It’s The Future: Myoelectric Mitchell

Claudia Mitchell has a new arm that she controls with her brain. Annalee Newitz has the story on io9. “Mitchell’s arm is ‘myoelectric,’ which means it picks up electrical signals coming straight from her brain, down her nerves. Electrodes help the signals jump from her body, to the prosthesis, which uses a computer to figure out which motion Mitchell is thinking about.”

The designer, Todd Kulken, wrote an article about the arm. He reminds us that we’ve built “a humanoid robot that can walk up and down stairs, a robot that can rove on Mars, collect samples, and send images back to Earth, and robots that are used to help perform surgery.” But prostheses present unique challenges. Targeted muscle reinnervation (TMR) is one solution:

The goal of TMR surgery is to utilize to the brain commands that still attempt to reach the missing limb… If these nerves are connected to different muscle sites, they can cause these other muscles to contract, producing the signals used to control myoelectric prostheses.

So the woman’s a cyborg. This kind of thing is not news, but it is still awesome.

The Voices In Your Head

First, some background. Synesthesia is a surprisingly common condition that causes two different sensory pathways to interact in unusual ways. Synesthetes may perceive letters as having dedicated colors, or numbers as having personalities. Read more here. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran is a neurologist: a doctor, a researcher, and an occasional Radiolab guest. Listen to him explain how he performed the first ever phantom-limb “amputation” here.

John Colapinto, in New Yorker profile of Ramachandran last May, found him speculating about the nature of creativity:

The most common synesthesia is number-color. Ramachandran believed it was not coincidental that the fusiform gyrus, where number shapes are processed in the brain, lies next to the area where colors are processed. He suspected that a cross-wiring in the brain, similar to that in phantom-limb patients, was responsible. Brain scans confirmed his hunch: in synesthetes, there are excess neural connections between the two brain centers. This suggested to Ramachandran that the syndrome arises from a defect in the gene responsible for pruning away the neural fibres that connect the various centers of the brain as it develops early in life. “What do artists, poets, and novelists have in common?” Ramachandran asked me. “The propensity to link seemingly unrelated things. It’s called metaphor. So what I’m arguing is, if the same gene, instead of being expressed only in the fusiform gyrus, is expressed diffusely throughout the brain, you’ve got a greater propensity to link seemingly unrelated brain areas in concepts and ideas. So it’s a very phrenological view of creativity.”

It can feel uncomfortable to examine the biology behind creative talent, which we’ve always treated as kind of magical, or divine. But science addressing questions that philosophers and priests once had a monopoly on is a wonderful thing. Nothing is more fascinating or important to us than our own nature, and beginning to build real, concrete knowledge about it is an enormous blessing. Reading about neurology leaves me awed, excited, and impatient. The brain is so marvellously complicated, as are the questions we ask, that our best efforts fall far short of sating our curiosity.

One of the most magnificent puzzles is consciousness itself: why we’re aware of our own thinking, and how we came to be this way. It’s a favorite subject for people who believe that some mental phenomena exist outside physical, testable reality, those who jeer at evidence-based approaches to these unknowns. But Ramachandran is willing to speculate on consciousness, too. Like his hypothesis about metaphors, these ideas are likely wrong, one of the many errors that “trial and error” requires. Still, it’s provocative stuff:

Mirror neurons play a role, he thinks. “One of the theories we put forward,” he said, as he packed up his bag, “is that the mirror-neuron system is used for modelling someone else’s behavior, putting yourself in another person’s shoes, looking at the world from another person’s point of view. This is called an allocentric view of the world, as opposed to the egocentric view. So I made the suggestion that at some point in evolution this system turned back and allowed you to create an allocentric view of yourself. This, I claim, is the dawn of self-awareness.”

I confess I find this possibility absolutely thrilling, especially compared to vague, untestable stories about “supernatural” mechanisms. But of course it doesn’t matter that it’s an appealing story; we have to figure out ways to challenge it, test it, until we know whether it’s true or false. “What we’re hoping,” Ramachandran says, “is that we can grope our way toward the answer, finding little bits and pieces, little clues, toward understanding what conciousness is. We’ve just scratched the surface of the problem.”

