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Can we build a human?
Professor Brian Cox and our expert panel explore the frontier of human bioengineering and building, replacing, and enhancing our bodies.
Will we ever have bionic brains and cloned humans? Is there a danger of science fiction getting too close for comfort?
From mechanical implants to lab-grown organs to whether humans could evolve to live in space, the discussion delves into what’s possible today and where science might take us next.
Brian Cox: Hello, I'm Professor Brian Cox. Welcome to A Question of Science recorded here at the Francis Crick Institute in London. This is the podcast where a panel of experts tackle your questions on some of the biggest scientific challenges facing society today. We'll be asking the world's top scientists your questions about issues that are central to all our lives. Who owns space? What is consciousness? Can we repair the ageing brain?
And in today's show, we'll ask "can we build a human?". Many new discoveries make this a credible, if futuristic, question. Stem cells could be used to grow new organs, but will these lab grown hearts and kidneys solve the current shortage of human organs? Lab grown mini brains help us to understand more about human evolution, but is there a future - this is the most futuristic thing I think - is there a future of whole brain transplants? The panel shake their heads.
Could computers in the brain treat depression, improve memory and help people with spinal injuries walk again? Maybe the final frontier is constructing synthetic DNA, essentially the recipe for us. Is it therefore only a matter of time before we can build a human and what might be the ethical implications if we can? I'm joined by four experts who will answer these questions and more, and they are...
Mark Pollock: My name is Mark Pollock. I'm on a mission exploring the intersection where humans and technology collide to cure paralysis in our lifetime. I work with companies all over the world and I'm doing a professional doctorate in elite performance. But the underlying story is I lost my sight when I was 22, became an adventure athlete and eventually raced over 43 days to the South Pole. And when I got back from that, I fell out a window, broke my back and I've been acting as a human guinea pig to work with scientists and technologists and investors trying to cure paralysis in our lifetime. So unlike the rest of the people on this who have deep expertise as professors, my expertise is in acquiring disabilities, which I'm world class at.
George Malliaras: Hello everyone. I'm George Malliaras. I'm a professor in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge and I work on neurotechnology.
Madeline Lancaster: I'm Madeline Lancaster. I'm a group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. And we use a tool that we developed a few years back, several years back, called cerebral organoids, which are brain organoids. They're little bits of brain tissue that we grow from stem cells and we're using them to ask questions about human evolution, comparing brain organoids from apes and comparing them to humans and trying to understand what makes us us.
Robin Lovell-Badge: And I'm Robin Lovell-Badge. I'm a group leader here at the Francis Crick Institute and I do research on embryology, stem cell biology and genetics.
Brian: And this is our panel. Maybe we'll start by asking a question about the science. You described your scientific research areas and I wondered how much of it is future-based, how much of it is just fundamental research into life itself and how much of it is maybe therapy-based and medical science now. So maybe I'll start with you, Robin.
Robin: We do fundamental research, trying to understand mechanisms of life, but we always have a view on what are clinical problems. And so we are hoping that what we discover in the lab, it certainly has helped diagnosis and eventually it might help new treatments. So...
Brian: Yeah, it's interesting because I often get asked, I mean, particle physics feels completely divorced from reality, but it's always like, shouldn't we be focused on this particular problem? Is that an appropriate way of looking at this kind of research or is it that it's curiosity driven and out of it springs useful things or is it a mixture of the two?
Madeline: The work that we do would not have been, it wouldn't have been possible without just curiosity-driven. So these brain organoids that we developed, that was not planned. That's hard to plan.
Brian: Well, you accidentally grew a brain organoid?
Madeline: Yeah, basically yes. Yeah, basically yes.
Brian: We'll get to them later. You brought some along, haven't you? But let's get to those. Mark, how do you see this interaction? You interact with people, many researchers, but also people who are focused on technology now. How do you see that interaction?
Mark: My default position has been asking questions of people like we have on the panel. After my accident and spinal cord injury, we started reading about scientists in labs all around the world. When I got out of hospital, we went to start to meet them. So there seemed to be this tension for me who wanted something immediately, with the biologists. But of course, it's not a competition. We need all of it. We need the basic science. We need that well funded. We need the translational work. And then we need, when it's ready to go, we need that work in companies viable to get to the clinic for people. So we need it all.
