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Ramez Naam
Hi there, good morning. I am the author of a book called More than Human, using biotechnology to enhance human performance. I am going to talk about the next 10 years of human ehnancement, and the underlying factors, the motivations, opportunities and the needs. Why do we need to transform humans, why would we invest in hundreds of billions of R&D for this? What can we change about human beings? How can we make a change in human abilities?
The motivation for most of the world is medical. Very few people think about enhancement, a lot of people think about healing. Most of society thinks about a baseline, and a human who is below that baseline. There's this human, and lifting them up to baseline, and that's acceptable. But if you have a nomral human, elevating a human is considered questionable. That's just how people think right now. We have gadgets like the iphone that are clear enhancers of human ability, it allows us to do things that we could not do a decade ago. External enhancements are considered different, for some reason, while internal are questionable.
Doesn't that mean the idea of enhancement at a serious risk? Well, no. Because technologically and scientfically, the power to heal is the power to enhance. Within the medical motivation, there's a subset of this, where the population is aging. This is the percentage of U.S. citizens over 65 ages, in 2035 it will be about 20%. It is not a phenomenon in the U.S. only, it's not just in the developed world. In China, the median age will pass the U.S. median age in 2025. The world is getting older. This is getting relevant because age is a good predictor. Medical expenditures get larger with age. At the early 20s it's a few thousand dollars per year. Past 75, it's about $16k+. A huge expenditure is on the elderly. A huge variety of abilities are lost: mental,sensory, etc, across the board. It's good news for us, bad for them. Good news for transhumanism because it's a development science to help enhance these abilities in humans as well. It's order trillions of dollars. There's $2T in healthcare spending this year. Worldwide healthcare spending is $4T. There will be 40 to 60T dollars spent on healthcare. Not all of it is going into R&D. That's the size of the market.
To visualize this, if you have a stack of $100 bills, a million dollars can fit into a briefcase. A billion dollars is several pallets, maybe filling the stage here. A trillion stage here, would fill this entire room with $100 bills. We're talking about 50 trillion dollars, or 60 trillion dollars in healthcare spending. Just one year of healthcare spending is larger than all of these companies combined, even when BP stock was 30 or 40 dollars.
So there's lots of moral and ethical reasons to develop these med techs. What's the opportunity? Gaining knowledge and learning about human construction. Richard Dawkins was asked for an essay to describe biology in one word: digital. Biology is primarily information. It follows hte patterns of information technology. I saw Craig Venter speak a year ago. The number one research tool he has is the computer. The sequencer workstation is mostly a computer. Mostly the sequencing lab is like a data center. There's lots of cost drops for these.
Genome costs for the last 20 years have dropped by about a factor of a thousand. It costs about five thousand dollars today. So that's a drop in a bucket even towards that original million. George Church is a polymath in many ways. He wants to sequence 100k human genomes by 2020. He's setting the goal too easy. Full genome costs, all base pairs are going to cost at most $100, or maybe $50, maybe some markup as a consumer. That's a steep decline. For a fraction that we spend on healthcare, we're going to sequence millions of genomes. This applies more than healthcare. We should be able to sequence every species. There's only 5,000 mammalian species,so that's $500k. That's about the deep water horizon- that's.. what? wtf
In 2020, that's the cost of sequencing all the species. The actual organism, lots of genes. Lots of data to mine. We'll do large scale genome analysis, association studies, to correlate the factors of these genes. To correlate their phenotypic expression. There's different variants of rice. Here's some known things about what fractions of variance that genes account for. There's height, physical traits, skin color, muscular strength, and then it gets down into mental stuff, like IQ, most assessments find it a litlte higher than this. Extroversion, introversion, personality traits, genetic. How adventerous are you? 60% genetic. There's certain involvement of this. Happiness is about 50% genetic. There's no other factor that comes close to genetics than happiness. Even this slide is a lowball. This is a bell shaped population, how much is variance accounted for. What's possible?
If you want an example of that, look at the family tree of dogs. Dogs come from wolves a few thousand generations ago. You see the variation between poodles, retrievers, lab dogs, these are all varfiants on the genes in wolves about 10k years ago, or a few thousand generations. We can make those changes very quickly. Not even inserting transgenes into the human population.. but we'll do that too.
As they say in G. I. Joe, knowing is half the battle. You can edit the genome. The synthetic genome. I almost put Venter's head on top of the Economist' cover. He's the nicest, most humble guy. Also a transhuman, I would say. The technical feat was in being able to print a very long contiguous strand of DNA, about 1.1M bp long. A 1000x improvement. In 2020, we'll be able to do 1B bp. There's 250M bp in the largest human chromosome. In 2018, we'll print entire human chromosomes. We'll be able to babies with custom chromosome creations. Viruses are machines in nature that can carry information in the form of genes into living cells, and they are the impetus behind gene therapy. Gene therapy has not gone perfectly, it's starting to working.
Last year, a group at Mount Cyanide, had success in restoring vision in retinal damage by inserting genes. Phase two study last month was completed for heart failure, with gene therapy. There's a couple hundred gene therapy studies in progress, and 40 to 50 are in phase 2a, medium scale human safety trials. So, for people with muscular dystrophy, there's IGF1, if you take IGF1 and change it in mice, knockout mice are very small, mice with two copies are very large. This is the cross-section in normal mice. The same genetic changes can be used. Myostatin. It has about double the muscle mass. This is the .. Hugo .. 1964 olympic winner. He generates more red blood cells. That's why he was an excellent endurance runner.
Lee Sweeney.
"About half the emails I get now are from athletes." - Lee Sweeney
There are possibilities beyond that. We're working on the genetic cascades that can take that off, in species like humans. In summary, we're approaching editable genomes, and a huge market. The genes are the bottleneck, printing genes, editing genes in humans. If there's one variable here, it's how good will we get at gene therapy in humans, and I'm optimistic about that.
Thank you very much.
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