I'm Dustin Grinnell and this is curiously Ever since I was a
kid, I loved reading science based thrillers and cautionary
tales about science and technology.
I grew up on a steady diet of books by Michael Crichton, Ray
Bradbury, George Orwell, and Aldos Huxley.
I'm a huge fan of scifi movies too, especially new films like
Her Arrival and Ex Machina that depict how realistic seeming
science and tech would affect us all.
In many popular scifi stories, I'm usually both fascinated and
horrified by the possibilities of what I'm seeing.
It was thrilling to watch scientists harvest ancient
dinosaur DNA and use genetic engineering to bring them back
to life, but terrifying to see them start using humans as a
food source. It was fun to imagine your
phone's talking assistant software organizing your life
like in the movie Her, until I watched somebody fall in love
with it. And who wouldn't want to adopt
an alter ego and play out some fantasies in a virtual world?
Sounds great until you see a movie like Surrogates, in which
most people retreat from the real world and spend most of
their time living in virtual spaces.
The best scifi makes us ask questions.
How close are we to realizing these scientific breakthroughs?
What are the ethical implications at play?
Even if we can create a certain technology, should we?
To help us sort through questions like these, I invited
Doctor Nisha Iyer onto the show. Doctor Iyer is a biomedical
researcher and an assistant professor at Tufts University.
Who teaches the class to 1st year biomedical engineering
students, in which she explores the science and technology in
five popular scifi movies, Jurassic Park, Gattica, Never
Let Me Go, Ghost in the Shell, The 1995 version, and Avatar.
In her class, Doctor Iyer engages students in discussions
about genetic engineering, cloning, artificial organs,
space travel, stem cells, and more.
How close were you to realizing the scientific advances depicted
in the scifi movies we love? How might these advances affect
our everyday lives? What are the possible unintended
consequences? Who would regulate it?
What laws may need to exist? Is developing this science or
tech even a good idea? We discussed all of these
questions and more in today's episode with Dr. Nisha Eyer.
Nisha Eyer, Welcome to the podcast.
Hi, nice to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Yeah. So I first heard of you on NPR's
Brilliant Boston segment. I think it was.
And you're a biomedical engineer, and you are teaching
first year engineering students a class that is very interesting
and caught the attention of this program.
And I listened to it with rapt attention because the subject is
the use of science fiction movies to undergraduate
engineering students to understand how plausible the
science is within those movies, and then some of the ethical
implications for that technology.
So I was hoping maybe you could just talk about how this began.
How does a biomedical engineer such as yourself get to teaching
scifi movies to undergraduate engineering students?
Yeah, thanks so much for that question because I get a lot of
questions about it. I love talking about this class
because I think growing up everyone watches scifi movies.
It's probably the way that a lot of scientists and even
individuals get a lot of their ideas sparked on science and
what is possible and how that science.
Interacts with the lives of people.
And it might be dramatized people, but people nonetheless.
And so those interactions on the screen, I think, really inform
what laypeople, students, families, people who are not
scientists, really think about science and interact with
science. So for me, as someone who enjoys
watching these films, thinks really deeply when I am watching
things on the screen, using that as an entree, as an
introduction, an accessible way to start talking about these
topics. And organizing these scientific
shops in a way that is not only accessible but makes sense and
starts to build from, well, this is a really high, high level way
that science can interact in the world and potentially in very
dramatic, crazy ways that then give rise to these amazing
narratives, these these stories that we get to tell.
But then how do you breakdown what might be a really, really
small component of these films? Just a concept or an idea or a
technology? And really think about how
possible is it to make that technology?
How would we as engineers or as students, how would you go about
making that technology in the film?
Or is it possible? And if it's not possible, then
what are we doing right now that's kind of getting to the
things that are possible or that would have very similar roles?
And so my class is Scifi bioengineering.
And again, the idea is to really introduce engineering students.
And these are students that are coming in with no other
backgrounds. There are high school students
that come from all over the world.
They've never taken engineering class before for the most part.
And they're still taking these really basic science, math, very
basic kind of sciences to get that foundation.
And this class is really to just get them excited about
engineering. How do we as engineers think
about technology and developing technology and how do we use?
What we know to build these things and then how are these
things then interacting with society?
So engineering as a subject is an applied science as opposed to
basic science, which is learning more about things.
And as engineers, I think our role is to build things for
people and that human science interaction is something that
engineers work on, that's in our careers.
And that is so much the story of scifi films, right, How science
interacts with people and how those interactions.
Can do again wild crazy stories. Yeah.
And as a science fiction lover myself, you know, I grew up on,
you know, Ray Bradbury and Michael Crichton.
And I read books like Jurassic Park.
And I read it with great interest because it does.
It's about application of imaginative technologies that
are usually just like a little bit out of reach.
But I think one thing Michael Crichton did, especially, it was
a sense of realism in the books. In the movie, it's a sense of
like, whoa, we're not that far away potentially.
To something like this, and it sparks the imagination of
engineers who made want to try to practically make that leap.
And I have to say, you know, when I was preparing for this
class, I hadn't read the Michael Crichton book.
I was very young. And so when it was that big
bestseller phenomenon, I was too young to really appreciate it or
read about it. And so I read the book and I was
just really astonished how close.
Some of those technologies, those methods actually are to
what we do. And when he'd written the book,
genetic science wasn't as mature as it is now, you know, in the
twenty 20s, in the early 90s. I mean, so it's really
remarkable for me to have to step back and think, you know,
this was really forward thinking, the way that companies
were going to interact with these genetic technologies, how
scientists were going to be working in the lab analyzing
data. Doing these kinds of
comparances, creating, you know, novel things.
And that was captured in a book so early.
And to what extent did scientists who grew up with this
book really see this book? And then integrate that right
into the into the science that we do?
And again, using these stories as inspiration for scientists
and how much that has now fed perhaps into the science that we
actually do today? Yeah.
I mean, if you think about Jurassic Park in general, just
in terms of sequencing and genetic engineering and.
Leading maybe to CRISPR technology and the mapping of
the human genome in general. But even more specifically and
kind of like oddly, we think about today isn't Aren't
scientists thinking about resurrecting Bully mammoths?
And George Church? I think he's a Harvard
geneticist. He's put that out there and
we're there. We're thinking about
resurrecting ancient DNA, yeah. Absolutely.
And these are exactly the topics that we talk about in class.
So, you know, you think about a film like Jurassic Park, What
are all the science that you need to know or be able to?
In order to do that and so again thinking about first year
students, that means learning about the building blocks of
life, learning about DNA, RNA, proteins, how those contribute
to, you know, the final kind of product that you might have.
How would you go about reading DNA, editing DNA, thinking about
then you know, sequencing technologies, CRISPR
technologies? How do you implement that in
embryos? So how do you genetically
engineer organisms and how are different organisms perhaps
difficult to do? It's very different, you know,
genetically engineering a single cell compared to something
that's alive or something that is an adult.
And so that there's different science that goes behind that.
What is actually possible to resurrect?
You know, how old of DNA can you resurrect?
And so dinosaur DNA is kind of getting up to the physical
reality. It's too old.
DNA is too degraded. We can't actually bring back the
dinosaurs. And so students understand,
learning that it's not possible to take Amber and, you know,
kind of the more scifi fantasy part of that film.
But what is possible is, you know, stuff a little bit newer.
So the woolly mammoth, only hundreds of thousands as opposed
to 10s of 1,000,000. And that scale is really
important when we think about that genetic material.