Brian: Yeah, single ecosystem. I think everybody's nodding. Well, thank you. So with that, let's go to the first audience question.
Richard Westcott: Hello, I'm Richard Westcott. First, could you tell me what brain and spinal implants are currently used to treat? So for example, can they already help with things like depression, or addictions or disabilities as well? And secondly, I'd like you to look into the future for me and answer a question probably lots of people here are thinking or assuming, will brain implants eventually be used to enhance human intelligence and create a world full of Brian Coxes?
Brian: You know, I hadn't read that. I just read it and it was like... You mean the actor. George, would you like to start?
George: Yeah, happy to take this. Thank you for the question. Yes, there is a lot of technology that dates back to the late '50s when the first cardiac pacemaker was implanted for helping people with arrhythmias, then cochlear implants for treating profound deafness in late '60s, spinal cord stimulators for treating neuropathic pain that doesn't respond to medication. And then fast forward in more modern times, deep brain stimulation for neurological, neuropsychiatric disorders.
And the spectrum is expanding beyond neurological and into autoimmune with peripheral nerve devices, devices that latch onto a peripheral nerve for treating things such as autoimmune diseases, type 1 diabetes, Crohn's disease, rheumatoid arthritis. So it appears to be a generalizable way to treat disease and injury. A major paradigm shift from the way we tackle disease and injury today, which is mostly through pharmaceuticals. Now, in terms of what the future will bring, yes, there is technology today to design a prosthetic arm that can crush a stone much stronger than a human arm or an eye that will be perceiving information in the infrared or an ear that can hear sonar frequencies. For me, the question is not of whether we can, it is whether we should.
Brian: Mark, you have very direct experience of spinal implant. You have tested prototypes and you are about to have one.
Mark: Well, look, this is kind of a 10-year-old project. In the early days when I was meeting all these scientists, we met a scientist from, he was in UCLA at the time, a guy called Professor Reggie Edgerton. The research is all housed in a company now. And they have three areas which are of interest to me. They have an external device which sits on the skin to excite the nervous system to allow for voluntary movement.
A new device has been implanted and is getting very interesting research results, including with a very particular type of injury, someone that has been able to walk. Now, not a miracle as we all have to hasten to add, but the implanted device has allowed people to walk. And the third device which they are working on is an implanted device with a brain-computer interface to allow for thought-driven movement. So we are starting to see little glimpses and hints of real impact on people's lives, if not a cure.
Brian: Well, thank you. Let's go to the next audience question, please.
Jennifer Franich: Hello, I'm Jennifer Franich. Could we grow organs from an individual's own cells, such as skin cells, or from stem cells?
Brian: Robin, this is very much your area.
Robin: I can kick off with this one. You can certainly reprogram skin cells or other cells from the body into the so-called pluripotent stem cells, or induced pluripotent stem cells, which behave like cells from the very early embryo. And because they are equivalent to cells from the early embryo, they can effectively make any cell type in the body. So these can be cultured in the labs or coaxed along particular pathways that mimic normal developmental processes generally. And you can coax them to make different types of tissue. So people have grown kidney organoids, gut organoids, lung organoids, cerebral organoids.
However, currently there are problems. So you can only get them to a certain size, because then you start running into problems that you've got to have enough oxygen and nutrients getting in and waste products getting out. And without a blood supply, that becomes difficult. So now people are trying to engineer the vascular system, blood supply into these organoids, and that might help them grow a bit further. And the cells don't always mature very well. And again, there's some clues of how to make them mature a little bit better. So I don't think anyone, as far as I'm aware, generated a functioning human organ from these cells. But there's certainly progress happening. And there's the hope that this will be possible.
Brian: Madeline?
Madeline: I don't know if this is the time to pull my organoids out, because...
Brian: Yeah, let's see one of these accidentally created brains. We should not, I know that's not what it is.
Madeline: Yeah. So I've got a model here, but the real thing is much, much smaller. The real thing is gonna be very hard for anybody in the audience to see, but I can hand it to Brian.
Brian: It's gonna be more difficult for people on the radio.