Amid insights on vision, autism, and the brain’s body-image map, one last passage caught my eye. “You know that when people think to themselves you get unconscious movement of the vocal chords?” Ramachandran asks. (It’s fun to try to notice this.) Well.

In the case of schizophrenia, whose sufferers often complain of “hearing voices,” Ramachandran suspected damage of deficit in a sensory mechanism in the vocal chords which, when normal people think, sends a signal to the brain indicating “This is simply a thought; no one is actually saying this.” If this mechanism was damaged, the subconscious movement of the vocal chords could be interpreted as an outside voice speaking in one’s head.

“By the way,” Ramachandran continued, “I have a theory that if you take people with carcinoma of the larynx, and you remove the vocal chords, and they think to themselves, they may actually start hallucinating. A prediction.”

A prediction. That’s where we start. Isn’t it great to be alive now?

Dinosaur Colors Discovered!

I can’t and won’t try to compete with the web’s many wonderful science news sites and blogs. But this story makes the ten year old inside me oh so very happy.

When I was that age, reading all about dinosaurs, we didn’t know what they looked like. Not really. The colors in those drawings I poured over were only someone’s best guess. After learning this, imagining dinosaur herds became both more exciting and more uncertain. The mystery—likely permanent, I understood—frustrated and aroused me.

Turns out they had red feathers. At least, one of them did. For the first time, evidence of dinosaur pigmentation has been found. Look at a rendering here, read about the discovery here, and check out the Nature abstract here.

Hearing the news, I felt what I learned to feel when I was ten, paging through science books: gratitude, wonder, and pride. For some reason, the driving curiosity and hard work a discovery like this represents make me feel like a proud parent sitting in the bleachers, cheering on the scrappy but dogged efforts of our home team.

Gladwell on Drinking

I don’t know how he does it. Once again, Malcolm Gladwell has managed to sound original, insightful, and entirely common sense.

Turns out we misunderstand the effects of drinking: it doesn’t simply remove inhibitions.

Alcohol makes the thing in the foreground even more salient and the thing in the background disappear. That’s why drinking makes you think you are attractive when the world thinks otherwise: the alcohol removes the little constraining voice from the outside world that normally keeps our self-assesments in check. Drinking relaxes the man watching football because the game is front and center, and alcohol makes every secondary consideration fade away. But in a quiet bar his problems are front and center—and every potentially comforting or mitigating thought recedes. Drunkenness is not disinhibition. Drunkenness is myopia.

Drinkers get loud and rowdy because they respond to signals sent “by the pulsing music, by the crush of people, by the dimmed light, by the countless movies and television shows that say that young men in a bar with pulsing music on a Friday night have permission to be loud and rowdy.” This means that intoxication in a different setting, with different rules and different expectations, presents very differently.

The article recounts several fascinating experiments and case studies that demonstrate this effect. Gladwell concludes that our efforts to “moralize, medicalize, and legalize” alcohol abuse are ultimately less effective than providing “a positive and constructive example of how to drink.”

Read the piece here (abstract only without subscription, unfortunately) and check out more of Malcolm Gladwell’s work here (including full articles, 1996-2009). He really doesn’t need the plug—I already seethe with jealousy at this guy’s career—but the writing’s just so good.

Look for future admiring posts: Gladwell on underdogs, Gladwell on invention, Gladwell on entrepreneurs…

This Joyful Noise

Wireless at last, my desk overflowing with scribbled notes on tiny scraps of paper, I’m setting out to make this pursuit work. Today all I’ve done is change colors again, though I’m still not happy with them, and add a snazzy picture, which I’m more happy with although I assume by the time this is all over it’ll be gone as well. No matter. I’m looking at websites that offer business cards and reading Apple’s instructions on listing a podcast in iTunes. I’m comparing myself to everyone else again and getting impatient with my findings. Some day soon I will own several magazines and a cable channel, and I’ll finance spinoff television programs featuring my favorite people, the ones I listened to and read for inspiration on my way to the top.

