Remember Dr. Curt Connors from The Amazing Spider Man? A scientific genius, mad beyond belief, who tries to re-engineer

humans to become virtually immortal. He says, “I spent my life as a scientist trying to create a world without weak-ness, without outcasts. I sought to create a stronger human being, but there’s no such thing. Human beings are weak, pathetic, feeble-minded creatures. Why be a human at all when we can be so much more? Faster, stronger, smarter.”

RegenerationTurns out Dr. Connors’ wish could be closer to reality than we think – obvi-ously with a far less dramatic effect. We aren’t far from the day when humanity

will get past the physical limitations of our bodies, either by fixing it beyond any damage, much like lizards that heal their epidermis. Research into undying jellyfish with regenerative cells is helping scientists understand how to make the body last longer than its shelf life. Hydra, a jellyfish species, repairs almost all its cells and regenerates periodically, without aging. James Vaupel, Director, Laboratory of Survival and Longevity at the Max Planck Institute for Demo-graphic Research in Rostock, Germany, claims its a fundamentally different survival strategy than humans. In an interview to the BBC, Vaupel explains, “Hydras allocate resources primarily toward repair. Humans, by contrast, pri-marily direct resources toward reproduc-

tion, it’s a different survival strategy at a species level.” This only means that we can’t self-heal without outside help. He also believes that senescence or biological aging can be slowed down rapidly in humans and gives a 50 per cent chance of close to negligible aging becoming a reality in our lifetime.

But if all cells “rust from oxygen exposure” and are going to suffer from inevitable destruction, however delayed it may be, what could be the next best thing than harnessing the phenomenon of 3D printing to print your tissues and organs and theoretically continue to exist forever?

Scientists have succeeded in achieving some amazing breakthroughs recently. Tissue engineering research has led to printing out a fully beating, three-dimen-

Jayesh Shinde

Our quest to harness the good things about technology to counter its negatives on our health and well-being doesn’t just stop at buying new fitness trackers or planning out a health regimen on your smartphone.

Far from it. Humanity’s in this for the long haul, and has its eyes firmly set on discovering the elixir of life and unlocking physical immortality. Here’s

some of the steps to prolonging our health to a whole new level.

To immoRTaliTy and beyond

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68 Digit | May 2014 | www.thinkdigit.com

sional, two-chamber mouse heart using a modified desktop, inkjet printer. By filling the ink cartridge with cells, they’ve been able to “publish” functional human kid-neys. We’re taking technology into places that’s truly unlocking the secrets of our physiology like never before.

Just in the last few months, we have witnessed scientific feats like growing human ears on the backs of mice and implant culture-grown lungs into rats. 3D printing ears, lungs, and even tissue samples for use in humans. Thanks to recent advancements in stem cell research, British scientists have successfully cre-ated artificial blood that can be adminis-tered to anyone, by growing RBCs from fibroblasts that have been reprogrammed into mature red blood cells in the lab. The blood, developed by researchers at the University of Edinburgh and the Scot-tish National Blood Transfusion Service (SNBTS), would be Type O negative, also known as universal donor blood, which currently comprises just 7 percent of the blood donor pool.

Experts in the field are unanimous in their prediction that in the near future, whenever we need replacement body parts, whether it’s a tissue culture or a major organ, we’ll just use rejection-proof artificial organs grown in laboratories using our own cells. “By putting in the

parts you need, you’ll be able to extend life by several decades,” explains Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Insti-tute for Regenerative Medicine. “We may even push that up to 120, 130 years.”

downloading memoriesThe above mentioned techniques on our path to immortality have overwhelming odds restricted by our physiology. Our body’s programmed to degenerate. But is that also true of our mind?

Less than a year ago, Berger and Sam Deadwyler at Wake Forest University suc-cessfully conducted experiments in which

they actually inserted memories into the brains of rats by stimulating certain parts of the hippocampus with electrical signals. Berger said they have also been able to disable the hippocampus, in effect blocking the memory, and then electroni-cally stimulating certain areas to create a

“new” memory. This has worked success-fully in rats and monkeys, while human trials are yet to begin.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-nology, Ed Boyden leads the Synthetic Neurobiology Group, which is building new tools to explore the brain. Boyden and his colleagues have found a protein in algae that is able to convert light into electricity. When this protein, called chan-nelrhodopsin, is introduced into certain neurons, it’s triggered by light to create distinctive patterns they can be trans-lated into electrical impulses and then mapped – resulting in a computer code of a memory. This opens up a whole new range of technologies in the field of brain and memory research, digitizing data and even offloading it to some extent.

