might
take us even that far.

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And let me give you two examples.

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So this is the wonderful Floyd Romesberg,

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and one of the things
that Floyd's been doing

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is he's been playing
with the basic chemistry of life.

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So all life on this planet
is made in ATCGs, the four letters of DNA.

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All bacteria, all plants,
all animals, all humans, all cows,

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everything else.

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And what Floyd did is he changed out
two of those base pairs,

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so it's ATXY.

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And that means that you now have
a parallel system to make life,

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to make babies, to reproduce, to evolve,

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that doesn't mate
with most things on Earth

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or in fact maybe with nothing on Earth.

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Maybe you make plants
that are immune to all bacteria.

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Maybe you make plants
that are immune to all viruses.

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But why is that so interesting?

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It means that we
are not a unique solution.

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It means you can create
alternate chemistries to us

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that could be chemistries
adaptable to a very different planet

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that could create life and heredity.

246
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The second experiment,

247
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or the other implication
of this experiment,

248
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is that all of you, all life
is based on 20 amino acids.

249
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If you don't substitute two amino acids,

250
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if you don't say ATXY,
if you say ATCG + XY,

251
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then you go from
20 building blocks to 172,

252
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and all of a sudden you've got
172 building blocks of amino acids

253
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to build life-forms
in very different shapes.

254
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The second experiment to think about
is a really weird experiment

255
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that's been taking place in China.

256
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So this guy has been transplanting
hundreds of mouse heads.

257
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Right?

258
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And why is that an interesting experiment?

259
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Well, think of the first
heart transplants.

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One of the things they used to do

261
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is they used to bring in
the wife or the daughter of the donor

262
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so the donee could tell the doctors,

263
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"Do you recognize this person?
Do you love this person?

264
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Do you feel anything for this person?"

265
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We laugh about that today.

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We laugh because we know
the heart is a muscle,

267
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but for hundreds of thousands of years,
or tens of thousands of years,

268
00:13:17,320 --> 00:13:20,216
"I gave her my heart.
She took my heart. She broke my heart."

269
00:13:20,240 --> 00:13:21,616
We thought this was emotion

270
00:13:21,640 --> 00:13:24,880
and we thought maybe emotions
were transplanted with the heart. Nope.

271
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So how about the brain?

272
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Two possible outcomes to this experiment.

273
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If you can get a mouse

274
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that is functional,

275
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then you can see,

276
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is the new brain a blank slate?

277
00:13:41,280 --> 00:13:43,320
And boy, does that have implications.

278
00:13:45,120 --> 00:13:46,320
Second option:

279
00:13:46,800 --> 00:13:48,920
the new mouse recognizes Minnie Mouse.

280
00:13:49,760 --> 00:13:51,856
The new mouse
remembers what it's afraid of,

281
00:13:51,880 --> 00:13:53,576
remembers how to navigate the maze,

282
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and if that is true,

283
00:13:56,040 --> 00:13:59,360
then you can transplant
memory and consciousness.

284
00:14:01,080 --> 00:14:03,496
And then the really
interesting question is,

285
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if you can transplant this,
is the only input-output mechanism

286
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this down here?

287
00:14:09,440 --> 00:14:12,136
Or could you transplant
that consciousness into something

288
00:14:12,160 --> 00:14:14,136
that would be very different,

289
00:14:14,160 --> 00:14:15,416
that would last in space,

290
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that would last
tens of thousands of years,

291
00:14:17,520 --> 00:14:19,520
that would be a completely redesigned body

292
00:14:19,544 --> 00:14:23,224
that could hold consciousness
for a long, long period of time?

293
00:14:26,040 --> 00:14:28,080
And let's come back to the first question:

294
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Why would you ever want to do that?

295
00:14:32,320 --> 00:14:33,576
Well, I'll tell you why.

296
00:14:33,600 --> 00:14:35,320
Because this is the ultimate selfie.

297
00:14:36,000 --> 00:14:37,800
(Laughter)

298
00:14:38,440 --> 00:14:41,000
This is taken from six billion miles away,

299
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and that's Earth.

300
00:14:44,800 --> 00:14:46,000
And that's all of us.

301
00:14:47,240 --> 00:14:50,760
And if that little thing goes,
all of humanity goes.

302
00:14:52,320 --> 00:14:54,536
And the reason you want
to alter the human body

303
00:14:54,560 --> 00:14:57,336
is because you eventually
want a picture that says,

304
00:14:57,360 --> 00:14:59,296
that's us, and that's us,

305
00:14:59,320 --> 00:15:00,736
and that's us,

306
00:15:00,760 --> 00:15:03,880
because that's the way humanity
survives long-term extinction.

307
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And that's the reason why it turns out

308
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it's actually unethical
not to evolve the human body

309
00:15:11,680 --> 00:15:15,016
even though it can be scary,
even though it can be challenging,

310
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but it's what's going
to allow us to explore, live

311
00:15:18,440 --> 00:15:20,960
and get to places
we can't even dream of today,

312
00:15:21,760 --> 00:15:25,496
but which our great-great-great-great-
grandchildren might someday.

313
00:15:25,520 --> 00:15:26,736
Thank you very much.

314
00:15:26,760 --> 00:15:32,280
(Applause)