It will undoubtedly be a source of humor and some considerable embarassment years from now to reflect on the great efforts I made branding myself before I had actually produced anything of value. I will tell the story gracefully, fully aware of the absurdity of this period in my life. I’ll recount how late one night, dissatisfied with my progress towards my goal of becoming a world traveler, a well known and widely respected public intellectual, and a brilliant and acclaimed storyteller, I jumped into action and changed the name of my rarely updated web log from A Joyful Noise to This Joyful Noise!

Lest you scoff, this was not the extent of my activity this evening. Oh no. I also set up a gmail account (thisjoyfulnoise@gmail.com), and asked politely for someone named Sharon to give up the blogspot address she’s holding (thisjoyfulnoise.blogspot.com), and then gleefully explored what font I would choose I were to order hundreds of business cards bearing my new brand.

This Joyful Noise, unlike clunky old A Joyful Noise, sports a snappy subtitle, which I have very cleverly (if I do say so myslef) included on the reverse side of my imaginary business cards. My brand’s message – light, heat, sound – is simultaneously too precious to stand and too weighty to bear. If I do what I hope to and all goes very, very well, it will likely be a decade or more before I produce something that lives up to such a portentious and epic signature. Still, I have nothing better. It comes earnestly out of an attempt to explain what it is I want to do. Listening to Astronomy Cast, a weekly facts based journey through the cosmos, has me keenly aware of the unimaginable emptiness, darkness, quiet and cold of the vast majority of the universe. Doing yoga at Yoga To The People, a donation based studio in the East Village, has made me keenly aware of life’s incredible capacity for producing heat. Standing in my lake of sweat, watching the windows fog, my chest feels like a coal fueled furnace and my mind turns to the chemistry of energy storage and use in the human body, the wonder of willed work, and, always, the unfathomable context of our efforts. Vast distances, lengths of time, silences. I name the sources of heat in our universe, few and far between, all of them wondrous: nuclear reactions in our stars, gravity’s pressure inside our planet, and in our cells, bonds breaking, decisions being made, life out of lifelessness.

I say we’re a noisy, hot, curious and hard working species, never satisfied, never finished: a stunningly beautiful thing in a still and empty universe. My feelings on the subject of humans are precious and weighty, and I see no way around that. I won’t be transcribing all my dribbling wonder at the world here; those who have encountered one of my rants on this topic will tell you, I’m very enthusiastic but rarely coherent or disciplined enough to be interesting. The blog and the podcast will, however, take as their official subject humans, the human project, the human experience, if only to provide cover for absolutely any story I feel like reproducing. In that sense, I’m aiming at capturing a little of the light, heat and noise made by my fellow wise apes, and it’s such an innocent and gradiose intention that my cuteness feels appropriate.

It makes sense. I have, after all, never been a very cool person. I’m too excited, too earnest and too invested to be cool. I dance at parties. I think economists say more interesting things than any other kind of person. I try to write a blog. I declare this rebranding officially underway. May we soon have some content to fill the empty vessel of This Joyful Noise.

Teratology

I had no idea there was a word for it before today, but there it was in front of me: the abnormal and the deformed, walls of skulls and eight-foot colons and the chair that the original “Siamese” twins had built for them. What I had heard, not inaccurately, billed as a “museum of medical oddities,” and had consequently driven a few hours to find, was the outwardly proper Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. Home of a collection intended to educate medical students on potential traumas, diseases and weirdness back whenever it was put together (shows how closely I was paying attention to the fine print… I’m guessing the 1800s), the dense, small space houses a woman turned to soap, a man whose muscles turned to bone, plaster casts of eyeball tumors, creepy things in formaldehyde, drawings of conjoined twins through time, a giant’s skeleton, and a comparitively mild exhibit on the health of U.S. presidents. In case you were curious, the most unnerving human anatomical possibility is a fully developed eyeball tumor. No contest. Eyeball tumor. Wow.

