Georgy Bovt From a sick mind to a healthy mind On how biotechnologies will change society and make it better 16/01/2023, 08:34

“There is a large dissection table in the middle of the room. Next to the table is a glass box, inside of which a human heart was beating. The tubes went from the heart to the balloons.
Laurent turned his head to the side and suddenly saw something that made him startle, as if he had been electrocuted.

A human head looked at him – a head without a body.

It is attached to a square glass panel. The board was supported by four long, shiny metal legs. Tubes already connected in pairs from cut arteries and veins through holes in the glass went to the cylinders. A thicker tube came out of the throat and communicated with a larger cylinder. The cylinder and cylinders were equipped with faucets, pressure gauges, thermometers and instruments unknown to Laurent.

The head blinked his eyelids and looked intently and sadly at Laurent. There was no doubt: the head lived an independent and conscious life separate from the body.

As you might have guessed, this is an excerpt from the beginning of the novel “The Head of Professor Dowell” by the author Alexander Belyaev. And our life always tries to catch up and overtake science fiction. And recently, neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero published an article titled “Whole brain transplant in humans is technically possible.” True, the paper was published, albeit in the peer-reviewed journal Surgical Neurology International, but the editor there was Canavero himself. Kim is generally considered a highly controversial figure. The sensation once stemmed from his own publication seven years ago, where he claimed that the head could be (completely) transplanted from one person to another. A head transplant, as we understand it, is an “intermediate step” on the road to a brain transplant. Later, however, serious scholars branded Canavero’s idea “anti-science.” However, he was backed by a Chinese colleague who confirmed that the head transplant was easy. Although in this case it was about corpses who didn’t care what they were transported to.

In fact, the formulation of the brain transplant problem (albeit in fictional form) arose due to the fact that modern science has not come close to the problem of preventing or even reversing the aging processes of human organs in themselves. integrity in a single organism.

Meanwhile, some people are particularly stubborn in their desire to deceive nature and prolong, if not eternal life, at least significantly without loss of quality (i.e. without aging). Someone follows the simple path and takes “antioxidants” and other similar “aging pills” of all kinds, someone transplants “young blood”, someone fantasizes about cryogenics (freezing for a hundred years and then waking up in a new wonder Earth). A separate direction is CRISPR supporters, who believe that genome editing and “removal of unwanted genetics” can produce good results on its own. There are also some pretty fantastic projects – to recreate far-flung brilliant people in the form of an immortal artificial intelligence. For example, your grandfather died, but his brain lives “on the computer” and continues to teach you how to live and what to do.

Still, the idea of ​​taking a brain from an older person and transplanting it into a younger body has a dizzying appeal in itself. Especially in your hand FIG. However, there may be a human clone specially bred for such transplants. They say they’re working on it too. Maybe in some other “secret Pentagon biolab”.

However, there is another rather realistic aspect of biotechnology that is based on bioprinting. The bottom line is that a diseased or malfunctioning organ can be printed on a 3D printer.

First of all, it will help solve the donation problem. In developed countries, there are no more than 6,000 donors per year, who donate about 8,000 organs for the need for a hundred thousand transplants. The number of those who died not waiting for their “donors” exceeds the final figure. The author has not seen detailed Russian statistics on this subject, but in our country, other than kidney transplantation (usually the most common type of transplantation), other organ transplantation cases are isolated to the best of our knowledge.

“Bioprinters” would finally make it possible to stop torturing animals while testing drugs and treatment methods – they could be resolved on printed analogues. In exactly the same way, according to the theory that everyone has “his own cancer” (now the problem of personification), which is becoming increasingly common among oncologists, it is possible to choose increasingly personalized oncological treatment methods. The treatment of cancer patients is being studied on specially bred laboratory mice). Donors of artificially grown organs can also be pigs, which are close to humans in terms of biocompatibility. In that sense, every human is really a bit of a pig.

There is already some progress in bioprinting artificial skin, cartilage, trachea, bones, ear parts, heart valves and even the bladder. Estimates of the creation and printing of more efficient organs such as the heart, including the patient’s own stem cells, take us quite a decade ahead, no less. Regarding the complete replacement of the human body, this is the expectation of the middle of the current century.

Many representatives of the already living generations can withstand.

Of course, all this raises many questions of both biological ethical and economic and political nature. In itself, especially if accompanied by at least a slowdown in the aging process, it will become a possible significant extension of life, a real revolution of civilization that has not yet been seen in human history.

First of all, the question of the availability of new biotechnologies for representatives of different social strata will arise. It cannot be openly equal and fair. At least until such technologies become widespread and relatively inexpensive. We’ll have to revisit ideas about the age of activity – upwards. Labor. Sexual and reproductive. Finally political. Yesterday (in historical terms) politicians of the 60s and 70s were considered veterans, today people like Biden never think it’s time to retire right away. The concept of “gerontocracy” will perhaps exceed the 100-120 years limit, making it even older.

The mechanism of knowledge transfer from generation to generation will change even more strongly, to which Pyotr Kapitsa draws attention to certain violations. Previously, the outgoing generation managed to transfer their experience to the new one in more or less full volume. Today, that kind of experience is obsolete much faster than generational change. Technological progress has been so rapid that the social “maturation” of humanity is increasingly unable to keep up. And in the near future, several generations will coexist simultaneously, not only from different technological structures, but also from different “civilizations”.

Meanwhile, on the one hand, the contradictions between executives, politicians who are still active at their own age (he will be older) and the younger generation, who will have less ideas about beauty and right/fit, will be stronger. and less corresponds. These conflicts will be even more acute if the wealthy and influential “elders” have access to the latest biotechnologies, while the young do not. Problems of social, property, and racial inequality in the past will seem like flowers when compared to “biotechnological” (biological) inequality.

And, God forbid, some satraps will consider transplanting the brains of their comrades and their own into the bodies of young, strong and healthy but poor youth, and for this purpose they will be caught in the woods – in the countryside – grown in the forests or from a test tube as a “repair kit”.

However, it is much easier for those of us who live in our own wide open spaces. First, we won’t live to see it. In this sense, any technological delay has its advantages and they will certainly not share such technologies with us. Second, we have completely different issues on the agenda. May God solve them.

But then why did the author write all this, the reader will ask, who “What do we need from this?” He likes to ask a practical question. Just to say that the “agenda” is different.

And in conclusion – a joke, partly about biotechnologies and how they change (change) ideas about both the future and the past. An already quite old scientist was recently asked: “Tell me, what did you like most about the Soviet Union, did you find it and managed to live in Soviet society for a long time?” The answer was short: “Erection”

The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.