Bio-revolution & Futurology

Bio-revolution & Futurology
Vladimir Kishinets

The book contains a popular description of the results of the analysis of some humanitarian (socio-psychological, economic, political, etc.) consequences of the development of emerging technologies for managing human biology.

Bio-revolution & Futurology

Vladimir Kishinets

© Vladimir Kishinets, 2020

ISBN 978-5-4498-1930-7

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

This small collection begins with a translation of the article “Catch the biorevolution train…», published in November 2019 in “Invest Foresight” magazine, which can be considered an introduction, an annotation to the second, more detailed work, “Bio-revolution is coming” (2018).

    V. Kishinets
    kishinets@mail.ru
    http://kishinets.tilda.ws/

Catch the biorevolution train, or why futurology is needed

Very briefly about where the progress of biology leads and the importance of studying the future in three parts.

1. Biotechnologies and life

GMO people? Yes

At the end of 2018, a chinese professor announced the birth of two twin girls in whose embryo he “disabled” the CCR5 gene. He explained this as a desire to make children immune to their father’s HIV infection.

Although we are talking about the world’s first genetically modified people, the main reaction to the event was the indignation of experts: the Chinese applied a new, breakthrough method of editing genes CRISPR/Cas9 (“Crisper”), which is actively used for editing DNA, but creates side effects and such experiments on people are considered, so far, not ethical and are prohibited in many countries. The Professor has been subjected to state censure and does not get in touch. To date, the fate of the children is unknown…

However, not all experts support a complete ban on such experiments. The characteristic news was announced by the BBC in a note: “a Russian biologist wants to create genetically modified children. What hinders him and what does Vladimir Putin have to do with it?” (www.bbc.com/russian/features-49883302). Dilemma between the danger of such experiments and their enormous potential benefits is a difficult, demanding, scientific and ethical problem.

However, despite the complexity of the situation, there is no doubt that…

…the widespread use of genetic technologies in humans is only a matter of time. The world is on the verge of managing human biology.

Why should manage biology?

The need for this is quite clear: human bio-physiology, formed by evolution, is very imperfect. One of the consequences of this is, for example, thousands of fatal diseases and minor ailments that torment people.

Although modern medicine of tablets and scalpels has achieved great success in the fight against them and continues to develop actively, its fundamental limitations are obvious: it will never be able to cure all diseases, it will not be able to give what a person really needs – absolute health. There is only one way out of this impasse, which seems paradoxical at first glance – we need to change and improve… biology of people themselves.

Health medicine

The General meaning here can be explained as follows: it is known that living beings suffer only from diseases that their biology allows. So people are genetically protected from swine fever viruses, and animals do not suffer from many of our diseases. This means that purposefully changing (modifying) the genome can make a person immune to infections. It is even more obvious that biological modification (biomodification) is the only remedy for hereditary and genetic diseases, somatic and mental.

The theoretical possibility, the visible progress in the development of genetic biomodification technologies and their understandable huge benefits leave no doubt that such a genetic and biological biomedicine will be created in the foreseeable future.

It will become the embodiment of the idea of “health medicine” that eliminates the root causes of pathologies, while the modern, struggling with their consequences, “medicine of diseases”, will develop as a means of emergency assistance in case of accidents, injuries, etc.

More than medicine

But biomodification is not just about fighting diseases. This is the path to victory over the most inexorable biological “curses” of intelligent man-aging and physiological limitations of life time.

This possibility is determined by the fact that living structures that have the ability to self-renew at the cellular level are potentially immortal, and the aging that kills them is not some kind of wear and tear of the body, as it looks outwardly. Aging that ends in death is part of the generational change mechanism, a biological program for freeing the living space from the parent individuals who have fulfilled their evolutionary functions.

Like all life-cycle programs, it is written in DNA and, therefore, by modifying the genome, it can be stopped, disabled, reversed, providing a person with permanent youth and a physiologically unlimited life span. At the current level of development of fundamental biology, solving the mechanisms of aging and creating technologies to counteract them is inevitable. Of course, such (physiological) immortality will not save you from death in disasters, but the average life expectancy can increase not by 10—20 years, as is dreamed of today, but by many hundreds of times.

