Think Differently: Life and Intelligence by Our Hand
Don’t misplace your brain!
Those of you who know me know that I love the Mel Brooks classic, “Young Frankenstein.” It is the comedic story of Dr. Fredrick Frankenstein (pronounced, “Frahnkensteen”), grandson to the immortal Victor Frankenstein from Mary Shelly’s classic, and his struggle with his legacy, stained by madness and shame of his grandfather’s experiments. The film’s anti-hero, Fredrick Frankenstein’s monster, struggles much like his predecessor in that he is created out of scientific genius but left as a symbol of fear for the villagers who are aware of his existence. It is all thanks to an abnormal brain he received instead of the intended brain (I’ve included a video clip at the end of this post for those of you who haven’t seen it before).
As far-fetched as the story might appear, that some brilliant, if misguided, scientist would devise a way to re-animate dead matter, three articles I’ve come across in recent months make me believe that it’s not as impossible as it once might have seemed.
And Man Said, Let There be Life?
It first began in September of ‘08, in an article I read in Wired Science entitled, “Biologists on the Verge of Creating New Form of Life.” You read that right. Jack Szostak, molecular biologist and head of a research team at Harvard Medical School and his team have figured out a way to build simple cell molecules that can almost be called life. The fatty cells they use can trap nucleic acids that contain the instructions for replication. When coupled with an external energy source, such as our sun or some chemical reaction, the cells can begin replicating on their own. Granted, this isn’t like anything we know as “life” on earth now, but it could certainly represent what it might have looked like when it started millions of years ago here.
The reason why it’s “verging” on a new form of life is because the cells still require a trigger before they will replicate. Most scientists consider something as being alive when it has 3 basic components: a container, a way to harvest energy and a way to carry information using some kind of nucleic acid such as RNA. This form of life doesn’t quite yet harvest its energy or replicate its nucleic acid readily, but it is getting there.
The video below demonstrates how Szostak and his team got the protocell to form and become the vessel for their near life-form.
Reaction to the discovery was, as to be expected, widely varied. Balance, one responder to the post, stated:
There are only two places this can lead. The first is into a hyper-intelligent, incredibly tough and nimble organism that likes to snack on humans and the second is into something that turns most of us into zombies. PLEASE stay away from the future and redirect your efforts to creating new iPhone accessories.
These were balanced by responses like ZHULogik and chris:
This is great. Don’t fear things because you don’t understand them. The implications of this are immense…
and
Awsome [sic], it means that sometime in the future might actually there be intelligent life on planet Earth…
How would you feel if this experiment were to continue and yield the ability to create life?
Be Smart about What you Create
So, at least one scientist out there believes he is on the verge of creating new life, but we’re really just talking about a single-celled organism, right?
Well, scientists from Aston University in Birmingham, UK took cells from a cancerous tumor and altered them to be identical to those cells found in a human nervous system, according to the UK Telegraph’s “Scientists create ‘artificial brain’ to help fight Alzheimer’s.” Though they’re not necessarily developing a complete brain as you and I know it, they are leveraging the discovery to improve research on disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and general dementia. Scientists quoted in the article seemed enthusiastic about the possibilities the discovery offers in terms of better understanding the diseases that afflict the brain, and were hopeful it could lead to new treatments for those diseases.
However, if the artificial cells “process thought at the most basic level,” as the article states, then what, exactly, are those thoughts? There was no indication of what kind of thought we were dealing with, and though the cells appear to have been developed as a possible alternative to animal testing in the future, at what point are we creating and then destroying sentience? How would we know? How would it communicate with us? Perhaps I’m overanalyzing this, but isn’t life starting to imitate art here? Are we becoming a little Frankenstein-ian in our discoveries?
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804)
We may even somehow be able to impart wisdom to any creations that we manage to develop in our creation of brain cells and artificial life. The Mail Online reported in their April 5th edition that scientists at University of California in San Diego may have pinpointed the region in the human brain that houses what we call wisdom. Study author Dilip Jeste and his colleague Thomas Meeks found that when faced with a problem that requires an altruistic response, the brain relied primarily on the center for intelligence and learning, the prefrontal cortex. When presented with a moral dilemma, on the other hand, the brain organizes information from both primitive and modern areas of the brain to develop a response.
Though understanding that wisdom may purely be a function of brain development, it’s unsettling in many ways and certainly challenges the doctrine we’re taught to follow both in religion and in philosophy. Knowing where wisdom took place in the brain, the scientists say, might help to identify ways to enhance it in the future. However, to what end would our world change if we could all “enhance” ourselves to share the same level of wisdom. Who would determine the “right amount” of wisdom? What would we do for those people who might not be physically capable of attaining that wisdom?
Think about it
Much debate will surely ensue on these three topics, and I find it difficult to come to a conclusion myself. On the one hand, the prospect of better understanding how our brain works is enticing and could give us a window in time, back to our very creation. On the other hand, much as I argued with genetics and gene therapy, I worry that the potential for misuse of the knowledge is a real threat to our humanity.
Before I go, I’ll leave you with the clip from “Young Frankenstein” I promised earlier. It just goes to show how a single mistake could lead to disaster, and could be a light-hearted reminder to scientists to be careful as they experiment, because in cases like these, they could be the guardians of our very existence.
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