And Even so, it's not the woolly mammoth that's coming back, it's
a East Asian elephant that's being edited to have woolly
mammoth like features. So it's not quite the woolly
mammoth, the animals that are really being brought back,
things like the thylacine are much more recently extinct, only
a couple of less than 100 years old and those are, those are the
Tasmanian tigers. So that's one of the newest
projects I think from Colossal, this company.
And so again, thinking about how the age of DNA contributes to
kind of that quality of DNA, how that quality of DNA then really
controls what you can or cannot do with it.
So you can definitely, you know, splice in parts of the DNA or
understand what that DNA was and kind of create equivalence in
modern animals or you can take extinct animals, but the quality
has to be within a certain range.
And so these are kinds of those quality control math metrics.
These are the basic science, kind of the practicalities.
Of, you know, what would go behind something like Jurassic
Park. And you know, this can take a
long time to even get to the point where we can discuss a lot
of science goes into even just understanding what is or what is
not possible. And what can scientists do with
that? How, well, what should we then
be doing with that? So things like bringing animals
that are recently synced back into their ecosystems versus
doing things like genetically engineering mosquitoes to try to
get rid of malaria or other kinds of airborne diseases.
And that's inserting genetic material that doesn't belong in
nature into these animals potentially and changing our our
biodiversity. Changing what what, what our
ecosystems look like. And So what responsibilities do
we have when thinking about implementing these and, you
know, living creatures that are going to go out into the wild?
Yeah, first of all, bummer. No possibility for a Jurassic
Park. Sounds like there's a myth
busting aspect to to some of this work.
Yeah, absolutely. Is that I didn't.
It didn't occur to me that the. DNA would degrade to that to
such degree. But I want to pick up on that
idea of it's not could we, Should we?
It's Michael Creighton's. It's the Jurassic Park.
It's the theorist who's saying, you know, you're scientists were
so preoccupied whether or not they could, they didn't stop,
think they should, right. It's the famous line.
And I guess the question is, should we be tinkering with
genes and mosquitoes, even if it has a profound public good?
What are the possible unintended consequences?
What are the ethical implications of that?
How do you, yourself and students work through those
questions of like, even if it's plausible from an engineering or
technological perspective, should we?
Because we can't anticipate what could happen because we'd be
playing God, so to speak. Yeah, yeah.
And I mean, I think this is not just the role of scientists.
I think that's really important, right, that there is a public.
Science. There needs to be conversation
and interaction between policymakers, the public folk,
potentially individuals who live in these environments,
consideration for animals, for the plant life, entire
ecosystems and of course scientists who may or may not
feel comfortable or able to do these kinds of things.
So you know in the case of of the mosquitoes, I mean there is
right this huge public good that could be have.
You can also think about things that you know even without
genetic modification that we should and could think about the
role of humans and human induced climate change on you know
animals environments. Is that not also a way that we
are affecting you know animals in the environment.
There are now you know recent evidence that there's genetic
drift in animals that live in urban versus rural or you know
non human occupied areas so that by just living we are you know,
in the way that humans live that we are.
We're not actively, but we are certainly changing the
trajectories of different species and their evolution
right by virtue of being near. Us also in some cases putting
our own species at risk with like infectious diseases where
there's less kind of forested area, so now.
And invasive species as well. You know a lot of the public
health problems with mosquitoes, ticks.
You think about the insects that are decimating tree populations
or having agricultural impacts. In waterways and in land, all of
those are broad and moved by people into places that they
don't belong and they're causing problems.
So, you know, outside of just the science, just by being human
and living our human lives, we are, you know, making these
dramatic changes. So how are any of those
different from perhaps putting a genetically modified mosquito?
And, and I don't know the answer to that.
I'm just suggesting, you know, that these are questions that
exist beyond kind of the scifi. Genetic modification of animals
or anything, These are things that we already do and that
people are already discussing without that kind of very
poignant immediacy of, you know, this is an intentional plan as
opposed to things that are already happening.
And so I think it's important to think about that in a balanced
way, right? This is an intentional thing
that we could do maybe put in modified mosquitoes and there is
huge public health benefits. Thinking about the cons of doing
that, what potential things could go wrong and how do you
potentially mitigate harms? But also, outside of this
context, what are topics and things that we already see in
society that very closely mimic what could be happening?
And if you care about this, but you don't care about those other
things, then what kind of ethical frameworks are you
working in? Are you only concerned because
it's scientists who are doing it?
Or are you concerned about kind of the larger impact that humans
have on ecosystems beyond kind of just that single case of, you
know, genetic modification? You know, one thing I love about
the movie Jurassic Park, and there's that scene where
Malcolm, the chaos there is, delivers that famous line.
What I love about that scene too, is that there's multiple
representations at the table. So there's two scientists,
there's one mathematician, there's like the lawyer, and
who's like a layperson, and there's the founder.
And they all have their own backgrounds.
And what I'm getting at is like, why does it often seem like the
ethicist? Or the philosopher and the
scientists aren't always in the same room at the origin of the
technology or the scientific advancement.
Because that's I think, what your class is sort of doing,
right? It's like, let's think about the
science and the ethics and the unintended consequences all at
the same time at the inception of the technology, because I
think that's what you're. I think that's one of the things
I'm trying to do with my students, certainly, you know,
at the beginning of this career that they're going to have and
their decision to become engineers.
Thinking ahead of time what, what and how they could be
putting science into the world and how we should be thinking
about things. And I don't think that that's
very often done in science education.
I think it's something that happens on the side and with
less intentionality and certainly as a consequence of
perhaps bad things happening in the world that we have these
conversations, but certainly not on the front end.
So that's definitely something that I enjoy thinking about,
enjoy doing, and I think it is. Really awesome to think that
kind of huge, big picture right at the beginning, to have that
inform and the rest of what you're studying and thinking
about how you think about things in the world.
But as the science is being incepted, I think it's really
hard, you know, as a research scientist, because you know, I
love teaching, I love this class, but I mean, at the end of
the day, I also have a lab and I also do research and I I work in
stem cell research, which has its own controversies and its
own. Kind of ethical.
A lot of ethical kind of stuff around around stem cell research
and when you're in it and you're doing the research, it's very
incremental and it's really hard, I think when you're you're
in the weeds to see the forest. And so when you're making these
incremental changes, not even one lab or one person, right?
It's a whole field. It's this disperse set of
knowledge that is being created slowly every day by individuals
in the laboratory. It's really hard to see.
Until there are these pivotal moments that happen, right?
Someone has edited an animal. Someone has implemented this in
people. Yeah.
And it takes these really proof of principle things to hit that
public consciousness, where for scientists, this is all just a
very logical incremental change onto the thing that has happened
before. But it takes those again, those
kind of really big splashes in the news media needs to pick it
up, right, Those big splashes to really hit the public
consciousness and. For then there to be that kind
of active conversation of what could be happening, because
until the science has been developed, there's not a lot of
people that are really interested in policing it.
And that's not a bad thing. And that's something we talk
about in the lab or sorry, in my course as well, you know, at
what time should there be this intervention?
Should we be slowing research down, speeding it up?
Who should be involved in these processes and to what degree do
things like? Policies that ban stem cell
research or policies that ban animal research or CRISPR
technology in certain ways. To what degree does that put us
at a competitive disadvantage if someone else in the world is
going to do it? You know, outside of the United
States, we live in a Western structure.
