Below is an essay exploring Advanced Bioengineering that replicates life.
The value of the 1982 film Blade Runner — an epic cinematic masterpiece — goes beyond the gloomy aesthetics of rainy LA and magnificent score by Vangelis. Blade Runner is fundamentally a contemplation of bioethics.
Ridley Scott, inspired by legendary writer Philip K. Dick, depicted how the ability to create human identical synthetic beings called replicants put into question the very notion of humanity.
Lab-synthesized body parts, assembled into living beings which could breathe, think, eat, bleed and die, resembled humans so closely that, once replicants obtained memories, the already blurred line between “us” and “them” became nearly ungraspable.
The replicants could, however, outperform humans in several ways. Their genetic makeup was modulated to give them superior strength, speed, agility, resilience, and intelligence.
Replicants did have two major disadvantages — their life span was as short as four years and they couldn’t feel empathy.
Neither of these traits prevented humans from abusing replicants as off-world laborers, combat soldiers, and sex slaves.
The explorers of the ethical limitations and benefits of genetic engineering will always have new challenges to meet, and adopting new definitions and beliefs is a natural part of the scientific game which tests the community’s rigidity of views.
For instance, the discovery of epigenetics made it difficult for us to continue to refer to DNA as just “the instruction book of nature” given how fluid gene expression turns out to be.
These kinds of humbling discoveries keep reminding us that no matter how much we know — the day when we feel that we know enough may never come.
Nature may never be fully understood but it can be fully experienced, therefore we will keep testing and building new things in this playground.
Is it possible to engineer humanoids that are “more human than humans” and what are the must-haves for anyone who would attempt to synthesize human-like life in a lab?
Before we go over the replicants’ manufacturing lifecycle, I want to give credits to the group of scientists that in 2021 synthesized what is known to be the first programmed organic creatures.
Those “living machines” a.k.a. Xenobots were created using a simulation run by a supercomputer and using some few thousand cardiac and skin cells from a Xenopus laevis frog, which the bots got their name from.
The function of cardiac cells is to generate force and motion, and skin cells typically envelope and protect other tissues.
Just these two types of tissue, structured and assembled creatively, were enough to generate a new life form that could move independently in a dish, move objects out of its way, reproduce, and then with an additional set of cells, could also obtain memory.
Described superficially (roughly), the creation of xenobots looked something like this:
1.The functionality for a synthetic biological organism is decided. The bots have to move and have enough force to be able to move other objects.
2.Cell types that could best fulfill that functionality are chosen. Do cardiac and skin cells provide what is needed for movement?
3.Computational modeling is performed. How do we arrange these cells to ensure they can and will perform the desired actions?
4.Cells are assembled according to the model’s predictions.Cells are released into a test environment.
The process is far more complex and resource-intensive, but it essentially boils down to one question:
“How to arrange these atoms to make them behave the way I want?”. The rest is a matter of how hard you are willing to try.
The team behind the Xenobots’ creation recently founded The Institute of Computationally Designed Organisms which aims to further the work related to creating living machines.
If Xenobots are possible, human-like living machines could be possible, too.
The process of synthesizing a replicant will look similar to the creation of Xenobots, but the level of complexity will increase significantly.
Process of Synthesizing a Replicant
The functionality for a synthetic biological organism is decided.
Replicants’ genetic makeup needs to meet certain phenotypic criteria (increased muscle strength, intelligence, healing etc.) — so base human DNA will be modified for this genetic enhancement using genome editing techniques available today.
Aside from generating a DNA update, we need to map out all the biological processes of the future replicant, including those associated with cognition which will also be based on what we know about such processes in humans.
Cognitive neuroscience studies the mechanisms underlying the exclusively human ability for speech and abstract thinking.
Those mental events need to be quantified, which is the topic of an ongoing debate among the greatest minds in the field of artificial intelligence about how complexity of the human mind can be expressed computationally.
Roger Penrose and Marvin Minsky express interesting views on consciousness and on its computability.
Penrose believes in new physics one day unveiling the mysteries of consciousness. Minsky seems to believe that we should not shy away from the complexity of the human ability to think and perceive, and evetually, giving machines structures replicating processes in the mind, machines’ output will be fairly similar to humans in terms of perception.
Without a doubt, gathering qualitative insights on the human mind is a hard challenge to accomplish.
Multiphoton microscopy is currently used for harvesting quantitative data on processes in the brain, and this process is called neuroimaging.
Cells are selected. Induced pluripotent stem cells were discovered roughly 20 years ago and have already enabled regenerative medicine to create organic human tissue of any type.
The cells can be instructed to differentiate into skin, heart, neuronal tissue… whatever you tell them to become.
Computational modeling is performed. This requires the capacity to perform high-fidelity system dynamics simulations. It is difficult to simulate processes of biological systems, especially sophisticated ones because such interactions are not always fully understood and are non-linear.
However, technology like AlphaFold’s that can predict protein folding will provide synthetic biology with some shortcuts in the design of novel biological organisms.
Quantum biology will deepen the understanding of the mysterious and beautiful dynamics of organic life, and accelerate the possibility for high scale simulations to take place, which will likely be made using quantum computers.
Cells are assembled according to the design generated by the computer model. The replicant will be created using a combination of bioprinting technologies and bioink containing induced pluripotent stem cells (those mentioned earlier that can be programmed to differentiate into any type of cell). MIT Self-Assembly lab 4D develops programmable materials and 4D printing.
“In 4D printing, the resulting 3D shape can morph into different forms in response to environmental stimulus, with the 4th dimension being the time-dependent shape change after the printing.
It is therefore a type of programmable matter, wherein after the fabrication process, the printed product reacts with parameters within the environment (humidity, temperature, voltage, etc.) and changes its form accordingly” — Wikipedia.
This video illustrates how material with embedded transformation from one shape to other acts.
This additional dimension in 4D printing combined with color coded bioink of tissue preprogrammed to respond to electromagnetic radiation of certain frequencies will resolve the orchestration problem of bioprinting complex multilayer tissue and tissue vascularization.
Have a look at this video:
A 3D bioprinting method invented at the Wyss Institute and Harvard SEAS embeds a grid of vasculature into thick tissue laden with human stem cells and connective matrix. Printed within a custom-made housing, this method can be used to create tissue of any shape.
Once printed, an inlet and outlet own opposite ends are perfused with fluids, nutrients, and cell growth factors, which control stem cell differentiation and sustain cell functions. By flowing growth factors through the vasculature, stem cells can be differentiated into a variety of tissue cell types.
3D printing already today can be performed at nano scale.
The Product Life Cycle of Replicants will Have Four Main Phases:
1. Research, Design and Prototyping.
2. Production — development of the biological replicants
3. Programming — uploading general skills such as motion, perception and speech as well as a combination of job based skill sets.
4. Testing — evaluation of assembly quality and skills set.
Once a humanoid is made, it will need to learn how to move and do other day-to-day things that humans normally learn throughout childhood. That being said,by the time replicants can be created, rapid task-oriented programming via brain-computer interface will give replicants the possibility to learn basic as well as task-specific skills quickly.
Regardless of how and when the technology will advance far enough to create replicants, we still face the question “Of whether a constructed being should count as a person?”