The biggest roadblock to downloading memories right now is that they seem to disappear when not in use. Unlike memo-ries in a microchip which can be accessed any time, if the human brain isn’t actively triggering a memory, one can’t really download or copy it, according to Ted Berger, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California. And unless we get past this hurdle, the reality of completely offloading the contents of our brain can’t be achieved.

Even Stephen Hawking believes that downloading data from the brain is an inevitable eventuality. “I think the brain is like a program in the mind, which is like a computer, so it’s theoretically possible to copy the brain onto a computer and so provide a form of life after death,” he said, according to a report in Guardian last September. “However, this is way beyond

our present capabilities.” But don’t be disappointed just yet.

The avatar ProjectThis is the most ambitious endeavour towards achieving immortality of the mind, perhaps not the body. And it hints

“There’s this whole other aspect of intelligence which is new thoughts, new ideas,

creativity, these are things that we don’t even understand fully among us humans yet,

much less how to get that into a robot.” - James McLurkin, Asst. Prof of Computer

Science, Rice University, USA

3D printed or lab-grown organs and prosthetics will prolong our life

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towards cybernetics immortality, where we create a neo-humanity and truly take control of our evolution beyond the grasp of nature’s biosphere. And that, according to various schools of thoughts, is the only true way for us to become truly immortal. And the Avatar Project is the first major step in that direction.

The Avatar Project is the brainchild of Russian billionaire, Dmitry Itskov, who isn’t unlike Peter Weyland from the movie Prometheus – both want to be immortal. While Weyland looked at the stars for answers, Itskov’s putting his trust in neuroscientists, neuroen-gineers and futurists to allow him to “live” forever. Not just him, but eve-ryone. Eventually.

The Avatar Project seeks to conquer death in four stages by 2045. Stage one deals with the creation of a robot that can be controlled by our brains (through a brain-machine interface) by 2020; Stage two takes things further when a human brain can be transplanted into a synthetic body by 2025; Stage three is where the boundaries between humans and robots blur, and it will be achieved after the con-tents of a person’s brain can be uploaded into a synthetic one by 2035. The last and final stage of the project, slated to end by 2045, results with the completion of a full-blown Avatar, a hologram that will replace bodies completely and allow us humans to live forever.

This may sound like a hoax, but it actually isn’t. Itskov’s vision is backed not only by his own deep pockets but also other tech luminaries – Itskov’s ambi-tious roadmap is supported by vision-aries like roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro, Google’s director of engineering, Ray Kurzweil, and chairman of the X-Prize

Foundation, Peter Diamandis. Even the Dalai Lama has given his blessings and endorsed Itskov’s vision, when he said in a press release, “We should carry out these experiments with a full sense of responsibility and respect for life that will only benefit humanity, benefit others.”

Ray Kurzweil, Google’s director of engineering and a self-confessed futurist, said at a WSJ conference recently that “We’re going to expand who we are. We’re going to become more non-biological.” Calling the human body a “software process,” Kurzweil believes that in the future humanity will no longer be limited to its physical form and be able to upload our consciousness into a cloud and use nanobots to recreate our physical bodies at will. And as humans start becoming more like machines, AI advancements

will make machines increasingly more human. This convergence is what Kur-zweil calls “singularity.”

Food for thoughtSo we are trying to achieve immortality by slowing down biological aging of the human body, by supplementing the human body with fresh, new lab-grown organs, and ultimately escape the con-straints of our physical cage – arguably the best piece of intelligent life form that evolution has produced to rule the earth with – and exist in the form of a digital entity for eternity. And from the looks of it, all this doesn’t seem to be the stuff of sci-fi at all.

So the question we put to you is this: Excited or petrified? And how will you start preparing for your immortal life?

Visit 2045.com to see how the Avatar Project is creating the stuff of sci-fi. Unbelievable.

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