To what degree does that prevent us from developing lifesaving
technologies? So do we have a moral obligation
to use the technologies for good?
And is there some kind of problem that you're causing by
preventing those technologies from being developed?
These are really hard questions. And there's not a single force
that is doing that for every single field of science.
And so I think these are really great, and it's really amazing
to even bring these up to students and just have them
think about what is stopping anyone from doing anything.
And if there was something stopping scientists from moving
forward, is that a bad thing as well?
So where are we and where should we be?
Yeah. And I think that's exactly why
science fiction writers do what they do.
Because it's sort of here's a simulation, yeah, for
consideration. And in often cases, it's sort of
dystopian. It's like here are the
unintended consequences of this invention.
In this particular application, this is basically like every
Black Mirror episode. Absolutely.
And so it's sort of to like wake us up, to scare us and to say,
oh, wait, that's an eventuality. If we took this left and that
right and this left. So the story sort of gets right
in your face and says we've dramatized this potentiality and
now it's on the table for consideration.
And I love that that creates a safe space.
To talk about these things, because when you talk about it
to scientists or politicians or, you know, grant funding
agencies, the people that are funding the research, it becomes
very technical and it again loses that human aspect.
And at the end of the day, right, science does interact
with people. It interacts not only with
people, but with ecosystems, with with the planet, and
without those stories, those narratives.
To at least give us a framework to think about those
possibilities, we have to wait until it actually happens in the
world, right? For someone to really mess up
and to create some kind of huge disaster before there's
backlash. And that backlash can be
harmful. And so I think using science
fiction as a way to not only inspire and to learn, but to
also be a place where we can discuss where human characters
went wrong or where societies perhaps made poor decisions.
Is a phenomenal way for young scientists to talk about these
topics in a world that is not based on our own.
So you can bring people together from, again, multiple
backgrounds, faiths, geographic locales, and have conversations
because this is just a fictional world we're just talking about.
You know, a story, Yeah. And it becomes play.
But through play, we think really deeply about these
philosophical elements of the science that we're doing and the
ethics of it. Yeah, Which I think is really
cool. And it's not, I think, always
what science fiction writers think about.
But it's certainly one aspect outside of just the story,
right, How decisions right, can cause both good and bad.
Yeah, I think I heard a science fiction writer say once the his
whole job was to prevent civilization from destroying
itself. That's sort of Orwellian
approach, I think. Even Huxley, who wrote Brave New
World, he was asked, you know, what's the point?
What are you up to here? He said.
Don't let it happen. Don't let it happen, you know,
don't let this future society happen where we're like drugging
ourselves into bliss and and controlled.
Our minds are controlled through pleasure and and things like.
That I know. And then when you think about
what cell phones are. You know every day TikTok or
dream scrolling are we not doing that has technology not always
already. Have we not already created
technologies inadvertently that do these things that you know
someone thought it was going to be some kind of drug and it's
instead, you know this glass screen that we have so you know
again you. Mean a Black Mirror?
Yeah, exactly. It's just it's amazing that even
unintentionally, the ways that technology can lead to these
dystopian realities that people used to write about, and now we
just take its normal. It's been normalized and is that
good for the human experience? Is that bad for the human
experience? It's neither here nor there.
It can be both good and bad. And that's why ethics are
important to talk about and think about.
And I think it ends up being an individual decision, right?
What is the human experience that individuals should have or
should seek to have? Yeah, Imagine you have some
pretty stimulating philosophical discussions in your class, which
is like take a cell phone for example, obviously there are.
Many advantages, conveniences to your life.
I mean, it's amazing what you can do.
You can be in contact with the Internet and in contact with
your family and friends. Etc.
It's the history of the world is of everything is at your
fingertips. Which is incredible.
If you think about you know when we were growing up, you know you
would have to find an encyclopedia and the
encyclopedia was the best thing and you have to get every
addition to even just know things and.
The Internet is just instant knowledge at all times.
And that puts a lot of, you know, mental lift off of perhaps
remembering things. We can spend more time maybe not
reading encyclopedias and more time, you know, actually
implementing the knowledge that we've saw.
But it also means that it's a source of distraction, and it
means that attention spans are lower.
And it's not something we talk about in my class, which is more
bio focus, but it's certainly a way.
That technology interacts with people and both unconsidered but
also really amazing ways. And it's really hard.
It's really hard. It's I think that's that's what
we decide in my class. At the end of the day, we have
really great discussions and there's a lot of opinions, but
there are no answers. And I think that's also hard for
a lot of people to come up with. It's that the world is not black
and white, and science, despite being this thing that should be
black and white, is not always black and white.
The science is real or not real, but.
How it should be used and implemented in the world is
definitely up for debate. And the pace of technology has
been accelerating and so I feel like more and more every day,
every hour where having to face these complicated conversations
that become exhausting and. Isn't it better to check out or
isn't it easier? To check out.
Check out of the conversation. Yeah, and just sort of let the
technology happen and run its course, which may be running off
the rails or being harmful, but it seems like every sector of
technology, there's some sort of new philosophical unintended
consequence to grapple with, I think, yeah, there are no
answers is what you said. It's mostly about the questions,
should we, can we, how would we, could we modify this so it's
more safe? Could be do it this way instead
of that way. It's more like the questions.
Yeah. And I think science fiction, as
you mentioned, is, is dystopian mostly in nature.
It tends to be very extreme, you know, potential undintended
consequence of, you know, whatever ethical quandary the
world might be facing. So another film I do is Gattaca.
And very often when 23 Andme, that genetic and sequencing
company became public, that was the first thing everyone thought
about. Oh, Gattaca.
Right, Gattaca, this film about you know when everyone knows
what everyone's genetic code is and what your gene means for you
as a person, that it's going to control whole society and
everyone's going to start being judged by that.
But you know, to what degree are we already judged by things like
our socioeconomic status or the color of our skin?
This morning, Supreme Court struck down affirmative action,
and to what degree could have that have been encoded in the
genome? And yet with 23 new technology,
it hasn't. You know, dictated our society.
There's still privacy laws, you know, around the sharing of
genetic information. And there's also a lot more
information that we know about genetics, right.
That all of who you are is not written into your DNA.
That there's the epigenome, which a lot of students don't
know about when they come to my class.
Right. Which is the way that DNA is
modified as soon as you're born or even before that to, you
know, change how? Different proteins and therefore
cells and therefore the phenotype or the outcome of who
you are changes as a result of your life experience.
So it's not just the genome, but also that nature and that
environment and that nurture And you, not only your experience,
but the experience of your family, right, the your mother,
your father and how that information gets translated onto
that egg and sperm. So we are more than just our
DNA. And so with the way that we know
about science right now, well, we'll never have a world like
Gattaca because there's no way. To become born and be able to
read that, to know what you're going to be on the other side.
That's not how genetics works. We.
Couldn't read the epigenome potentially.
I mean, we can, but it's constantly changing.
And so how can we start modifying the epigenome?
The way that we're trying to modify the genome with CRISPR
technology is something that people are definitely looking
at. How can you do things like
potentially rapidly age or DH cells?
How can you activate regenerative pathways?
These are things that are, you know, all new science that is
still happening in the laboratory.
And as you know, people are understanding about the basic
science, trying to come up with strategies to implement that in
people. And you know, what does that
look like? And we'll have perhaps another
kind of huge wave of drugs and therapies.
