Re-engineering the human body
“The genetic code is 3.6 billion years old. It’s time for a rewrite.” - Tom Knight, MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab
I view the human body (and indeed all carbon-based life) as a complex machine. Just as a computer is a complicated piece of hardware (silicon and metal) controlled by software (encoded in hard drives and executed by a Central Processing Unit), a life form is a complicated piece of hardware (carbon-based molecules, lipids, proteins) controlled by software (encoded in DNA and executed by protein assembly and replication).
Consider that computer software is created intentionally by design for a specific purpose. The code is open and changeable by human designers, and can then be compiled into machine-readable form (binary, 1s and 0s). The biological software was designed over billions of years of natural selection, acting through cellular mechanisms such as mutation and reuse-after-modification of existing components. It is “compiled” in DNA form and the genetic code is not human-readable, but in principle it is possible to reverse-engineer the biological software and then modify it however we like. This means we can re-engineer the human body to behave however we want (or at least, to do anything that is physically possible).
I am not alone in this view. The Synthetic Biology (SynBio) movement, led by visionaries such as Craig Venter (who first deciphered the human genome) and Tom Knight (a professor at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab), aims at the intentional design (and redesign) of biological systems. Aubrey de Grey, a controversial biomedical gerontologist, aims to extend the human lifespan up to 1,000 years.
I have been mulling around an idea in my head the past few weeks. Since the human body was designed by natural selection, it is not “perfect.” Just as in the software world, the human body has “bugs,” unintended and undesirable behaviors. These bugs are not due to human error, as in computer software, but due to the unguided process of natural selection. We can correct nature’s bugs with guided bioengineering. That is, we can apply “bug fixes” to the human genetic code.
I would like to launch a web site called BodyBugzilla. This is named after Bugzilla, a web-based bug-tracking system. On BodyBugzilla, anybody can submit a “bug report.” Complaints can be about anything: pointless pain and suffering, body parts that don’t function correctly, weird signal processing in the brain, vulnerability to viruses, lack of robustness in harsh environments, etc. By filtering through these bug reports, moderators can assign them to appropriate categories, classify their severity, or determine whether they are bugs or enhancement requests. Bug resolutions can also be posted: existing cures for diseases, cause of the bug, possible fixes for the bug, etc.
Ethicists may cringe at deliberately tampering with the human genetic code. But they ought to cringe even more at the needless pain and suffering that millions of people suffer every day, simply because nature was a little sloppy with its security or with its modification of basic body shapes. Why not do away with wisdom teeth, or smelly toes, or nearsightedness, or joint pain, or horrific diseases? If we know how to fix these things, I believe we have an ethical imperative to fix them.
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