On the ride home, discussion found it’s way to the fantastic 1932 horror movie “Freaks.” The movie casts circus freaks in starring roles, highlighting their sense of community and the strange and awesome ways they manage or adjust for their abnormality. The thing that stayed with me the most (ok, after “one of us… one of us…”) was the opening title card. In setting the stage, it describes how the diseases and deformities on display in the film are rapidly being cured or corrected by medicine, and therefore the contemporary generation of a lot of freaks (I think pinheads were mentioned specifically) will be the last. These are words from a film released in 1932, so I can only imagine how much further along medical science and technology is today.

It is a fascinating, curious “problem” that society is faced with when it has the knowledge and the means to make abnormal people more normal. There seems to be a lot of hand wringing going on about how medical intervention to change a condition stigmatizes it, suggests that all must aspire to a “normal” ideal, and removes the impetus for tolerance as well as the contact based engine of it. So what justifications do we believe in for limits on the individual’s right to inhabit a body he or she chooses? Consenting adults are allowed a good deal of freedom to modify their biological raw material for personal reasons – tattoos, piercings, hair coloring, and makeup are common, but increasingly profound elective cosmetic surgery is also widespread and gaining in popularity. What societal goals should trump the individual’s control over the shape of his or her own body?

The fantastic thing about this question is that prior to very recent human history it was next to meaningless, because available technology for body modification was either inoffensive, gradual, or nonexistent: humans could adjust diet, clothing and exercise, and make only minor, temporary, and superficial changes beyond that. We can see this in the lives of the “normal,” who were straightforwardly living what they were handed biologically, and in the lives of those men and women who were born at significant remove from the human body’s averages, who were for lack of other options doing the same. Conditions present at birth that led to loss of bodily functioning, pain, and severe social barriers, conditions that narrowed potential employment, impaired the ability to have and raise a family, caused limited mobility or early death, these were dealt with as gracefully as could be managed, because humans had no technologies to offer them control over their own bodies. So we all went our merry ways, inhabiting the bodies genetic and environmental chance handed to us, and in most instances, couldn’t even imagine biological choice possible.

Today, I think it’s clear, both those born under the category of “normal” and those born with recognized variation from that norm, including variations that cause significant impairment, have more avenues open to them than ever before. We learn more about the shockingly extensive degree of choice a wealthy American currently has over his or her biological systems ever day, on voyeuristic television programming that reports exactly what new, completely optional surgery is being performed on those with the money to pay for it. We also hear stories of birth abnormalities being operated on successfully, of diseased being treated or cured, of the survival and in some cases long, productive lives of those who only a few years ago would have been doomed by their lot in the genetic lottery to extremely limited lives, or would not have lived at all. I doubt these stories, the cosmetic and the medical, strike many as two dimensions of the same trend, but it seems to me that the exact same thing is happening in both cases. Whether or not our current medical edifice labels a surgery elective or curative, what we are seeing is humans beginning to flex their new found ability to make transformational personal biological choices.

As many commentators have documented, there is a hugely fuzzy line between correcting biological “mistakes” and offering up the same technology for use in optional improvements. Medicine has learned, for instance, how to significantly extend human height for many, causing people who once would have had no say in the matter to chose to live lives as taller humans (the men and women receiving this treatment to date have to my knowledge all been of below average height). Where should we draw the line between those who are so far out of the mainstream when it comes to height that growing taller is classified a medical procedure, correcting a diagnosable flaw, and those humans who just really wish they were taller? What is the optimal human height range, outside of which you are allowed to resort to growth hormone therapy, and within which you are not? I have little sympathy for such distinctions. It seems unjustifiable to divide human beings from on high into those with different rights when it comes to biological alteration. It seems unjustifiable, actually, to limit acceptable biological alterations to those changes that bring people closer to human averages.

What about the man of average height who wants to be of above average, who dreams of a career in the NBA? What government bureaucrat has the right to deny him, when he’s willing to pay for the procedure and accept the risks? What societal “good” do we preserve by limiting freedom in this area? It would seem to be the same sort of exaltation of human “norms” and averages that disability advocates decry when it comes to treatment of those with divergent bodies. The expansion of choice will no double cause many who today are abnormal to seek normality, and this will no double have repercussions when it comes to societal treatment of those who chose to retain their nontraditional biology. But this is the same choice we will all have: a body which generally conforms to norms and expectations, or a body wildly divergent from them. To deny this choice to those born abnormal seems criminal and discriminatory; to deny this choice to the enormous pool of the medically normal but personally unsatisfied just seems impossible, not to mention unwise and cruel.

