Category Archives: Biotechnology

Biotechnology, Brain tech, Human transformation

Creating super-senses

3 Comments

Researchers are developing ways to give people superpower-like abilities such as sonar and night vision.

Sensor signals are sent to the brain via an electrode strip on the tongue, enabling people to feel images, including the sound echoes of sonar. The technology could be used to add senses, or replace them. “In testing, blind people found doorways, noticed people walking in front of them and caught balls,” the article says.

The research is funded by the US Defense Department–another sign that people are likely to try to create the enhanced combatants of Soldier, but through non-genetic means.

Biotechnology

On the way to Gattaca?

Leave a comment

Britain will allow pre-implantation genetic screening of embryos, to avoid use of those who might develop cancer in adulthood.  This marks an escalation from previous policy, which only allowed screening for fatal childhood diseases.

An ethicist at the British Medical Association denied that this was a stop down the “slippery slope.

“We do not see that today’s decision is moving towards ‘designer babies.’ There is a world of difference between a parent not wanting their child to develop breast cancer and someone wanting a child with blue eyes and blond hair.”

However, it is a world of difference marked by small and debatable gradations:

Some experts fear that as scientists discover genes affecting traits such as obesity, addiction, intelligence or height, a market in elective embryo screening may emerge — backed by evidence that selected children would be healthier, happier and more successful.

There is no clear line to be drawn.  Is it at schizophrenia?  Depression?  Homosexuality?  Some parents would act to prevent any of those, and myriad other conditions, in their child.

And what if the cancer-causing genes could be fixed?  Would that not be preferable to discarding the embryos?

Ultimately, this is another step toward the Gattaca future of genetic improvement of humans.

Incidentally, the article notes that this is not unique to Britain:

Similar embryo screening tests have been used in the United States for years. But because they are not regulated or tracked, no one knows how often they are performed or the full range of conditions being screened for.

Biotechnology

Recreating extinct animals

Leave a comment

Wired reports on an effort to recreate the genomes of extinct animals.

Last year, scien­tists working with physical DNA specimens published the sequence of a big chunk of a genetic code extracted from a frozen woolly mammoth bone. Another team recovered 40,000-year-old DNA fragments from cave bears. Other groups have gone after the DNA of extinct plants, insects, and even dinosaurs.

Though significant obstacles remain, even the Jurassic Park scenario is now seen as at least possible:

Hendrik Poinar of Canada’s McMaster University and his father, George, an expert on amber-preserved biological samples, were consultants to Steven Spielberg on Jurassic Park. “People kept asking us, ‘Is this ever going to happen?’ and we would say, ‘No, it’s never going to happen,'” Poinar recalls. “But the picture is somewhat different now.”

Ultimately, we could end up in Blade Runner territory: according to one scientist, “within the next couple of centuries humans should be able to make any creature they want.”

Biotechnology, Movies, Tyranny

Review: “V for Vendetta”

2 Comments

FORECAST SUMMARY

Event / Likelihood
Totalitarism in Britain by 2020 — very low, even decades after that date
Severe bioterror attack — medium

RATINGS
Overall rating: 5.5 (40th of 119 movies)

Futurism rating: 4
This movie is more about the politics of the present than a vision of the future. It does not attempt a meaningful depiction of how societies actually creep toward tyranny.

Entertainment rating: 7
For a movie about terrorism and oppression, this movie ducks every hard question. “Violence can be used for good,” a character states, but that idea is accepted in some form by every society. The regime depicted is sufficiently odious that resisting it is clearly moral.

Despite its imperfections, the movie is interesting as an unfolding series of mysteries, and occasionally as visual spectacle.

Plausibility rating: 7
Unlikely, but there are no inherent or absolute reasons it could not occur.

(A sidenote: we know where the crowd got its masks, but it was impressive that they managed to assemble the entire Zorro ensemble.)

Approach to the future
Vehicle for views on current events

TOPICS DEPICTED

Tyranny

By 2020, England has fallen under control of a vicious fundamentalist Christian regime, brought to power in a climate of fear created by war and plague.

It happened very rapidly: in 2015 things seem to have been normal, and by 2018 the government was rounding up lesbians and banning Islam and many kinds of art.

The trigger was a bioterror attack that killed 80,000 people, amidst a chaotic and dangerous world situation. (The US has apparently dissolved into civil war.)

Such a calamity would trigger drastic responses, but they would flow from the nature of the society afflicted. A stable Western European nation is unlikely to fall so far, so fast.

Above all, England does not have a reservoir of extremists from which to draw, particularly in the religious sphere. A fundamentalist regime is far more plausible in the US, where the “Christian right” has heavily politicized itself. Even here, only a minority of that group has truly authoritarian tendencies.

A much better depiction of tyranny in England is the Richard III set in an alternate 1930s, when that country had some actual fascists. Christian extremism is more the forte of the US, and is well-depicted in the futurist film The Handmaid’s Tale.

Bioterror
Thousands are killed by an engineered bioterror agent.

This is all too plausible. Biotech capabilities are steadily growing, and the possibility of garage bioterror looms, potentially enabling a situation like that in Twelve Monkeys.

Biotechnology, Espionage

Cyborg spy insects

2 Comments

The New Scientist blog reports that ever-amusing DARPA is working on organically combining electronics with insects in order to create controllable insects, presumably for espionage or recon.

A cyborg roach appeared in The Fifth Element, carrying a spy camera until it met a sorry fate.

The intersections of infotech and biotech are growing, but the likelihood of useful cyborg insects still seems low. The FuturistMovies.com estimate: