Speculative Overview of Gene Therapy, Brain Organoids, and Bio‑Electronic Computing

Even the bright red line for human manipulation of human beings shows many signs of moving or breaking completely. More than 2,300 approved clinical trials for gene therapy are in progress worldwide. A major medical goal is the treatment or prevention of cognitive decline, especially in light of our rapidly aging global demographic. Some treatments of cognitive decline will include cognitive enhancements (drugs, genes, cells, transplants, implants, and so on). These will be used off-label. The rules of athletic competition (e.g., banning augmentation with steroids or erythropoietin) do not apply to intellectual competition in the real world. Every bit of progress on cognitive decline is in play for off-label use. Another frontier of the human use of humans is “brain organoids.” We can now accelerate developmental biology. Processes that normally take months can happen in four days in the lab using the right recipes of transcription factors. We can make brains that, with increasing fidelity, recapitulate the differences between people born with aberrant cognitive abilities (e.g., microcephaly). Proper vasculature (veins, arteries, and capillaries) missing from earlier successes are now added, enabling brain organoids to surpass the former sub-microliter limit to possibly exceed the 1.2-liter size of modern human brains (or even the 5-liter elephant or 8-liter sperm whale brains). Conventional Computers versus Bio-electronic Hybrids As Moore’s Law miniaturization approaches its next speed bump (surely not a solid wall), we see the limits of the stochastics of dopant atoms in silicon slabs and the limits of beam-fabrication methods at around 10-nanometer feature size. Power (energy consumption) issues are also apparent: The great Watson, winner of Jeopardy!, used 85,000 watts real time, while the human brains were using 20 watts each. To be fair, the human body needs 100 watts to operate and twenty years to build, hence about 6 trillion joules of energy to “manufacture” a mature human brain. The cost of manufacturing Watson-scale computing is similar. So why aren’t humans displacing computers? For one, the Jeopardy! contestants’ brains were doing far more than information retrieval—much of which would be considered mere distractions by Watson (e.g., cerebellar control of smiling). Other parts allow leaping out of the box with transcendence unfathomable by Watson, such as what we see in Einstein’s five annus mirabilis papers of 1905. Also, humans consume more energy than the minimum (100 W) required for life and reproduction. People in India use an average of 700 W per person; it’s 10,000 W in the U.S. Both are still less than the 85,000 watts Watson uses. Computers can become more like us via neuromorphic computing, possibly a thousandfold. But human brains could get more efficient, too. The organoid brain-in-a- bottle could get closer to the 20 W limit. The idiosyncratic advantages of computers for math, storage, and search, faculties of limited use to our ancestors, could be designed and evolved anew in labs. Facebook, the National Security Agency, and others are constructing exabyte- scale storage facilities at more than a megawatt and four hectares, while DNA can store that amount in a milligram. Clearly, DNA is not a mature storage technology, but with Microsoft and Technicolor doubling down on it, we would be wise to pay attention. The main reason for the 6 trillion joules of energy required to get a productive human mind is the twenty years required for training. 168 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016388