Hopefully that goes after the epigenome and can help us live
healthier, better lives. It's interesting because the 1st
2 movies that. We've talked about two of five.
I think the others that you teach are never let me go Ghost
in the Shell. Not the Scarlett Johansson one,
but the earlier one. The better one the the anime.
Right. It's interesting because
Jurassic Park and Gattica, you've said of them both, we're
probably not going to have those worlds, which is great, right?
Because the world in Gattica, which is one of my favorite
movies, by the way, it's a story of genetic determinism, like you
you said, you're sort of defined by your package of genes.
Where you go in the world and that's great that we will
probably won't have a society like that because it's
completely. It's not a good society.
It's yeah, it's an immoral society that creates like caste
systems and your have or have not based on.
And yet that is a movie of optimism, right?
The protagonist is a person who, despite their subpar genome,
this congenital disease goes on to do really remarkable thing
and is the best in the company. And, you know, goes to show.
That we are not all in our DNA, and that you can do things even
in this really judgmental, reclusive society based on
technology that transcends that technology.
The human capacity is, is more than what might be written by,
by nature or otherwise. And I think that's a remarkable
thing to think about in a lot of aspects.
You know, we think a lot about the negative parts of
technologies, but how many more people in the world are educated
because of cell phones? How many?
More opportunities to people have because of the Internet, no
matter what kind of negatives, right?
The technologies as they're developed should be improving
the human condition. I think that it comes out to
being human, right? That humans have so much
creative capacity and the capacity to do so much despite
or because of the technologies that they interact with.
Yeah, that's what's remarkable about Gattaca is that it is a
dystopian world, but you have a protagonist, Ethan Hawke, who
has is so willful. And he has like a heart of a
lion, and he will not stop unless he becomes an astronaut,
which is his dream, which is statistically 0% chance he has
based on where he started genetically and in life.
And so it really is a message of the human imagination and human
will can win out despite how wrong we've gone as a society in
that world. And then that's a mention of
goodness, which is a little bit unusual in the world of science
fiction that tends to go dark on most of the scientific
advancements. But there's even a huge number
of people that are helping him in that film do this right.
There's the donor of the genetic material, Uma Thurman, who's his
girlfriend. There's the doctor that does all
of his screening for all of the testing that he needs to do as
part of the space company. And there's so many people
around him that are genetically perfect or who have been placed
in in positions of privilege in this society, who are also
trying to lift up someone and protect someone who has been
hurt by the society and who has the capacity to to grow and do
these great things. I think that also speaks to even
the privileged in society and people who benefit from
technologies or otherwise. Can see what the problems are
and can move beyond it to try to make a better world right and
try to give opportunity where it belongs.
Yeah, and this was most powerfully displayed at the very
end of the movie, right right before Ethan Hawke is about to
realize his dream of going on the space shuttle.
Spoiler I guess he and the Doctor Who's been testing him
throughout. The story and you know, making
sure he's he is who he says he is.
He does a like a surprise urine sample right before he goes on
the shuttle and this is game over for him because he didn't
expect it. Ethan Hawke could head all his
ducks in a row. He'd figure out every way to
deceive the system, but he got caught right at the end and the
Doctor just let him walk. And that was a really nice
moment because exactly to your point, even in an A moral
society. There are people who recognize
how wrong it is, and this is their little rebellion, you
know, and that's what will happen in that society.
It may not be outright revolution, although that's
probably what is going to happen eventually.
It's these little rebellions against wrongness.
Yeah, yeah. And I think that's just so much
fodder for the imagination to be able to think or and predict
where these characters are going to go in that film.
I think that's what makes it such a great film is.
You don't know if he gets caught.
You don't know what he does when he comes back.
They kind of set up these individuals and and their
stories and set up these little rebellions and you can just
imagine what will happen on the other side and and hopefully
it's a society that's better and and fuller that's.
I think the only thing we can can hope for is that hope
element. I think another nice thing about
that film, you know, that I talked about is it was again
like Jurassic Park. Thought about in the early 90s
during that the human genome project and there was a lot of
fear I think at that time is if we can know and access the human
genome then there could be all of these things that happened.
We could bring dinosaurs back. If we knew what the DNA was.
We can predict one's life and we would have the society that was
kind of unequal based on the perfect DNA that different
people have and the human genome project the 13 years in the in
the 90s to sequence the first human genome.
And it's just remarkable that there are a lot of technologies
that were developed, you know, much sooner than our ability to
actually edit the genome and and implement the stuff in Jurassic
Park. Like cell phones, for example,
Keep getting back to the cell phones that that weren't in that
movie, that the idea that you could just walk onto a spaceship
in a suit would be enough that, you know, their idea of training
was just doing a heart rate thing, so.
I think it's it's a little funny to see these anachronisms
especially in these films now living in the twenty 20s that we
have so much technology that has made things like communication
and computer technology so great And and they envisioned all of
these biological technologies being so much more advanced than
where we are on the on the computer side.
And then the bio is really much harder to implement than
technological advances that you see in in say computer science
or. Electrical engineering or other
kinds of engineering disciplines.
And that's because we just don't know very much about biology,
that just knowing about it doesn't mean that we can
engineer it or implement it in ways that actually will have an
impact on people, and that the time scale of biological
discovery is just much longer. You can throw billions of
dollars into biology research and get nothing.
Look at the race for cancer cure.
We know a lot about cancer and we still can't cure all cancer.
And that's just because biology is really hard.
And I think, again, from an educational standpoint, I think
it's really important for students to understand that,
that you need to know the biology to do kind of
bioengineering, biomedical engineering.
But we still need to know a lot about the biology.
And then even when we know about it, it's really hard to get that
engineering aspect down. It's a huge challenge and that's
what makes it so cool and interesting to work on because
this is a huge potential field. There's so many opportunities if
we can just get that stuff right.
Yeah, it's so cool and interesting, but also probably
maddening from the scientific perspective.
I studied Physiology in grad school and I was just struck by
the how the systems work together in such a complex way,
and especially just when you go into the cell and you think
about intercell signaling and. And all that.
And it's just this dizzyingly complex arrangement of systems.
And so again as a stem cell scientist, I'm constantly amazed
by this great technology that's coming out just in the last
couple of days. We have FDA approval for islet
cells. So these are the cells that
create insulin that are damaged when someone has diabetes.
So we have stem cells arrived, human cells that are potentially
going. Into patients to cure people of
diabetes. So you can get this stem cell
transplant and it'll create insulin for the patients.
They don't have to take insulin for Parkinson's patients.
So these are patients who have this degenerative disease of the
dopaminergic neurons in their brain.
So it can cause tremor, eventually paralysis and death.
So really terrible neurological disease, stem cell transplants
also happening for these cells. So can you replace those cells
that have degenerated in the patients and therefore get that
function back? And so these are huge
advancements that you know, hopefully they're in the clinic
and they're going to be available to patients.
But it took 20 years from when stem cells were first discovered
and imagined to be as part of kind of these regenerative
therapies to the point where we're still in clinical trials,
we're still just determining if they work, but that's a long
developmental time scale and a lot of people have gotten really
bored about stem cell research in the meanwhile.
So it's just remarkable to see these technologies finally
making it in the twenty 20s, these things that these films
talked about and maybe imagined early on and are just now
happening. So not organ replacement like
and never let me go per se, but definitely individual cell types
and thinking about how you can use biology in the dish to
regenerate and cure different kinds of human diseases.
