Human augmentation via bacterial biome

Human augmentation of physical and mental capabilities by bringing electronics on board seems a likely future. The early stages have already been realized, 10% of Americans are cyborgs today in the sense of having synthetic items permanently implanted: hearing aids, teeth, pacemakers, hip and knee replacements, RFID chips etc. Cochlear implants interfacing with hearing cognition for deaf children are routine. Neuroengineering research has been progressing in the implementation of electroencephalography-based computer controllers. Brain cap video game headsets may become the norm.

There are at least three ways for achieving human-electronic interfaces; physical implants, wearables and a third as yet unconsidered possibility, exploiting the human bacterial biome.

The 1,000 trillion bacteria that are part of each human (10x the number of human cells) could be an ideal augmentation substrate.

There are trillions of them, they are already on board and pass easily and unobtrusively in and out of the human. They are easy to obtain, test and experiment on in the lab. They are expendable. Functionality could be enabled individually, or distributed over the 500 – 100,000 classes of bacteria.

Augmentation applications: communications and processing
The two most important augmentation applications are communications and processing, both of which could potentially be conducted via the human’s microscopic bacteria. Communication is required between the bacteria, which they are already doing to some extent, and externally, to the Internet using wireless, Bluetooth or some other, possibly to be developed protocol. What a vast improvement on board connectivity would be, never having to depend on the vagaries of PC wireless cards, modems and Bluetooth devices.

The second main application is processing, the initial killer app being a memory aid. Coordinating the bacterial biome into a distributed biocomputer for searching, downloading, accessing and delivering information would be an obvious first goal. Other applications could include continuous lifelogging perhaps (literally) through eye cam bacteria, personalized biosensing and remediation of the external environment as it interfaces with humans, virtual reality and nutrient and waste cycling. Electricity from the body could possibly facilitate these computations.

Easy upgrade and maintenance
The continual turnover, ingress and egress of bacteria in humans means that upgrade cycles and retirement of dead or non-functioning elements could occur seamlessly. Bacterial updates could be printed regularly from a 3d printer or automatically dispensed in smarthome air or water. Mechanically, the updates might be delivered through the air, in the shower, or by a nutrient blanket during sleep.

Nanobot intermediaries
Enhancing the human bacterial biome would really just be extending the life support functionality it already provides and could be a nice intermediary step to the more robust bionanodevices and nanobots envisioned in molecular manufacturing. Existing bacteria could be enhanced, much of the human microflora does not appear to be doing anything anyway, or additional bacteria could be engineered and brought on board.

VC life extension opportunity redux

The VC life extension investment opportunity could happen in at least three areas: first and most importantly, translational medicine, second, health social networks and third, distantly, standardized longevity treatments and delivery systems.

Translational medicine
The biggest and most obvious longevity play for VCs is in translational medicine, shepherding and commercializing science findings from basic research to patient therapies. The vast majority, perhaps even 90% or more, of basic research findings never go beyond the lab or journal publication. A particularly high profile example of an early stage longevity company that rocketed from test tube to IPO to big pharma acquisition is Sirtris, bought by GlaxoSmithKline for $720M in June 2008. Some other early stage translational medicine longevity startups are Elixir Pharmaceuticals, Juvenon and Sierra Sciences. In the plethora of remedies claiming science support, it is critical to tightly link the research evidence to the intervention. For example, in this year’s exploding brain fitness market, there is much claim of scientific support but little published clinical trial evidence.

Health social networks
Another VC play is health social networks (for example, PatientsLikeMe, CureTogether, DailyStrength, HealthChapter, Experience Project and peoplejam). Not only can patients connect and generate group-synthesized, curated and moderated knowledge, but health social networks can also facilitate the development of personalized medicine by being a repository for the quantitative data of genomics, ongoing biomarker measurements and electronic healthcare records. Big pharma can approach patient communities for field studies and clinical trials.

Longevity treatment delivery
Standardized longevity treatments and delivery programs via private clinics are not a traditional VC play, but some interesting 10x business models may be possible. In the several years before longevity treatments are more proven and automatically administered via traditional healthcare channels, these services can be provided by private clinics as they are now.

What would improve the longevity treatment market is standardization; standardization of doctor qualifications, certifications, validations, services and treatments, and treatments supported by scientific research clearly evidenced to consumers. Currently, longevity doctors offer heterogeneous suites of services which is challenging for consumers to parse. Positioned appropriately, there is more than adequate demand despite the current lack of insurance reimbursement. Since longevity treatments are currently outside the purview of traditional medicine, third party certification (for example led by the Methuselah Foundation) could help validate doctors and treatment programs, and contribute to industry standards.

Next big VC market: life extension?

Life extension is a growing market and could be the next significant industry targeted by Venture Capitalists and private investment as alternative energy and clean tech eventually wane. The opportunity is made obvious by continuous soaring costs in the world’s largest industry, healthcare, unfunded Medicare type liabilities in every industrialized country, and the demographic aging of populations and below replacement fertility rates together with massive demand and willingness to spend on longevity remedies.