But that’s not all. With the development of technologies, biomedicine will allow you to literally control the human body, change the appearance, face, volume of fat deposits, muscles, length of limbs (bioplasty), as well as change the psycho-cognitive properties (psychoplasty). Thanks to this, people will no longer be the result, figuratively speaking, of a lottery of a combination of parental genes, but will become the real masters of their body and spirit. Against the background of the victory over diseases and aging, these opportunities may seem insignificant, but, as the analysis shows, they will be extremely in demand and will allow solving the problem of innate bio-physiological inequality of people that is insurmountable today.

It is not difficult to understand what serious consequences in interpersonal, economic, socio-political relations will result from the implementation of such real, and not normative, human equality.

Thus, the scientific revolution in biology that is beginning today can give a person truly the greatest, incomparable, benefits of life: absolute health, eternal youth, the ability to change and live thousands of lives.

On the progress of biotechnology

Although such prospects may seem fantastic, there is hardly a serious specialist who denies the fundamental possibility of such technologies. Moreover, their analogues have existed in nature for billions of years and all living things, including humans, are actually the result of a chain of genetic changes implemented with the help of a huge number of biological technologies created by nature.

In fact, the phenomenon of life is the sum of natural biotechnologies.

Some elements of this natural toolkit have been used in biology for a long time, but the creation of the mentioned CRISPR/Cas9 opens up new horizons.

It is based on a natural molecular complex for destroying viruses in bacteria, isolated and ingeniously adapted by biologists for previously inaccessible manipulations with DNA in multicellular organisms. This was not only an important practical, but also a scientific and ideological breakthrough. This use of natural biotech will significantly accelerate the creation of biomedicine.

Of course, there are still many problems to solve. Today, only the very first steps have been taken towards the creation of publicly available biotechnologies, towards the solution of the main, grandiose and extremely complex task of ensuring the inalienable right of access to them for the entire population of the earth. At the same time, the dynamics are obvious – the predictions made in 2005 about gene-cell technologies are being implemented even ahead of schedule, and important discoveries can happen here at any moment.

2. Revolution of revolutions

Thus, we can state that man is approaching the most important event in his history – the creation of technologies for improving and managing his biological basis. It is easy to understand that no conceivable scientific discoveries and inventions that are certainly waiting for humanity ahead, can not be compared with this in its significance. Therefore, the success in creating biomedicine can rightly be called the greatest scientific revolution.

However, it will not only be a scientific and technological revolution. Its social, humanitarian, and civilizational consequences will be no less grandiose. They are inevitable, because everything in our world – interpersonal relations, economics, morality, politics, law, religion, art, absolutely everything – is ultimately determined by the biological properties of a person and their change is a change in the Foundation of the world order.

It is difficult, for example, even to list the changes in people’s lives as a result of overcoming aging: from the return to work of the mass of rejuvenated pensioners and the acceleration of population growth, to changes in the attitude of future super-long-livers to work, to marriage and family relations, to life and death, to violence, wars, to physical risk, art, entertainment, etc.

No less revolutionary will be the consequences of other areas of biomedicine application.

Problems of the revolution

The final results of this biosocial revolution will be unequivocally positive. It will make people’s lives much more comfortable, safe, and reasonable. However, it will not be without serious problems. It is expected that the processes will be complicated when the inevitable contradiction of new forms of human existence with the previous economic, political, legal principles and mechanisms will require their fundamental, global changes.

The obvious consequence of such a radical restructuring will be a transition period with widespread destabilization of management systems, disruption of economic and production-technological ties. As the analysis shows, it is very likely that this will lead to a special global crisis that cannot be resolved by today’s methods, to a widespread drop in production, a decline in living standards, etc. Only way to mitigate it is to prepare technical, political, and social measures to counteract it in advance.

This will require huge efforts and a lot of time, and much will depend on how timely responsible politicians, scientists, entrepreneurs, and everyone who is able to influence the course of future events will be able to understand their logic and meaning.

It is obvious, however, that the upcoming changes are so non-trivial and go beyond ordinary ideas about the future that it is impossible to understand and predict them without serious scientific analysis…

Revolution today