Yeah, I always think about. The line in Jurassic Park, the
movie, it's nature always finds a way, right?
What a wise saying. It's, you know, especially in
biological systems, there's so much evasion and that adaptation
and like unanticipated tricks, I can imagine.
Maybe we put the insula cells in people's pancreases and
something happens that makes the whole.
Theory crash down or something, Unfortunately.
Like, yeah, I can discover that. And I mean, and if I could
probably run a whole class on this, right, like the the
science behind just how do we know those cells or what we say
they are, how do we make sure that they function?
How do you protect them from the immune environment?
What kind of transplantation strategy will use?
So what is going to be the source of your cells?
How are you going to make them then actually making them in
that process years worth of doing it.
If you finally have a technology and maybe a drug delivery system
right at some way to protect the cells from being degraded, well
then what are all of the regulatory hurdles that you need
to pose? And so these are things we're
talking about in my class, the the patenting process, what FDA
approval looks like, How do you run clinical trials?
How do you do the statistics for clinical trials, right, How much
money needs to go into all of this?
Where is that money coming from? Is it coming from companies,
governments, individuals? Who is doing the research?
And after all of that is done, you need to create something
that's cost effective, which means you need to go to Business
School too. So this isn't something that you
can just imagine. There's this whole
infrastructure around perhaps what is a single disease bearing
therapy and and this is happening in parallel for
thousands of diseases in the world and they're at various
stages, you know and I think the scale of that again thinking
about those first year engineering students is.
It's quite remarkable when you're still taking that basic
biology class and maybe if you want to take something to
clinical trial or you want to cure someone in the long run by
being a biomedical engineer. This is all of the stuff you
need to think about this huge process, this huge scientific
enterprise that we that you're entering, which I think is
pretty cool. Yeah, totally.
So I'd love to talk about Never Let Me Go.
Yeah, you know, so this is a movie where essentially.
Children are raised to be identical clones to older people
who would like to later harvest these donor clones for their
organs when they get older. So maybe you are 75 years old
and you need a new kidney. You go to your donor, you go to
your clone, and you, because they're genetically identical to
you, you can take their kidney and put it back in you as a
replacement. So people are being bred
essentially for replacement organs.
It's a pretty bleak movie. It's pretty grim and there's no
Gattaca hope to it. But where the movie, The Island
has also explored that area. Where are we there?
Because that to me, seems I could see some biotech
entrepreneur doing that right now.
Like, yeah, you know. Yeah, And so that's the crazy
thing. I think we we talk a little bit
in my class is if if we wanted to clone humans, I think we
could. Because we have active DNA, we
know how to modify the germ cells.
So these eggs and sperm like we can do in vitro fertilization
and we can think about doing something like that with people
that are alive today. I mean there are a lot of
technology that are just being developed to create kind of
artificial embryos, artificial blastoces, These are not quite
the same as the ones that. Happen naturally, but they are
starting to happen in the dish. It's just happening in just in
the last few years. So a lot of controversy around
it. A lot of people are really
concerned about where this technology can go.
But at least right now there are the glimmerings that it could
happen that we could create, you know, with your cells, say
literally thousands of clone embryos in the dish, you know,
using very commonly used technologies.
That technology isn't mature, but it is happening.
So can you create a lot of clones of humans?
Potentially, even though it's still just in development?
Can you edit those embryos? That's much harder, right?
That gets into the realm of kind of Gattica crossover.
But can you do the clone to begin with?
Genetic modification? Harder cloning more easily?
The problem is aging right now that I see it.
That you need to be able to grow these organs to a size and an
age that is going to be useful to you.
And so that is where all of kind of stem cell research runs up
against a problem where we can create really early versions of
cell types and organs. We can even do things like.
Take an organ from a pig or another person.
We can take out all of the cells and then try to replace it with
cells from you to try to create something that looks like your
cells. But the problem seems to be that
the stem cells remain really young.
It's really hard to create organs that have that same kind
of functional maturity that you do have as an adult.
And that is a big roadblock in stem cell research right now.
How do we think about going beyond kind of these very early
developing tissues? And create environments and
tissue structures that are much more like you would have in a
person. So there's a couple of routes
that you know people are looking at.
One is the engineering route, can we create materials and stem
cells and combine them in ways that kind of improve the
maturity of these tissues. So you don't need to do things
like create an organ, you could just create it say in a in a big
tank or something that would be great.
And so that's you know what tissue engineers like me try to
work on and in different ways. Another kind of route as well,
can we think about maybe not using people, but think about
genetically modifying animals to be able to grow these kinds of
tissues for us. And so that's another company
that are working on creating genetically modified pigs so
that you could grow human pig kind of chimeras to grow human
heart cells within like human hearts effectively within.
Kind of these chimeric pigs and you would be able to then grow
the pigs which grow at a much faster time scale than humans do
and get maturity and get the size bigger.
And you could then take the pig and take out the heart and be
able to transplant into that patient.
So that first pig, human heart transplant was done just last
year. In human patient it was a, it
was an end of 1 as a as a very preliminary trial and he lived
for a number of days before passing away.
He had very, very severe heart failure.
But it was the first instance of kind of using a genetically
modified animal to host these human organs and then being able
to transplant that human organ into a patient.
And so when thinking about kind of animal to human
transplantation. There are a lot of barriers.
So not only the human cell type and the immune response, but
things like, well, certain animals are receptive to
different kind of viruses. So the coronavirus is, you know,
a big example, a lot of people I think learned about bats and
viruses and how viral crossover happens.
So pigs also are susceptible to certain types of viruses.
And so the genetic modifications that they've had to do in these
pigs have to do a lot with making the immune system, the
pig to look more like the human immune system.
And also to try to reduce the potential for these kinds of
organs to get these kinds of viruses that pigs very often get
to prevent that kind of human animal crossover.
And so it's a huge number of genetic modifications they've
had to do in these animals in order to make that happen.
But this patient didn't have any kinds of problems with either
immune rejection or any of these viral things.
So he died because he was very sick and the heart eventually
didn't take. It didn't work.
But the reasons that they had genetically modified this heart,
those all worked, that the modifications worked, that the
the tissue might have worked. And as this technology matures,
perhaps this will be huge for organ transplantation.
There are thousands, millions of people that die because of heart
failure every year in the world and there's just not enough
hearts to go around. And so if we can think about
using animals to host these tissues to be able to transplant
them, that. Can save so many lives beyond
what we currently have available.
Yeah, the upside is profound. The thing about the movie like
Never let me Go is all of the, if I can call them kind of
workarounds from just creating identical clone that you spoke
of sort of preempting all the in the immological responses, the
viral responses you're trying to sort of do as best you can to be
a representative of a human. But that movie just decided
let's raise humans. Because that's probably the most
ideal place for a tissue or an organ, right?
Because one of the things I was talking about with a friend,
which I think is really interesting, is like, why
educate those clones? Because like, maybe a kidney is
healthier if they're educated, if they're in a happy setting,
in an environment, maybe if they fall in love, maybe if they have
healthy social networks, maybe it's a healthier kidney.
So that movie sort of sets a world up where.
The best donor is a donor who's living a full human life.
Yeah, which is really interesting.
And this is a conversation that we had with my students who are
really interested about the nature of animal studies, donor
transplant, the potential use of animals or, you know, people
thinking about the ethical implications of growing animals
for human tissue transplantation.
Same with human for human tissue.
And again, thinking about these parallels well.
We already use a lot of animals for agriculture, a lot of
animals already consumed every year.
So you know, really, what difference is it to use an
animal instead of for meat or for food, but instead to use
them for orchard? And that was an ethical kind of
dilemma a lot of students had who thought we definitely
shouldn't be making these clones for human health, but I don't
have any problem eating them. That's kind of one of those
moral Gray areas that people were running up against and I
think very similarly, you know, they looked at.
These we kind of did a paper on thinking about organ transplant
and animals and then look at the parallel of effectively treating
these children, calling you know putting them onto the farm quite
literally. And in this film where they're
growing up in kind of these very rural areas where they're not a
lot around a lot of non clones, that they're living full lives
but they are like living separately.
And the similarities between how we treat our animals in
agriculture today perhaps to how you know you're treating the
clones for those films, the idea that.
You know, grass fed meat is better, or animals that are
living better lives are going to be better than only for the
animals. But as an agricultural product
is not totally out there. And it's disturbing to think
about when you're making those comparisons.
And it can be hard, I think, for students to make those
connections. But I think it also helps to
create ethical clarity and where people's boundaries are.
And maybe you know what should and shouldn't be legal or
allowed or stopped in the name of progress.
I think there's just a lot of really interesting conversation
that can be had around all of this and a controversial movie
that is very dark, very non hopeful can lead to really
interesting discussions and kind of these other realms.
I imagine one of the discussions you probably have are those
really big kind of philosophical questions like what makes a good
life and why live to 100, You know, so we have these maybe
wealthy, privileged people who? Are creating clones so that they
can overcome diseases and live for a very long period of time.
You know what age is. What age is enough?
You know if you can get to 100, well why not get to 125 and
like? But why?
Why live that long? Should we?
Yeah, and I think most of biomedical history has been
let's live longer, let's live longer.
And that's what almost all of medical science has tried to
achieve for until now. Because we're living the longest
that we've ever lived, you know, in this moment.
And there are problems with that.
We have folk who are getting really old who are starting to
have neurological diseases that we've never encountered.
A lot more people are with having cancer because they're
living much longer and there's more opportunity for these
things to come up. It's created economic,
financial, environmental issues with, you know, the long
longevity that people have and disparities in different parts
of the world as different places are catching up.
And so I think. It's really interesting to see
students understand when I asked them this question.
You know, is this something that we need to do?
The goal of the society is to continue to prolong human life.
Is it worth creating clones, potentially humans, and using
them for their organs? And the answer is
overwhelmingly, I don't know why anyone would do that.
Like why we shouldn't be extending human life, we should
be expanding human healthfulness, expanding health
span as opposed to lifespan. But that's a very new idea, I
think, for medicine that that's what we should be focusing on,
not longevity, but the quality of the health of the life that
we are living. And I think that's a remarkable
shift, not only in the attitudes of students in the classroom,
but, you know, society, I think a society we're looking for.
Well, we we live a long time and there seems to be problem with
age. Let's.
Hold off on trying to live even longer than we already do, to
make sure that the lives that we are living are the best ones
that we can. And the student, I think
students understand that and I think that's that's great.
Yeah, but I often feel like that's great.
I do sense the public conversation is more about
extending a healthy life than extending the years, and that is
great. But I often feel like in human,
I don't know history, it's like 99.4% of.
Of us can sort of get that and strive toward that.
But then there's like the last fraction of the population that
just is going to push the science forward.
And I feel like there are researchers who look at aging as
a disease and they don't want to die.
And there's some tech entrepreneurs who are heavily
invested in living to 500 years and there's different
strategies. It's like reducing damage to DNA
and other organs and. And a lot of people, I think it
was like Aubrey de Gray. I think I read his book when I
was in my 20s and he's like a crazy man.
Like people think he's completely out there.
He's long beard. He has a really interesting Ted
Talk and he's trying to prevent. Death.
Yeah. And then there are people who
are kind of biohackers, right? Folk who are trying to implement
CRISPR engineering in their homes and creating these kinds
of homemade recipes. I mean, there's always going to
be a fringe population that is interested in.
Doing things that I think society finds to be repugnant or
or problematic. These can be case by case.
They could also be research programs.
So a lot of people are still interested in longevity,
continuing to reduce the effects of aging.
And I think it's important to differentiate between
understanding and doing kind of these proof of principle things
in a way that is controlled and scientific.
And by scientific, I mean, you know, do you have a hypothesis?
Are you doing things in a way that is consistent and rigorous
in the kinds of experiments that you're running and the kinds of
investigations that you're doing?
And are you reporting that science that you're doing in a
format and in a way that is accessible to other scientists
so that you can get review and you can, you know, get feedback
on that? And that's how we grow human
knowledge. And I think expanding human
knowledge in a lot of ways and in ways that don't always make
sense, again, kind of thinking about basic science is great
because you never know when you're going to need that
information. I think, you know the
coronavirus pandemic was such a great example of that where this
mRNA vaccine was something that was developed, technology that
was developed and just it's found it's time the same thing
with coronaviruses. There's very few people in the
world that actually study coronaviruses and they ended up
being overnight phenomenons. You know, and it's it was until
very recently a just the smallest thing that very few
people in the world did and and ended up being huge and it took
that investment from public resources and companies into.
These just basic signs. We never know what's going to
hit in order for that information to be there for when
we needed it. So it's not a bad thing that
there are always going to be people that have different goals
than the rest of society. And as long as they're supported
and doing things as ethically as they can in the most rigorous
fashion, you never know when that knowledge is going to be
helpful. The problem is, when you start
to hurt others, you start to hurt yourself.
Right. And also reject scrutiny.
Yeah, because I think we should all be under absolutely.
Like, whether it's from lawmakers or journalists or
whoever, we should all be implementing checks and balances
on things that can potentially affect us all.
Yeah. And in my classroom we talked
about that. You know, as a research
scientist, who am I beholden to? Well, we have a lot of ethics
committees for working with stem cells, for working with animals,
for working in laboratory spaces, environmental health and
safety. Ohio Safety, we have to write a
lot of safety protocols and we have to educate our students
before they can enter the laboratory.
And then you know once the science is done, while we have
the peer review process and how does that work and the
publication process, things like how do you get funding to even
do the science and what kind of review process is done for the
funding and what kind of accountability do we have as
scientists, the people who pay and.
Read and review, review our research and and these are all
processes and a lot of people are involved in just the
decision to start an experiment. A lot of people have had input
on your ability to do that before any science actually
happens in the kind of academic setting that we have in
university laboratories today. And that's all really new
information for a lot of students.
You can't just buy a lot of the reagents.
Necessary to buy pack yourself. A lot of them are just simply
not accessible to people who haven't gone through some of
these regulatory processes. Yeah, I love how, you know, as
you're you're an academic scientist, you just sort of
outline the kind of hoops you have to jump through the
necessary. To do the first experiment, to
do any kind of science, we have to have all of this safety stuff
in place. We have to have all of this
ethics training and the safety training, and we need approval
to even do the science. And so it's not as simple as I'm
going to become. A backyard biohacker.
It's much harder than that, and I think it's really comforting
to know that there are these checks and balances in the way
that research is done today. Yeah, must kind of rub you the
wrong way when you do see a backyard biohacker where they're
just kind of injecting things in the selves and you know they've
leapt over all of the hurdles that are there for a reason and
they can either hurt themselves or worse.