Madeline: He can- I know.
Brian: Yes, just describe it. I suppose it's what, a few millimetres long and it's pink. Why is it pink?
Madeline: So it's been dyed. Normally they're just sort of this whitish colour, just like real brain tissue is.
Brian: So this, I'm looking at a little sort of few millimetres across piece of brain. In what sense is it not a brain?
Madeline: So they're generated from cells, like Robin said, that are reprogrammed from skin or blood or, you know, even from urine. And then they're following the same sort of developmental process that happens in an actual embryo or a fetus. Because that's, you know, how you make a brain, right? That's how the embryo makes a brain. That's how we all have brains now as we've been through development. And so that's what we're mimicking. But that also means that we are limited in size because of a lack of vascularization.
We're limited in maturity because, look, you know, it took me over 40 years to get to the point I am now. I don't wanna, these are definitely not 40 years old, you know, these are probably about two months old. So it's how much time it takes for them to get mature as well. And so they're lacking a lot of these things. Plus, most importantly, they're not in a body. And that is really, really key. And that's also relates to why they're not vascularized, but also just in terms of functioning as a brain, really getting sensory input and interacting with the world and all that.
Brian: It might be worth actually just taking the next question because it's really related to this.
Bella Thorpe: Hi, my name is Bella Thorpe. Could synthetically produced organs replace the need for human and animal transplants?
Robin: It's certainly a hope. And so that's what you will see in grant applications. That's what people are doing. And no, it's definitely the plan. But so it's a long way to go. I should just point out, what is remarkable is that you can start off with these sort of group of cells that initially were all the same and then they start- altered along these developmental pathways, typically the embryo, and they self-pattern. They organise themselves and that's just remarkable. They know how to make these structures, which look not normal-normal, but relatively normal.
Madeline: It also goes back to what do you need from a transplanted organ? So take, for example, I don't know, the pancreas, right? And, you know, diabetes, for example, where you don't have functioning islet cells. So we don't necessarily need to transplant an entire pancreas. If we could just make a small piece of a pancreas that would have the islet cells, you could potentially implant that and it could, you know...
Brian: Do the job.
Madeline: Do the same job, secrete the insulin that it needs to secrete in response. And it doesn't necessarily have to look like a pancreas. It doesn't necessarily even have to be in the same place as the pancreas. You could put it like, I don't know, under your skin somewhere, you know. And that's exactly what people have done in mice so far. You know, they've had a mouse model of diabetes, they've implanted these little pancreatic organoids and shown that that can actually keep the mouse alive when it would have died otherwise.
Robin: I mean, a kidney, for example, that has a particular structure and it's designed to obviously filter the blood and secrete things out to the urine. So if you were to have lots of these little things implanted in your skin, you'd still have a good way of getting the urine out in the end. I mean, and that would be a technical challenge. But I quite agree that for many organs, you could have sort of multiple mini organs implanted here and there to do things.
Brian: Yeah, so my picture's wrong because I suppose maybe it's many people's picture that you're talking about growing a thing in a jar and then just transplanting it. But that's not necessarily what we're talking about here. It's the function.
Robin: It's the function you want to recreate, not the structure.
Brian: George, would you like to comment?
George: Yes. In my field, the question we ask ourselves is how far can you go in restoring function with purely artificial technology? For example, an electronic device that stimulates, could it restore the function of a kidney? Currently not possible, but some other organ. So the answer moving down in the future is, I think, a combination of the two technologies. So to combine living cells with human-made technology as a way to both repair some function inside the body and be able to guide that process of repair and monitoring it with human-made technology.
Brian: Yeah. We have a question. The next question from the audience fits neatly there. It's about mechanical limbs and enhancing capabilities.
Dylan Parker: Hi, my name is Dylan Parker. And my question for the panel tonight is how far away are we from mechanical limbs which can surpass organic ones such as robotic arms with crushing grip, brain implants with super fast processing and eyes and ears with heightened senses?
Brian: So George, this is a question specifically about the, how far away from, not should we, how far away are we from these...
George: Yeah. No, not too far, to be honest. And thank you, Dylan, for the question. You can make today robotic arm that will be much stronger than a human arm. Any computer chip will operate, calculate, compute much faster than the human brain. You can imagine eyes that are panchromatic. They look in the ultraviolet, visible, infrared. So that technology exists.
