Ryan O’Shea runs the business side of Grindhouse Wetware, a
Pittsburgh collective of programmers, engineers, and enthusiasts working
towards body augmentation using safe, affordable, and open-source technologies.
Started in 2012 by a group of colleagues through the biohack.me forums,
Grindhouse has rapidly grown into a key figure in the biohacking movement and
gained a great deal of press through initiatives such as Tim Cannon’s 2013
implanting of the Circadia body monitor into his forearm.
The funny thing about a dialogue with a
biohacker like Ryan O’Shea is that while he acknowledges that integrating
machines into the human body to enhance ourselves is weird, the entirety of
human history with technological development is also pretty weird, if you think
about it. Airplanes, space travel, Facebook – in many ways we are already a
transhumanist society and for people like Ryan, body hacking is simply the next
logical step.
Yet when we begin to explore the
traditional medical system, O’Shea’s tone is somewhat less empathetic. His
frustration with the media and public’s views of biohackers as “disturbed
people in basements cutting themselves open and jamming cellphones inside” is
completely understandable when you learn of the impressive roster of scientific
professionals working with the team. However, they do still work out of
basements, garages and other places away from the public eye, largely out of
necessity. Money aside, working from the coffers of a large biotech or academic
institution would allow a much more professional setting, however, massively
hinder the speed and transparency of their work through patents, regulation,
ethics reviews, and other red tape.
So what can the medical community learn
from a group of rag tag pioneers such as the Grindhouse crew? Through a
conversation with Ryan O’Shea, we uncovered a few things where the pros could
take note.
Medical Science’s Biomimicry
“People seem to be fine with getting a prosthetic limb if
they need one, or getting a cochlear implant if their hearing is damaged.
Medical science is fine with bringing people who are considered “damaged” in
some way up to normal, but it seems largely uninterested in making “normal”
humans better.”
While O’Shea’s point is very relevant
in the recovery vs. enhancement argument, there is an even deeper learning here
about the ways in which medical science treats the body. Due to either our
conservatism or the limits of our imaginations, by and large the types of
treatments we pioneer to humanity’s ailments are attempts to copy nature,
assuming it had it right all along.
But we only need to look to examples
like composite running blades, ultrasonic neural stimulation, and Chlorin e6
injectable night-vision to realize that the unnatural is at times a better way
forward. While we have traditionally sought to restore body functionality to a
state of normalcy through biomimicry, we are in essence setting for ourselves
an upper-limit on the types of treatments we are able to create. This is a
constraint not simply on the functionality of our bodies, but also a
handcuffing of medical researchers who are told to hit the “sweet spot” of
human ability – not too little and not too much.
Our Bodies are Vessels
“There’s this lingering belief that the human body is some
perfectly crafted, preplanned organism. It’s not. It’s the byproduct of
generations of accidental mutations, adaptation, and survival. Parts of our
biology are vestigial remnants of our animalistic past.”
This extreme view should remind us that
while it’s important to tend to the body’s ailments, ultimately the body is simply
what transports and serves our minds. Each year, it seems, our advancements in
prosthetics, artificial organs, and synthetic body chemicals leaps forward,
while our understanding of the mind inches at a snail’s pace. We hold the body
on a pedestal though as O’Shea points out, it is nothing more than a byproduct
of centuries of evolution and our current attempts of integrating technology
into the body, while somewhat risky, are simply an acceleration of this change.
The medical community needs to pull the
human body off the pedestal and to stop enabling society’s narcissistic view of
ourselves as Adonises. If this article’s first point has merit, then future
treatments will likely inch further and further away from the body’s original
state. If we do not begin to reset the norm of medical care to be one of
optimizing ourselves instead of simply restoring the functionality of our evolutionarily-mutated
flesh-bags, then we will begin to see a divergence in health between the
trailblazers who are willing to hack their bodies and the stalwarts who are too
scared to vaccinate their families with over 200 year-proven technology. Our
bodies are not sacred temples. They are imperfect and at times broken systems
that we need to get comfortable with augmenting or repairing through any means
necessary if we truly want to optimize health.
DIY
“The fact that we choose to go the route of the open source,
citizen science, and maker communities isn’t an indictment of our methodology
or vision. If anything, it is a conscientious stand against ridiculous patents,
hindering regulations, and bureaucratic red tape that would keep us from
innovating how we see it.”
And perhaps the most obvious, yet
important thing the medical community can learn from a group like Grindhouse is
how to rapidly innovate. While decades of regulation have made our health
systems more safe and reliable, this has also prevented the medical community
from sprinting forward on many advances. Yes, we must always weigh the risks
and consequences of our actions, however, those aware of the risks should have
the choice to circumnavigate regulation.
This would allow the types of
incredible pioneering work being done at places like Grindhouse, Science.Mic,
Biohackspace, or DIYbio, to take place under far more safe, controlled, and
scientific communities. It could mean that new drugs and new medical devices
could be in-market within months instead of years. Regulation and property are
crucial concepts for the business world, but when it comes to matters of our
health, we have a moral imperative to serve the needs and health of people
ahead of our organizations and governments. Yet until we resolve this
dissonance, expect that more and more of the major medical breakthroughs you
read about over the next decade will not come from the top Universities or
Biotechs of the world, but by the basement-dwellers and hackers like Ryan
O’Shea.