It will flow naturally, then, from medicine tackling mental impairment that artificial mental enhancement will become commonplace. Surgery and pharmaceuticals pioneered on those with below average capabilities will, once tested, become available to anyone looking for above average capability. If we’ve learned anything, its that the human appetite for self betterment is insatiable. We won’t stop at curing all known diseases. We’ll begin to view previously “natural” capabilities as woefully unsatisfactory, and this may happen in the blink of an eye, just as contemporary laptop computers outperform the fastest supercomputer in existence twenty years ago. We’ll also discover all the things we’d enjoy doing if only our biology allowed us, and then begin realize them.

So what will the world begin to look like when humans start exercising greater choice in their biology, be it conforming to or confounding anatomical averages? This choice, offered up across the board (if you can pay for it, and accept the risks, sign here) would level the playing field in a truly wonderful and profound way when we consider the maddening unfairness of a pre-1932 world filled with carnival freaks and others who, not by choice but by chance, found themselves far outside of the mainstream of human social and productive life. It’s terribly impolite to say it, but despite how beautiful we find human diversity, the fact that it is imposed by genetic selection causes a lot of suffering and loss of opportunity: only the beautiful can be beautiful, only the strong can be strong, some of us cannot experience biking along a river or watching great cinema or hearing great music, ever, and that’s just tough. The extension of basic human abilities – sight, mobility, hearing, memory – to those who don’t now have access to them would in itself be a glorious achievement. Cochlear implants and modern prosthetic limbs suggest how completely and how soon technology will allow this.

Of course, in other ways, the playing field will be less level than ever before. Our species will experience intensified biological segregation and inequality, which although well entrenched already thanks to substantial differences in diet, health care, personal grooming budgets and the option for cosmetic surgery, is today a pale shadow of what it will become. Billions will continue to struggle for basic nutrients and bodily function while several million will pioneer advanced stages of biological reinvention.

The separation of human bodies into new forms will not simply mirror wealth, however, as people will have wildly divergent goals. For many, optimal health and physical beauty will be something traditional, easily recognized, and familiar, probably a slight enhancement and exaggeration of the typical human form. Many will continue to adjust their music collections, social networks, travel plans and hobbies more avidly and carefully than their bodies, and more boldly; I can’t imagine that true adventurous biology will be a mainstream pursuit, at least not any time soon. But what of our minorities? Already many of us choose physical appearances at odds, in varying degree, with expectations or notions of beauty. Niche athletes in the year 2008, as we witnessed at the Olympics, have freakish and fantastical bodies finely tuned to whatever sport they have chosen, bodies that come in all shapes and sizes but that are unified in their high level of directed, intentional alteration. Many communities create and embody alternative notions of the desirable and the possible, modifying their bodies with scars, piercings, ink, amputations, dye, implants; there’s even that one guy with the ear in his arm. Tomorrow giantism and dwarfism will be chosen, not an accident of birth; gills, sail fins, scales, and wings will be both beacons of irrepressible, brash individualism and centerpieces for close knit communities of transhumans. I look forward to photosynthesizing skin, myself.

Anorexia in runway models, bulimia in figure skaters, and steriod abuse in professional athletes and entertainers all point to the extremes that some of us will go to in inventing new ideals for ourselves. Don’t kid yourself. Many of our fellow humans, in the coming generation, will craft and inhabit bodies that to our standards are downright grotesque. Some men will seek to imitate their favorite superhero; I can’t imagine not one person will attempt a giant green “Hulk” body. There will likely be women who continue to reduce their width and extend their height, in a feedback loop with their peers, to comic (and likely tragic) extremes. The consequences of limitless body modification on gender expression and sexual function are truly awesome to contemplate; speculation on what forms that will take would require another book-length discussion.