Now connecting it with the human body doesn't come without challenges. For the case of a prosthetic arm, it's not that difficult. There have been many demonstrations. For eyes, it's a bit more difficult. There is currently a lot of research to do that. And then for augmenting the brain itself with extra processing or memory, it's a bit further down in the future.
Mark: I don't know if you know Professor Hugh Herr in MIT. He is a professor in this area. He's a double amputee. He was a very good mountain climber. And in fact, when he climbs, as he still does with his prosthetic legs, he can put longer legs on and make those big leaps across wider gaps in the mountain. And he's very much in the human enhancement space.
Brian: Yeah. I'd actually like to go to the next question because this is, I think we could discuss the answers to the next 1950s sci-fi sounding question for the rest of the programme. So let's go ahead.
Guy Callum: Hello. My name's Guy Callum. The first human head transplant was more hype than real. But would a brain transplant be a better solution to replacing the damaged or diseased brains and bodies?
Brian: It's a wonderful question. So Madeleine, we're gonna restrict ourselves to the less ambitious goal of a brain transplant.
Madeline: Sure. Totally doable. No. I mean, of course, I guess you'd wanna ask yourself why you'd wanna do that and then, of course, whether we can do that. I mean, the brain, of course, is where all of our thoughts and feelings and everything that makes us who we are resides. So if you were somehow to be able to take these organoids and go from organoid to organ, and truly make a fully functioning formed mature brain organ in a lab, and then transplant that, it would not carry any of the memories or thoughts of the person that those cells came from. Right? Because that all gets built through your experiences in life.
And so if you just took an entire brain, you know, made a whole brain from a person's cells who had a diseased brain and then replaced it, they would be, it would be like a clean slate and they wouldn't be who you remember them to be. Right? So it's hard to imagine a scenario where that would make very much sense, I think. But what I think you could do is, of course, there are parts of the brain that don't necessarily make us who we are, but are, you know, diseased and, or, you know, degenerate in different conditions. Like, for example, Parkinson's disease, where you have degeneration of a specific region of the midbrain, which is a part of the brain that is not necessarily, you know, it's not really where sort of all of our higher order thinking and cognition and feelings come from.
So I think that's a much more realistic scenario and also one where I think it's much more likely that we could actually reach that point.
Brian: Were you imagining having a new brain grown for yourself, for example, or were you imagining taking your brain and putting it into...
Guy: Into a fresh body. So a diseased body could be, you could transplant the brain directly across...
Brian: Yeah.
Madeline: So then you need to engineer the body, actually, not the brain. So then I'm gonna leave it to Robin to answer that.
Robin: I'll do all the rest. Yeah, sure. I mean, there will be, I imagine there'll be some problems with connections. Again, yeah.
Brian: Yeah. I suppose the question is, is it just an engineering problem?
Madeline: Yeah, I mean...
George: As an engineer, I would claim that it is an engineering problem.
Brian: Oh, so it's just engineering? Yeah.
Madeline: So as a developmental biologist, I would say it's a development problem.
Mark: And I would say, from my perspective, it's a collaboration problem.
Brian: So if we could just get the developmental biologists and the engineers together?
Mark: Yes.
Madeline: We are collaborating!
George: Yes, indeed.
Brian: Actually related to this, I have a question from the audience, but the audience member isn't here. It's David Chapman. So I'll read the question, because I suppose when we talk about brain transplants or something, then there are ethical implications. And this is a question about that, it's who would decide or who should decide what we should or shouldn't do when it comes to this kind of research? Do you prefer a researcher-led approach or should there be more public debate and potentially regulation of the scientific process?
Robin: Well, I can be very clear about that. I think you should never leave decisions like that up to scientists or clinicians by themselves. It has to involve others, and that would include members of the public. You have to be public engagement, proper public engagement. You'd have to have ethicists involved, philosophers, maybe, others, interested parties have to be involved in making that decision.
Brian: George?
George: I fully agree. There are many examples of technologies that were developed without proper engagement with society at large, especially without proper engagement of patient groups that just did not do as well because of that, did not have the uptake.
