[Slide 1 L6.1] Welcome back.
I'm Professor Rickus and in this part of the course, we're going to take a step back and
look at a little bit higher level and
think a little bit more about what the future might hold.
For cellular design and for biohybrid devices.
So in this lecture, we're going to talk about the concept of synthetic life.
[Slide 2] We're going to talk about: what is synthetic life?
What is the potential?
And perhaps begin to start to think about what are some of the limits.
And lead us in to the upcoming lectures on ethics and technology in society.
[Slide 3] So, if we think about our natural world and put this on a scale
going from small scale or small complexity to a larger scale.
And in our natural world let's start with viruses.
Viruses going on to cells increasing in size scale to organs and
entire organisms, including us and other primates.
And moving on even farther into thinking about, at the other end of the size scale,
the sort of universe and beyond our planet, okay.
Now we can put these dividing lines in biology.
We typically put the boundary of non-living and
living between viruses and cells.
Cells are considered the fundamental unit of life.
So what exists on the other end of our natural world?
Well, is that our synthetic world?
So on the same size scale,
on the size scale of viruses, we have a lot of nanotechnology.
Such as these multi-functional nanoparticles that we see here.
On the other end of scale and complexity, we also have on our non-living end,
perhaps our computers and robots that are being engineered.
So the question is, what lies in this space between these boundaries?
And this is where synthetic life exists.
Between the boundary of what considered living but
that was not naturally occurring.
And so, it's very, I think, important to think about how do we get into that space?
And what takes us there?
So, the different ways that you can enter this space.
You could re-engineer living organisms, we can re-engineer existing bacteria,
introduce new genes into them, for example, to make a cellular biosensor.
We can also push our existing technologies
into from non-living into what might be considered living.
So what are the fields that are really pushing this and are sort of set-up
to potentially cross this boundaries? These these fields include synthetic biology.
Right, engineering cells at the level of DNA.
And re-engineering and even creating cells from scratch by writing new DNA codes.
Tissue and neuro engineering, such as the brain computer interface and
the neural implants that we've been discussing.
Artificial intelligence pushing our computers and
robotics into a living space and even nanotechnology.
If our viruses are at the boundary of living into our cells, right?
We could also use nano and micro-technology to increase
complexity into a space with emergent properties of living cells.
So this really brings up some questions about what defines these boundaries,
and they're actually more difficult to articulate then you might think.
It brings up some fairly profound questions
that are very important to examine in this field about what is life?
How do we know when we've generated new synthetic life?
Is it important to know that and what does that mean?
What is it mean to be human?
And even what is it mean to be synthetic?
And does synthetic necessarily mean unnatural?
And so I would argue it's very important to know
when we've crossed these boundaries.
And in order to know that, we need to know where the boundaries exist.
[Slide 4] But let's first talk about why we might do some of these things.
And here's a quote that I really love
that really sort of highlights the importance of liberal arts
in these areas of bioengineering in which we've been talking.
So people especially early twenty-first century people,
live in a world where strangeness lurks just beyond our frame of vision.
But we can't see it by looking straight at it.
I think that's really profound.
Because this is where I think our literature, our imagination, our movies
and the arts provide this looking glass to be able to imagine the far future.
And think about how we should and
shouldn't be guiding some of our technologies.
[Slide 5] Let's think about the science fiction and the science where it is now.
So in neural implants, right,
probably one of the things you first go to is the matrix, right?
These neural implants where we can implant all these things and create some
of these images in an actual entire reality around ourselves with these implants.
Well what does today's science look like, so
here I have an example from the Center for Implantable Devices here at Purdue.
And here is a neural implant that can record and
stimulate and up to eight of these in one single patient.
So certainly neural implants are regenerating the Matrix, no we're not.
But neural implants certainly exist today and are being designed for the why.
[Slide 6] Why are we doing these sorts of things?
Well, today why we're doing it, one of the reasons for
example is that 1 percent of the world has epilepsy.
And about 30 to 40 percent of epilepsy patients have drug resistant seizures.
And neural implants are providing a lot of potential hope for
patients to possibly control and correct these seizures for these individuals.