There will be inventions, hybridization, ornamentation, innovations artistic and functional (flying will undoubtedly be a rewarding and exhillarating experience), and whole categories of designed, biological change that are impossible to forsee. From cottage industy to recognized university degree, cosmetic body design will grow rapidly and transform millions of lives. The abberations, the choices a few will make that most or all other humans will look upon with disapproval and disgust, should be allowed, and even celebrated. They will represent the triumph of the mind over the dictates of biology, and represent a huge expansion in human freedom. There have always been giants, bearded ladies, human torsos, living skeletons; there have always been abnormal bodies, some (if we’re honest) unbearably grotesque. The crucial difference is that in the past, the people who had to live in and with those bodies had no choice in the matter. When everyone can be as average as they want to be, those who chose abnormality will not only profit themselves from living out their dreams, but will reward the rest of their species with continued, and expanding, human diversity. Diversity will be as beautiful and desireable as it has always been, only this time around, it will be created through human choices and not genetic whims.

A few other notes from today. Downtown Philadelphia is terribly clean and quiet, and stunningly dull: enormous windowless walls, hospitals and banks, a few beautiful old buildings and all too many terrifically ugly new ones. Waffle House is… beyond. It’s worth a six hour drive thinly disguised as a field trip to a museum of medical oddities just to sit in that butter-yellow box and gorge on waffles, hash browns, and bacon. What a world.

Better Living Through Biology

Back in April, William Saletan reported that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has thrown its hat in the ring for the development of non-animal meat products, putting together sort of an X Prize for the world of vat grown tissue. The internal politics of this group are fascinating in their own right, and Saletan focuses on these, observing that, like the interested parties in the abortion debate, “Pragmatists thought they could broaden the movement’s appeal by changing its language and arguments. Purists worried that these changes would narrow the movement’s agenda. Both sides were right. This is an important lesson in politics: Message, constituency, and agenda are related. The broader your message, the broader your constituency, and the narrower your agenda. You have to choose your trade-offs.”

So true, and so rarely admitted by ideologues. I am happy to sit on the sidelines as P.E.T.A. fights among itself. My brief contact with ideological “movement” types left me with little doubt that I wanted nothing to do with such hot air. On the other hand, meat without animals! Think of the possibilities! I did, anyway. Some of them. What follows is something I wrote, ranting to a friend and probably making an ass of myself in the process, after I read about this back in April. This post is tagged as “wild speculation” for a reason, but despite the excitable tone, there’s gotta be something true here: the future will be wilder than any of us can imagine.

I’d be shocked if it took more energy to make meat outside of an animal than in it. If that’s currently the case we obviously need to hold off on this as a mass market technology until the opposite becomes true. It would happen eventually, though; without the huge waste that is the industrialized production of heads, livers, hooves, stomachs and skin, and the expenditure of calories over the lifetime of meat animals, and the waste produced by these animals, all of which is just disposed of, our meat will one day require a tiny fraction of the grain, the land, and the electricity that it does today.

The ability to tweak the end product in direct as opposed to indirect ways is one of the most attractive features of this method of food production. I know we get a superior end product from grass feeding and certain other cow-rearing methods than from certain other cow-rearing methods, but these are blunt and poorly understood tools in affecting the meat we consume. After study and trial and error, I can’t imagine we wouldn’t be able to positively affect the lipid profile, protein content, and other variables. There’s a huge amount we don’t know about precisely how nutrition, or I should say food, in general, interacts with and achieves human health, but I find within myself a nearly boundless faith that in time all things will become known to us. (Whenever this belief starts to feel silly and embarrassing, I remind myself of our record thus far, review the past 100,000 years or so in my head. Never fails to make the impossible seem guaranteed.) When we do have goals – more holistic targets than vitamin content, perhaps, or even something completely unknown to us today – as long as we’re aiming for something measurable, we’ll be able to experiment towards mass production of meat that meets those goals.