Yeah, and. That hurts them the most.
They are putting disinformation out into the world and
pseudoscience, which is a problem for everyone.
It's a problem for us as a society.
But at the end of the day, they're hurting themselves and
people hurt themselves in all kinds of ways.
So how is this any different? Again, kind of thinking about,
you know, people are always going to find ways to try to
destroy themselves. And if this is their way of
doing that, we live in a country for good or bad where they have
the freedom to do that. I am even more of the wrong way
when people are in places of responsibility and have gone
through her in these hoops and lie about their work or do
things that haven't been approved.
And these kinds of scientific Mavericks are very, very rare.
But but it does happen. And that is kind of a community
response, right? Are your colleagues or the
scientists working in your lab? Are your funding agencies really
making sure that you're doing the work that you have?
And so that's an accountability thing.
It's, again, very rare. But it happened recently with,
you know, some CRISPR editing in China a few years ago at caused
a lot of global backlash for good reason.
And I'm glad that it got so much backlash, but it still happened.
And these things can still happen unless we make sure that
we are creating scientific environments and communities
where not only ethics training, but that circle of integrity is,
is being maintained. Yeah, they feel like, you know,
you have a. You put the burden of
responsibility on yourself for having a well informed public
from a science perspective. Because I mean how many.
We can name so many examples where there is a just
misunderstanding with the technology or the science, like
stem cells and we all sort of freak out.
But we're it's all based on misconceptions or a lack of
fundamental understanding. And it's hard to understand.
Because exactly right. You could you have a PhD and
it's still kind of. Because understanding what's
possible involves a lot of stuff, and I think I try to get
my students to understand. It's really hard to understand.
But these are the places you can look for information.
This is how you should evaluate information.
And this is background knowledge that you need to have to at
least start to understand where technologies that are
successful, the kinds of things that they've had to do to get to
that point, so that you can feel trust in the scientific
enterprise, or you can be. A critical thinker or critical
scientists of the world, A citizen of the world, and be
able to at least evaluate where the sources are coming from and
the kinds of perspectives and opinions they're going to have
based on their role in the scientific or public enterprise.
And I think an informed citizenry is really important.
You don't need, you shouldn't need a science education to
know. That you should be able to trust
a different source that's kind of a part of a bigger kind of
conversations about civil society and our ability to
critically assess information, of which scientific information
is only a small subset of the deluge of information that
people are encounter encounter every day.
One thing I really love bringing it back to the movies a little
bit is the sense of realism and the accuracy that's being
achieved. Lately.
Especially with. Science fiction movies, there's
you had brought this to my attention.
There's this group called the Science Entertainment Exchange,
right? And it's really this group that
helps film makers get access to scientists from all different
fields so that they can enhance the accuracy of the science
they're trying to portray in film.
And a really good example is the movie Interstellar, where the
filmmakers, I think Christopher Nolan, the director and writer,
he met with Kip Thorne, a physicist, and they helped try
to figure out what would a supermassive black hole actually
look like. And and we saw it on screen,
right? And to my knowledge, I guess
that's like what a massive black hole would actually look like,
what the gravity would do to the light and color.
I think that's great. You know, it's because why not
just get it right? Yeah, and we are getting it
right in a lot of cases. And I think that's what makes,
you know, scifi movies and TV shows and, you know, the things
that are showing up on the visual screen these days as a
result of these conversations, such great educational material.
Because these conversations have been had and they seem realistic
because they're probably based in some kind of reality.
And that's in comparison to some of the fantasy like thinking
that. We had when those conversations
weren't necessarily happening. And it's certainly nice to see
science that you resonate with or get excited about portrayed
on screen. I can definitely say that as a
result of doing this class and never talk to about that, oh, do
you do this moving? How do you do this movie?
And I think it's because we try to see ourselves and the media
that, you know, we see on the screen.
It's always really exciting to be able to point to that film.
It's like that's the science that I do and you can see it
right there. And it's not always accurate,
but it's the only way that we assigned.
Us often have that ability to talk to people and give them a
little small picture of what we do every day for decades
sometimes. And it'll show up for like 2
minutes on on a movie. And that's the thing that'll
stick with you, right? Not whatever academic papers are
put out or conversations that I have or talks that I give.
But that one minute on screen is the work of of so many people
that can be really exciting to see.
I'm sure, even if it's only two minutes, yeah.
Or less. Right.
Yeah. In your class, I'm sure there
are common themes and patterns that pop out.
I mean, I think with Jurassic Park, we're talking about
hubris, right? And hubris is a big one on in
sci-fi, right. We just kind of fly too close to
the sun kind of thing. What else comes out like?
Most commonly in conversations when you're exploring Scifi.
Yeah, I think one of the things that, you know, I arranged the
movie to do is to kind of build up to this idea of you know,
what does it mean to be human in a technologically advanced
world. And I think you know the the
next movie I do in the sequence is Ghost in the Shell where you
really have these cyber enhanced humans interacting with AI that
is come to life and it's kind of a terrorist in the society.
And thinking about how can you tell what is human when we are
so integrated with technology, whether that be through
prostheses, artificial organs, artificial bodies, brain
implants or brain computer interface kinds of structures
that help to connect the biology of the brain to the technologies
that we live in the world. And when you start to see in
parallel from the computer science side, technologies that
start to look and sound human and.
Perhaps think like a human, then what What is the boundary of
what is a human versus not as one?
And how should we then be treating our technologies and
people and the intersection thereof when the lines are
really getting blurred. And I think that's something we
built up, right, if we start with the genetic engineering
side. And that's not nature, it's not
natural, but it is something. But it's still based in biology
to the spectrum of, well, now we have a lot of technology that's
starting to interface with biology.
And independent of biology, starting to look a lot like
biology. You know, what is human and how
do we treat ourselves in our societies?
So yeah, in that movie you have cyber enhanced humans, You have
a character who's really just their brain is left over from
death and it's put into a kind of an Android so that it's a
super soldier. You have other tech like people
are communicating with other people via telepathy. 1
character gets hurt and. He he loses his eyes and so he
has new sort of robotic eyes put in where you can see way better
and seeing the night, seeing the dark and all that.
So anybody who gets hurt gets hand in hand stray.
You lose an arm, you get a new arm, a robotic arm.
There's also hacking into people's brains so they can
steal information. They're also putting false
memories in your brain, which is really interesting.
So yeah, I guess the question comes back with what is human?
If you have lost your biological eyes and you have new robotic
eyes, are you human being anymore?
You're definitely an enhanced human, but I think we're all
kind of wondering what to call that.
Yeah. And I think it's really amazing
because you can point to, oh, you lost your heart, OK,
artificial heart. That's not human.
You're still human. You know, eyes.
OK, So these individual organs. Don't make us human.
But certainly that idea of the nervous system, right, the
brain, the kind of epicenter of, you know, reports people things.
Yeah. Starts to get at oh, well, now
you've kind of gone beyond just an individual organ.
And that's kind of a place that I also try to push back with
students. So an example of of this is,
well, there are a lot of things that are increasingly thought
to. Influence the way that the brain
works, things like the gut. So you know you are what you
eat. To what extent is does your
diet, your microbiome influence the way that your brain work and
how much does that make you who you are.
So I mean the fact that we have bodies that have kind of this
information that goes from all of the body to the brain and
then back means that there's this feedback network that can
the brain be the brain? Can you be yourself without, you
know, your body as it exists? I mean, that's a lot of biology
that has nothing to do with neuroscience, but it's the way
that neuroscience interacts with the body.