Brian: Mark, what's your view on this? Because you participate in research programmes, of course.
Mark: A lot of my work's been in the US. In the US context, they were experimenting on people in the middle part of the last century unethically, and that has spawned FDA approvals and institutional research boards that are so tight you almost can't get anything done. And then you have other parts of the world where it's a free for all and people are spending a lot of money and not getting anything through.
So, you know, again, it's somewhere in the middle for me. I think we do need to hear, you know, from my perspective as a non-scientist, your input is absolutely critical. The regulatory environment is absolutely critical. But the danger is, if you don't, if interesting research gets stuck behind the university walls and it doesn't get out into start-ups and that start-up isn't funded and it doesn't get to the clinic, then we've got a problem. So I'm saying we need to be cautious on one hand whilst at the same time finding a pathway for anything that is a glimmer of hope to get out in the world.
Brian: It's interesting. I mean, we've heard this time and again on this series, actually, in different areas of research that the risk aversion is a problem. But also, of course, as you said, no regulation at all would be a problem. Maybe there are parts of the world where there's little regulation.
Mark: People raising a lot of money to go out and do something that offers great hope on paper but just isn't based on anything.
Robin: I'm afraid that, yeah. So there's a lot of stem cell clinics in parts of the world, actually the US as well, that offer unproven treatments and often these are actually worse than doing nothing. They can cause damage.
Brian: Madeline?
Madeline: What I've been seeing from the organoid field, especially brain organoids, is the concern that we could make some conscious thing in a dish. Like Mark just said though, if there's a danger that you don't want to stop the science though because there are millions of conscious human beings out there who don't have treatments. So we just need to find a good balance.
Brian: The next question is on exactly this.
Samiya Kayani: Hi, my name is Samiya Kayani. Do you think a synthetic being could ever be conscious? And how would you define consciousness in this scenario?
Madeline: So yeah, I mean consciousness is just such a hard problem and there's been a whole...
Brian: We had a whole programme...
Madeline: One of these programmes on consciousness. I guess the way I've been thinking more and more about this is that I'm not sure we'll ever fully be able to define consciousness or even necessarily measure it because we can't really measure it directly. But I think that what we can do is think about what do we know we humans have, if we assume that we humans are conscious. But what do we know are certain prerequisites that we know that human beings have that sort of set us apart. And that's where sort of the work that we're doing trying to understand human evolution and kind of what sets us apart, I think, can feed into that. And then we can look for those features.
So it kind of goes back to some of the things we talked about. Like I think you do need to have a body. You need to have some kind of way to interact with the world. And you need to have some kind of maturity. And you need to have some kind of complexity. There's something different about our brain than a fly brain. It's much bigger. It's much more complex. It's organised in a very specific way. And so we can kind of look for those almost like prerequisites of consciousness and use that as a much more practical approach.
Brian: Let's go to the next question, please.
Anna Farra: Hi, my name is Anna Farra. Is it possible to engineer a human from scratch using synthetic biology?
Brian: So is it possible to engineer a human from scratch using synthetic biology? Robin?
Robin: Not yet. There are different ways you might contemplate doing it. So we can talk about growing embryos in a dish. So that's starting with cells. But you can take it even first principles, can we synthesise the human genome, for example? So all the DNA that would be human? And somehow put that into cells and have those cells develop. And so you end up with a human that you've designed because you've written the DNA.
There's a project which is going quite well to do this with yeast, like brewer's yeast. So you can, they have basically, I think, just about by now probably synthesised each of the yeast chromosomes. And they can essentially put these back into empty yeast cells if you like, and have something that grows and behaves like yeast. So the principle being that if you can take something apart and rebuild it, synthesise it, then you must really understand how it works.
There's a project that's starting to do this with human. But it's much, much, much bigger problem because we have a lot more DNA than a yeast has. We're far more complex. The genome is, we understand bits of it quite well. But there's a lot of it we don't understand well. Actually often referred to as a dark genome, like dark energy and stuff. It's complex. We don't understand it all. So the whole idea behind this project is to get to understand more about it. But whether you could ever recreate a human that way, I think it's an awful long way off, if ever.