Let’s set aside practical, human-survival-on-a-crowded-planet type thinking, because these benefits are easy to predict, and if survival for survival’s sake is the goal and pleasure and diversity of experience are of no import, meat eating of both the animal and the non-animal kind is worthless. Let’s set aside the most immediate, straightforward results that adopting extra-animal meat production wholesale would have on humans (the price of meat would drop, making it available to billions for the first time, and the price of high quality meat would drop to a greater degree, improving the health and increasing the happiness of meat eaters everywhere). And let’s set aside the sea change in the amount of captivity and suffering that sentient organisms on this planet would experience.

Humans behave in very predictable ways when set free on a new task: whenever there is the time, the wealth, and the technological ability, they will tinker and play and dream up things more wonderful than a field’s pioneers ever expected. With the advent of extra-animal meat, there will be adjustments in every conceivable facet of human life. There will be counter-measures, backlashes, nostalgia. I just learned that country music became popular just at the moment the United States ceased to be a majority rural nation – when nostalgia and longing for a lost, simpler time became a majority experience among a newly minted nation of urbanites. This has implications for the practice of animal husbandry: the lore, the honor, the pride and the cache accompanying the production of animal meat for human consumption may explode. There will also be disdain and dismissal akin to the use of rotary phones, curiosity akin to the use of eight-track tapes, and accusations of barbarism akin to… well, the use of capital punishment in all those other industrialized nations that have long since ended it.

When making meat in the kitchen becomes an entire culinary discipline, like making bread or making pastries, when chefs have control over not just sourcing their meat but shaping it, when home kits allow for huge variation in taste, nutrients, texture, color, and every other meaningful variable, when meat ceases to be something we eat because it exists in the world around us in predetermined form and becomes something we make exactly the way we want it to be, however we want it to be, how many trillions of gastronomical experiences and combinations will we realize, almost overnight? Who will get rich formulating and marketing the flavor of the week? How much better will cheap meat-based food taste!? How many hours of human ingenuity and industry will be spent blissfully, by the few with a taste for it, adjusting time, temperature, microbes, ingredients? What trade magazines will crop up? What writing careers will be made reporting on the variety, recent innovations, new combinations? What corporations will sponsor the annual world championship meat making competitions? How many new restaurants will appear, claiming to have founded a new kind of cooking, a new kind of eating? Who will cheapen and exploit this ability? What ad men and women (and machines) will come up with soulless jinges to hawk the latest no-calorie all-vitamin great-tasting answer to all our problems? What artisans will quietly cultivate and enjoy this, like potters? What daredevils with warp and radicalize and obsess over this, like base jumpers? What artists will declare this a new canvass, what performance artists will use it as a prop, what small town will brand itself with some story related to this? (Home of CocaBeef!)

What plant traits with get combined with this malleable tissue, yielding what unimaginable and wondrous and disgusting and divine and dangerous materials years and years from now? What teenagers will distinguish themselves from mainstream society by the kind of homemade meat they consume? What young professionals with declare certain strains of meat indicators of taste and sophistication and other meat-fashions crude and inelegant? What entrepreneur will cook up some impossibly tricky or rare combination of ingredients and sell it to the super-rich with an insane markup? How will local pride and xenophobia color these new kinds of foodstuffs? What will we associate, culturally, with the different ways of getting meat? Who among us will insist on animal rearing and slaughter in the production of their meat? Where? When? What stories will they tell themselves about this insistence on the old ways? What stories will they tell themselves about the people who eat the modern kind? What wonderful or rotten childhood associations will we bind to memories of the meat we made or consumed while growing up? How many currently unimaginable careers with this create: in research and development, the inevitable government oversight, production, management, marketing, engineering, design? How many long and well-loved careers with this destroy? How many towns, how many hundreds of thousands of meat-producing acres of the world’s surface will this reshape, both culturally and physically? What will we do with the land we currently use to raise corn to feed to cows? What will we do with the land we currently house slaughterhouses on? How soon can our children tour a carefully preserved slaughterhouse on a school trip to marvel at the barbarity of their ancestors? What will the children of those who work in slaughterhouses think of their parent’s profession? What mischievous curiosity will inspire the slaughter and cooking of a real animal, every once in a while, just to see how it tastes? What will that killing feel like, what will it mean? What will our relationship with animals be in the future? How many pigs, cows, and chickens will this planet sustain in the year 2100? One million? Four thousand? Will pigs become common household pets, bred and engineered for loyalty and intelligence? Will we morally judge the death involved in other animals’ nutrient acquisition, and begin to insist that those close to us (our pets, perhaps, or chimpanzees) have nothing to do with such behavior? How will we morally signify the distinction between tissue formerly incorporated into organisms with central nervous systems and tissue never associated with a central nervous system?