[Slide 7] So what about the brain computer interface, right?
What's the science fiction, right?
Science fiction might look something like the amped war exoskeleton in
James Cameron's movie Avatar, right?
So what is modern science look like?
Well here, I don't know if you noticed, but in one of the recent World Cup
events was kicked off by a mind controlled exoskeleton, right?
So, and this is what that looks like in real, today science.
And this patient was this individual was able to kick off
the first soccer ball in the world cup event.
[Slide 8] So why do we do these things?
We do these things to restore the ability to experience and engage with the outside
world to people who have lost or have perhaps never had that ability.
This could be an auditory, it can be controlling the physical world, but
this is why we develop these sorts of things, all right?
[Slide 9] Let's talk about Tissue Engineering Organs in the Lab.
What's the science fiction, right?
I love this reference to the old Mel Brooks movie here, right?
So this might be our science fiction.
Bringing life back to life or from assembled parts,right?
So what does the real science look like?
Well, here's an example of an engineered human brain from my lab, a mimic.
And why are we doing this, right?
So we're doing it to watch tumor cells from a human patient migrate
along this pseudo-artificial blood vessel in this engineered brain.
[Slide 10] So why do we do these sorts of things, we do this because
the median survival after diagnosis for glioblastoma is 15 to 18 months.
It's a very devastating cancer.
And the current cell and animal models just simply don't yet
predict therapy outcomes in humans.
And we haven't moved that marker of 15 to 18 months,
survival marker, very significantly in a while.
So this is one of the things that motivates some of the technology that
we've been talking about, like tissue engineering.
[Slide 11] Synthetic biology, writing genomes.
What's the science fiction?
One example might be some of the crazy organisms that were found in the books and
the movies from The Hunger Games.
Where is the science?
Well, in 2010, the first genome transplant of a fully chemically
synthesized genome was produced.
So we're now at the scale where entire genomes can be written, and
perhaps novel genomes can now be written.
[Slide 12] So why is this technology being pushed forward?
Well, because one of the many reasons, but one is the humans
global extraction of earth's raw materials is 70 billion metric tons a year.
When we start to look at the energy requirements and
the mass requirements, and raw material requirements of the Earth,
we need to be able to move forward in a much more sustainable way, and
control these cycles in our in our system.
[Slide 13] So bringing back to where we were and thinking about these boundaries, again.
So as we move forward, I think it's very critical that we,
as engineers, consider these boundaries.
Really understand in reflecting when and how we're crossing them, and
what that means.
[Slide 14] And we can even begin to think about what a working definition of life is.
And again, this is very difficult.
And it's very critical for
thinking about when we've crossed this boundary from living and non-living.
So in my class on campus, I often ask students and
will ask you to do the same, of developing a working definition of life.
And there's many different ways to do this.
You can do this based on function.
You may say that living organisms simply must metabolize, evolve and replicate.
You could look at it from a thermodynamics point of view,
a control systems point of view.
For higher organisms, a cognitive point of view, being goal-oriented or self-aware.
And some people will argue that a working definition of life
even has components that are beyond our current capability of understanding.
[Slide 15] So this brings up many questions about what makes us human.
Is it hardware or is it software?
Is our humanity in our biological substrate or is it in the software?
Is the humanity in the input and output functions and
interactions with our outside world and other people?
And this will become increasingly important as things like our biohybrid
devices, evolve in their complexity and in their integration.
For example, implantable devices in the human body.
When are we modified to the point that we ourselves are synthetic?
And what about synthetic manipulation of higher function?
What about neural implants that modulate memory, emotion and intention?
What about identity, free will, and responsibility?
So as we think about the future of biohybrid devices of which
the simple sorts of things that we've talked about
are potential precursors to some of the things that we imagine and
consider in science fiction.
[Slide 16] And we're going to go a little bit more into this in our upcoming lectures.
And this lecture was to really frame our discussion about technology in society and
putting our biohybrid devices into context of ethics.
And how we assess risks and safety and
what frameworks do we use for evaluation of our biohybrid devices.
I hope to see you next time.