Crossing the limits of humankind

A while ago, I went swing dancing. I must admit it is not one of my strengths, given that the dance events are often at night, and at this time, my capacity to execute coordinated movements is, at most, that of a wooden doll.

How could I enhance my dancing skills? Am I condemned to dance badly all my life, just because that’s the pool of skills I am gifted with? One should think: ‘Well, train and you will improve it for sure’. But I don’t want you to overestimate my learning skills. There might be a way to improve it, as well as any other body capability.

 A body of secrets

We can manipulate cellular processes with much more precision than the old chemical approach with biotechnology. An example of this is the gene editing CRISPR technology. You can click here to know what this is. CRISPR allows scientists to pick the letters and build the words of gene code quicker, cheaper, and smarter. They do it for health research and treatment development purposes (1).

But that sounds pretty close to what happened in the movie GATTACA, doesn’t it? In the movie, humans were gene-edited to correct inborn gene mutations, which could represent a disease during the person’s life. Moreover, brings the possibility of choosing how our babies would be, as if we were in the supermarket selecting the best healthier and most attractive products. This is the concept of eugenesia.

Another example of manipulating body processes comes from bioengineering research. Scientists are trying to disclose the information of a given group of cells that are close together and communicate via electrical fields. They argue that by modifying the whole-tissue electrical field, they can activate the regeneration of the tissue. The approach is devastatingly impressive: they make a planarian worm – a flat worm –regenerate the tail when manipulating the electric field of the cell tissue. And hey, hard stuff coming: they even made the worm have two sides with a head with eyes, and the worm can live pretty normally (2). Here’s a video which lays out these experiments. Don’t miss out on what they are doing with frogs! 

Here’s a ‘friendly’ planarian worm.

Finally, there’s neurotechnology. In a previous post, I wrote about what scientists can achieve with it: just decoding your brain activity, actually, very precisely in animals. For example, decoding brain activity allows communication with people in critical care settings, with some degree of impairment of consciousness or coma, using brain-computer interface (BCI) systems. Within the upcoming years, decoding brain activity will become even more precise in humans. Of course, this possibility opens a window to manipulate it (see an example of visual illusion reconstruction by analysing brain activity in the ‘to know more’ section, ref. 3).

Are we humans, or are we dancers?

Life sciences and technology change fast. Faster than my middle-aged mind can afford. We don’t even understand what humanity is, and we want to manipulate it and push it, maybe out of its limits? So this is my concern: are we trying to change what’s human, before understanding what it means to be human –i.e. how the body works? Do we really want to push ourselves to the limits, even knowing that the system may work like a tight, elastic rope? Imagine this: what if we represent the human body as this tight elastic rope, and we keep tightening it, to the point that we break it? Let’s remember that the body system, in medical terms, is represented as a delicate equilibrium of biological processes we call body homeostasis. And that, under this definition, when homeostasis breaks, we undergo disease.

However, the aim of this piece is not to raise alarm, but to reflect on where the limits of the human body are, and body manipulation. I admit I want to become a better dancer. I swear I tried dancing training, with rather poor results. In this line, the possibility of overcoming human disease by unravelling the ‘secrets’ the human body may contain is, at least, stimulating. What if this hidden body knowledge had been there for centuries, just waiting for us to be capable of switching it on? Undoubtedly, humanity would definitely benefit from decoding human regeneration processes, if they exist.

Please, just one demand: I would prefer to dance with my whole body, instead of two heads, like the planarian worm. Despite this worm moving cooler than a wooden doll.

To know more

1. Redman, M., King, A., Watson, C., & King, D. (2016). What is CRISPR/Cas9?. Archives of disease in childhood. Education and practice edition, 101(4), 213–215. https://doi.org/10.1136/archdischild-2016-310459

2. Levin, M. (2014). Endogenous bioelectrical networks store non-genetic patterning information during development and regeneration. The Journal of Physiology, 592(11), 2295-2305. https://doi.org/10.1113/jphysiol.2014.271940

3. Cheng, F. L., Horikawa, T., Majima, K., Tanaka, M., Abdelhack, M., Aoki, S. C., Hirano, J., & Kamitani, Y. (2023). Reconstructing visual illusory experiences from human brain activity. Science Advances, 9(46), eadj3906. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adj3906