I mean that's all new knowledge. Like we we don't know a lot of
about a lot of that, which is really fascinating.
The idea of hacking memory is something that people are trying
to do with engineering individual neurons in the brain
and trying to code and reaccess them using bring computer
interface, you know bring computer interfaces allowed
people to walk again. So thinking about.
Creating prostheses that access the brain and the spinal cord,
help paralyzed patients take steps after not being able to
walk as technology that just came out in this past year.
These are all things that are, you know, happening in
laboratories, happening in a lot of tissue engineering labs, a
lot of different technologies for not only artificial organs
but in neuroscience, thinking about regenerating the brain,
enhancing the brain, and so the future envisioned by something
like Ghost in the Shell. Especially in the advent of
ChatGPT and all of this AI kind of language modeling that we're
seeing is becoming again kind of more Gray perhaps than it ever
has been in the past. And I'm not a computer scientist
and I'm not sure to what degree programs and computer systems
like ChatGPT are true AI and the sense of self or being or or
thought. They certainly sound like
humans. They certainly able to talk,
communicate the way and in patterns the way that we do.
And if that's the only thing that makes us human compared to,
say, animals, that ability to communicate, you know, that's
maybe a line or a boundary that some people start to get worried
about. Yeah, we're going to have to
work some things out as we start interfacing with technology
more. And trusting it.
I think things that sound like us were more likely to believe
and trust, and to what degree that contributes to
disinformation and other kinds of scary things that we already
have as human society is something to think.
About, but that'll be a tumultuous journey.
I think movie Like I, Robot is interesting too, because you
have Will Smith, this character who has a lot of prejudices
against robots and he hates robots, he thinks.
He's sort of oldfashioned and he he's skeptical of them.
He's skeptical of their intentions.
Even the Mandalorian has a huge subset of that.
I think being skeptical of human robot interactions is also an
AI, right this even seller. Film.
This is happening in all my meetings as well, like I have,
you know with my team, I have this this AI that I invite on
that listens to the conversation, transcribes it and
then pops out, you know, a transcript that I can watch and.
We joke around about it that I don't even have to be there
anymore and who is this thing listening to us?
And it has become a stuff of jokes, but it is enhancement in
a way, because it's my tool. Yeah, there was a great article
just the other day about how these kinds of technologies are
being used in medical settings to help patients remember what
was just being said in the doctor's office, which.
You know, most patients apparently lose, don't remember
80% of what was discussed with their doctor right after that
conversation. So not only having a record of
that meeting, but helping doctors to spend less time on
the administrative stuff so that they have that opportunity to be
human with their patients. Yeah, to be doctors.
And so that is not an enhancement of perhaps it is an
enhancement of the of the doctors where we expected them
to spend hundreds of hours doing paperwork and very few
interfacing with patients that this technology has.
Enable them to live fuller lives and be more present as people.
Definitely. I mean, it's certainly I get
time back, yeah. And things are made more
convenient. How much has that made you more
able to be human, you know, and to enjoy the human experience?
Yeah. I can certainly go for like an
afternoon walk earlier, which is nice.
Yeah. So as we kind of like wrap up, I
wanted to talk about, I remember you saying.
Somewhere that you feel like we're kind of living in a scifi
film today in a way, given the current pace of change and what
areas of science do you feel like are most scifi right now?
Yeah, I mean, I think we already discussed a couple of the ones
that I'm excited again as a stem cell researcher interested in
neuroscience. So using stem cells to think
about how we regenerate the nervous system and the spinal
cord in particular. I am so excited about these stem
cell technologies finally making to patients these artificial
organs that are being developed and and whether animals are in
the dish and are finally being able to cure people with
biological drugs using cells and tissues instead of relying on on
medicines that have been recycled or reused or really,
really hard to control. They just don't have the
complexity right that some of this biology has the capacity to
do. So that's.
What I feel really excited about in the science that is happening
today and is making it to clinical trials, things like
being able to use CRISPR engineering to genetically
modify cancer cells to be CAR T cells, right to be a really
powerful cancer therapy. The idea that you can hopefully
edit the cells of patients with sickle cell disease so that you
know millions of people with sickle cell don't have to suffer
their whole lives. These are really, really great.
Strides that bioengineers have made in the last 20 years in the
advent of gene editing and stem cell research.
That is just the stuff of of scifi films and it's only going
to get better. All of the stuff that we're
seeing right now is just first generation.
So you can't, I mean we can only imagine what this will look like
in 50, a hundred years. They'll be looking you know at
the twenty 20s and the 1990s as being so old schools and when
they look at. You know, the films and the
books that we thought were these out of the world things, they'll
think it was fantasy and they'll probably have other things to
write about, other kinds of technologies that are going to
be more on the mind than kind of for teen gene editing, perhaps.
Who knows? It's nice to think about what
this era of science will look like, you know, 100 years from
now when we couldn't even imagine this era of science even
20 years ago. Totally.
My last question is, you are in your class using science fiction
to understand technology and the ethical implications.
What do you say to science fiction writers and film makers?
What kind of movies do you want to see as a scientist and as
someone who clearly thinks very deeply about science fiction,
what kind of stories and how are the stories told?
What would you hope? For, you know, I think the
beauty of science fiction. Is not necessarily technology,
right? It's how humans interact with
that technology. And there are so many human
stories and at the end of the day, right, science fiction are
just human stories. And so having conversations with
scientists about what they're excited about and laboratory
reading, going to conferences, just having those interactions,
things like that science fiction forum for film makers I think
are really remarkable because they start to open up
conversations between. You know, folk who are spending
a lot of time in the laboratory are really, really excited and
have a lot of knowledge about their specific subdiscipline,
what they're excited about. And I think science fiction
authors have this remarkable ability to take a step back from
again being in the weeds and look at the forest and perhaps,
you know, look at continents and and worlds and think about what
all of these, you know, real things that we're doing it what
they could become. And you know, we feel inspired
by science fiction. I hope science fiction becomes
inspired by us. But that can't happen unless
those conversations happen. Yeah, and maybe more hopeful
stories as well. You know, I think more Gattaca's
would be. Yeah, and we're living in a
great, hopeful time. And the the hope should make
stories that. Are enriching enough lifting and
hopefully we see more of those hit film instead of, you know, a
lot of the depressing stuff that we end up seeing, unfortunately
or fortunately, because as you said, I think it teaches us
about hubris and ways that things can't go wrong.
A. Little bit above a.
Little bit of both. Well, where can people go to
find out more about your work if they want to?
Yeah. So I have just recently moved to
Tufts and so I'm just starting my laboratory there, so
information. About me and some of the stuff
we do in my lab can be found on our tough faculty pages and
hopefully you see more work coming out in my lab on how we
can use stem cells to regenerate the spinal cord.
You know, as we continue doing this great work and I hope to be
working more on this class and thinking more about how we can
use science fiction and integrate that into our
educational model for getting people excited about research
and about the science that we do as bioengineers.
But also to think about these bigger picture things, ethics,
society and what our role as scientists are in the world.
Great. Well, we will leave it there.
Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Yeah. Thanks so much, Dustin.
It was really great to be here. Thanks for listening to this
episode of Curiously. I hope you enjoyed this
conversation with Dr. Nisha Iyer.
Stay tuned for more conversations with people I meet
along the way.