Brian: George, because I suppose there's two senses to the question. I don't know in which sense the question meant it, but there's just building a genome and allowing biology to do the rest, and engineering a human, which feels more like building the bits and sticking them together.
George: I suppose. I think that would be called the robot if you try to do this with non-living matter, that would be the outcome. We're far from that. We're way far from that.
Brian: Mark, this is a fundamental question, I suppose. Engineering a human from scratch.
Mark: I'm more interested in working out how we can support the human system rather than build a human. So maybe my argument is here, can we build a human? I don't think we want to. The urgency of a person who went blind 27 years ago and I'm still blind and it hasn't happened, and the urgency, 15 years ago I broke my back and I'm still sitting down. It just feels like the augmentation/enhancement route is gonna be with us way before synthetic humans are out there, which is why I'm interested. Robin answers quite a lot of these, not yet.
Robin: You're talking about enhancements, augmentations. Of course, you can use biology to do that as well. So you can tweak genes, which you could do to, for example, alter your visual perception so you could see an infrared or ultraviolet.
Brian: Because there are animals that can do that.
Robin: Animals that can do that anyway, so you just put the animal gene in you. And of course, there's talk about if people want to go on long distance space travel, they might have to be augmented to deal with high radiation and muscle wastage and other things like that. And there are ways you could do that.
Brian: Well, thank you. Let's go to the next audience question, please.
Vicki Mara-Collard: Hi, my name is Vicki Mara-Collard. If you were building a human, would you include male and female sex organs or keep it to one sex?
Brian: And if so, which one, I suppose? Who would like to start?
Robin: Well, one, okay, one of the topics I work on is sex determination. So how we become male or female. So I guess I should start off with this one. Well, currently, both are absolutely necessary to propagate the human species. So you can't just do it without one. If you were to choose one, then probably a female would be the sensible one. Because, of course, we don't know how to, this may be another question, have an embryo develop without having a uterus. So I think it would be very boring if you didn't do both. I can leave it at that.
Brian: I'm not gonna go in what sense...
Robin: I'm not, just, you know.
Brian: I just wanted to ask the question, is the sense of your question that, so if we're imagining, I was gonna ask you, if we're imagining just creating humans, which is the title of the programme, Can We Build a Human? Are you saying that if we build all humans, is that the sense in which you're asking the question? So do you need, do you just produce a completely asexual thing because we're just building them all anyway? Or is that the sense of your question?
Vicki: I think you need both. But it's... In the world of the unknown in the future, will somebody make somebody who's got both bits?
Brian: Or both bits?
Vicki: Both bits. Not to procreate with himself or herself.
Robin: I mean that in...
Brian: I was thinking no bits and you're thinking all of them.
Robin: That's the least interesting, isn't it? There are of course some rare individuals who are born who do have both bits in effect. They can't, you know, they may not be very fertile, but anatomically they can have a mixture of male and female.
Brian: I suppose there is a wider and deeper question here, which is which, it's what we referred to earlier, it's what makes a human human, in a way. So I suppose this might partially be a question of can you take pieces away of whatever it is? And are we asking questions in that sense about, because at one level you've got a brain in a jar that we talked about earlier, is that human? And you essentially said no, it won't be. So it's how many human traits do you need?
Mark: Is it the... This is a scientific lens we're looking through, do we need a few artists and romantic novelists here to help with this?
Brian: Yeah, maybe. So let's have the next question from the audience please.
Michael O'Shea: Hello, my name is Michael O'Shea. Would the ability to build a human be a key component of moving to other planets? Then you can send the ships with all the ingredients across the vastness of interstellar space and get AI to build the humans to live there.
Brian: George, this is a... I think this is an engineering question again, so can we send all the bits in storage and then reassemble them on Mars or wherever?
George: I'm a bit uncomfortable about having AI, the last bit that you asked, having AI build the human. Again, we're very far from something like this becoming a practical reality on Earth, let alone in space. I'll pick up on what Robin discussed earlier where we need to develop technologies to augment the human body in order to send people in space, radiation, survival and the like. And those technologies, yes, will be handy, once you reach space, you'll be able to repair some of the damage there.
Brian: Well, let's go to the next question please.