What do I not know enough to wonder about? What should I be asking?

In my opinion the logic of extra-animal meat is inescapable, will inevitably will come to dominate the market for human meat consumption and will transform gastronomy. If technology is not ready to provide this to the next generation of humans (which would surprise me a great deal), it nevertheless will find its way there, and our food system will someday be free of the astronomical material and energy waste and moral unpleasantness that goes hand in hand with the consumption of parts of formerly living animals. It is not a question of it but of how, when, where, and with what unforeseen consequences, remembering that unforeseen consequences can be both positive and negative. Our coming century will be shaped more by biologists (and once we’re sufficiently advanced, by environmental scientists, meteorologists, and all those who study the large, complex systems that have heretofore been closed to our understanding and influence) than by physicists or chemists or even traditional materials engineers; pretty much anything we could hope to do with inorganic machines I predict can be done better with organic machines. And I think the change in meat production, as revolutionary as it will be environmentally and culturally and economically and politically and morally, will the the very least of our adventures.

To infinity, and beyond!

Here ends my April email. To all this, I would add one further wild speculation, touched on when I wondered about our relationship with animals in the future. Freed of the need to artificially separate ourselves from the rest of sentient life in service of our continued ability to consume it in comfort, how will we frame the rights, the potential, the beauty and wonder of the other most intelligent of earth’s animals? I think that uplift, a theoretical scientific possibility inspired by science fiction, is closer than most would guess. Enlarging known membership of the culture club from one to two or three would be profoundly disruptive, exciting, dangerous, and awesome (truly awesome). Once an intelligent species crosses the boundary into culture, develops intelligence to the degree that it can transmit information from generation to generation through non-biological means (writing, artifacts, instruction), whole worlds open up, and no one can predict what insights non-human intelligence would offer the world of knowledge. Also unknown: how our seemingly boundless capacity for violence and desire to be masters of all we survey will play itself out on this stage. We currently enslave over 27 million human beings (both the largest number and the smallest percentage of slaves in human history, thanks to population growth). What will it look like, the ability to create sentient creatures with sub-human or specialized intelligence? What will the long-term effects on our self-concept and our culture be? What reverence, hatred, or inferiority complex will these species develop towards us? What political or economic relationship will our fellow intelligent species have with us, with each other? As the breathless narrator of the “Beneath The Planet Of The Apes” trailer puts it, “can a planet long endure, half human… and half ape?”

Surely these technological and ethical choices lie open before us regardless of our preference for extra-animal or animal meat. My glass-half-full hope is that by the time we’re actually interacting with uplifted chimps and dolphins, unrelated technologies will have rendered robotic assistance cheaper and easier than intelligent biological assistance, and unrelated social and economic developments will have forcefully and finally rendered the arrangements that permit enslavement in the world today a thing of the past. An end to animal consumption and a flowering of peaceful, cooperative, technologically enhanced human potential cannot help but advance our collective moral perfection to boot; the barbarism we see in previous generation’s social arrangements, values, slavery, and entertainment will be echoed in our descendants’ view of our food production, relative material deprivation, zoos, and costly warfare. We’ve already begun re-negotiating our relationship with apes, in appealing directions. Can you say retirement homes for chimpanzees? Here’s hoping I’m around to see great parts of this possibility come to fruition.

William Saletan is a wonderful guide to the increasingly complex questions about human biology we are facing: his columns on abortion, polygamy, homosexuality, bestiality, body modification, sex practices and norms, reproduction, and the politics, ethics, and technological innovations that color these topics are delightful and thought provoking. Read his blog here and mainline his contributions to Slate here.