Susan Caldwell: Hi, my name is Susan Caldwell. This question is on behalf of my 83-year-old mum who does not understand DNA, but asks, so what would Mary Shelley, author of "Frankenstein", think of all this?
George: Great question.
Brian: Well, go on then, George, what would she think?
George: I'm glad someone brought Frankenstein up, thank you. So I think she'd be both very happy with the state of affairs today and very excited. One of the threads in the novel is what can go wrong if scientists operate outside the bounds of society without constant engagement with society. I'm thinking of "Young Frankenstein", the movie, with the villagers with pitchforks outside the ivory tower and so on and so forth. So we have progressed away from that paradigm and today medical device technology is being developed in constant communication and with engagement with all the stakeholders as it should be. So I think she'll be happy about that. And of course, as science advances, it continues to inspire science fiction, which in turn inspires science. So I think she would be inspired by what she sees today and the things that we've been discussing in this podcast.
Brian: Madeline?
Madeline: Yeah, I mean, so I think when people bring up Frankenstein, they think about sort of the gruesome nature of it all and how, you know, it's these pieces from dead bodies put together to create this monster. And I think, you know, what we're doing, yeah, that's very gruesome. But what we're doing is actually very beautiful, I think, because we're trying to mimic the beauty of development as much as we can. And with obviously a very positive purpose. Right? It's also about the purpose of why you're doing this. And, you know, ultimately, if we can create organs that we can transplant in patients that need them, or we can use these as models for disease and develop new therapeutics, I mean, it's a very different purpose. It's very positive.
Brian: I just like to, there's a related question from Nishant Brambat, which is, why do we want to build a body that's evolved to an environment we no longer live in? So wouldn't it be better to build a human better adapted to our current needs? So, again, it's not only about building, the Mary Shelley question, but also about, I suppose, augmenting, changing, improving... I suppose we could argue from an evolutionary perspective whether we do live in a different environment to the one which we-
Robin: Well, we do, so we could augment ourselves to feed on plastic. We'll solve another problem.
Brian: To feed on plastic? Is that what you'd do? Is that what you would choose to do?
Robin: No. No, it's-
Brian: If you could have one trait? Eat plastic?
Robin: One of many, to get rid of some of the problems we've created.
Brian: So I suppose one answer is we are evolving slowly to fit our new environment. Well, at the same speed we always did.
Robin: We always have.
Madeline: We're still, yeah, we're still evolving and actually in the past couple, maybe 100,000 years or so, counterintuitively our brains have been shrinking in size. And I don't think we can blame that on the iPhones yet because it already started about 100,000 years ago. But these are all adaptations to our current world.
Brian: And I think we've almost run out of time. There's one wonderful question from Abidemi Otaiku who is presumably an accountant who said, assuming we could build a human, how much would it cost? But also, so we can answer that bit. There's also a more serious addition here, which is, which would, and then would it be ethical to spend that amount of money? Because of course you could imagine deploying that money elsewhere where it's needed in this world. So it becomes a more sophisticated question about research spending and so on as well.
Robin: I mean, new technology is often really expensive to begin with. So you take, for example, the gene therapy using genome editing, the first licenced products... That would be the thalassemia, sickle cell disease. Incredibly expensive. We're talking, you know, two million pounds per patient, which is unaffordable, really. But actually that's partly because of the model that's used to decide on how much it's gonna cost. But actually developing the whole thing is expensive. But once you've done that, it gets cheaper and cheaper.
Mark: And I mean, with what happened around COVID, the sort of acute crisis, the red tape and bureaucracy, the common purpose from pharmaceutical companies and scientists and countries, the ambition was so high that there was enough room for everyone to win a bit. We're all in it together and things seem to move at a pace that I'm sure in your labs, you would want to happen all of the time. But it seems that that's why I think exploration is so important, because when we get more ambitious, not less, it seems to create more collaboration. When we drop the ambition, everyone retreats and we get destructive competition, not positive competition.
Brian: I think that is the perfect place to end. It's an eloquent defence of science. Thank you. So that's it for this episode. A big thanks to our panel: Mark Pollock, George Malliaras, Madeline Lancaster and Robin Lovell-Badge.