What is the Life Extension Market?
The life extension market is the commercialization of scientific findings from stem cell, immunology, cancer, regenerative medicine and other areas of research. The research linkage between products and research will hopefully become stronger and more standardized. For example, many longevity remedies available today claim scientific support. This research could and should be linked to the products online (23andme is a nice example of research linkage) so consumers and other interested parties can research the products themselves. Bloggers and other independent intermediary watchdogs could synthesize the scientific research and confirm or deny the product claims.

Longevity Docs Needed
It is not clear that traditional physicians will be those prescribing longevity remedies. Specialist longevity docs are needed and will likely arise and market themselves as such, there are a few examples of this today. Most traditional physicians do not currently have expertise in new areas such as longevity and personalized genomics, or the enhancement and prevention vs. cure mindset.

Supplements, Hormones and Enzymes
The first step in life extension treatments is supplements, ranging from a daily multivitamin to the 200 or more supplements per day taken by futurist Ray Kurzweil. The next step is hormone and enzyme replacement therapies, which must generally be overseen by a physician. A variety of treatments have been undertaken per the shifting legal climate, not everyone wanting to be restored to the hormonal levels of their twenties and other reasons.

Longevity Social Network
It would be great to have a health social network (HSN), like PatientsLikeMe and CureTogether for the longevity community. First, people could share the different interventions they are trying. Second, they could upload their ongoing bio-marker test data into an aggregated electronic health record, similar to what Google Health is contemplating, to track and possibly share the impact of the interventions. Third, companies with research and therapies targeting this market could contact an aggregated group to propose field studies, clinical trials and offerings. For example, the 23andme Parkinson’s community has been contacted for such research.

Mobile surveillance?

Are location-based services (LBS) quickly becoming the next FaceBook? Loopt would be one prominent example. As the number of Internet-enabled and GPS-enabled mobile phones proliferates with the spread of the iPhone and the two-year upgrade cycle for mobile devices, about 45% of mobile devices in the U.S. now have wireless broadband access. Local search and other mobile applications can finally be realized.

Location-based services, also called location-aware services, are about finding out what is nearby and who is nearby.

The what is fairly straightforward. This is more granular and possibly dynamic information about the places nearby; restaurant and store reviews, movie times, historical information for self-tours, etc. and the ability to take action, to make reservations, buy tickets, etc.

The who is related to people you know and people you don’t know. One social application is enabling your geographical location to be seen to friends in your network so they can easily find you. Another application is chat networks for people that are nearby, waiting somewhere for example, that would like to meet or just chat anonymously. There are also public-space interaction projects, games, art, etc. where people can use their cell phones to interact with a billboard or display, playing a video game against someone else in Times Square or making billboard art, either directly with call or text input or ambient algorithms following network participants as they pass through the area.

Age-tiering of technology
Twenty-somethings may be happy to permission their friend network to see where they are and senior-monitoring could be desirable but are age tiers 30-70 as interested in this functionality? Is the last modicum of privacy breached when your friends and family can see that you are at the gym, the dry cleaner, not at your office, etc. or is it too plebeian to care if everyone does it? Cell phones mean we can be reached everywhere, but do we want to be seen everywhere?

Twittering Dante

Is medium sacred or could any content be served up in any medium? As vast content libraries are increasingly available on the web, content consumption should take whatever form is convenient and preferable to the user.

There is user-generated content and user-specified content is the next logical step. The amount of content available in multiple forms is growing, some examples are Audible books, and talks and interviews presented as transcripts, podcasts and videos.

User-specified content
In a robust platform, users could select content topic, format, level, detail tier and social dimension. Content topic is the main parameter chosen at present. Delivery formats could range from the text formats of book, academic paper, article, blog post and tweet to the multimedia formats of audio, video, slidecast, video game, etc. The level of content could be most basically popular vs. expert. The detail tier could be summary, outline, article, full detail and annotated version. Social dimension would include comments and reviews by others. These could all be drop-down menus at the top of Wikipedia.

Medium purists will insist that the only way to view the Mona Lisa is to hike up to the humid corridor at the Louvre and squeeze in to peer at the small canvas with the rest of the crowd but others are moving with the times. Who will be the first entrepreneur to do a twelevator pitch - twitter a business plan - to a VC, which VC will be the first to request twelevator pitches? If you can't explain your business in 140 characters or less, fahgetaboutit!

New literacy content and medium synesthesia
The new literacy is that the educated person of today is able to express ideas in a variety of media – in some combination of the traditional reading and writing AND in computer programs, 3d virtual worlds, synthetic biology, video games, 3d printing and visual storytelling. Does the new literacy mean that there could be a representation of all content in all media? Is there an opera of Cornell fab@home objects? What does an Indiana Jones movie look like in synthetic biology? What is a kinesthetic experience of protein folding?

Status of Research on Human Aging

Longevity is the new alternative energy
With $10m quickly raised by the Methuselah Foundation, VCs just beginning to see the opportunity and continually soaring healthcare costs, the longevity market could easily become as big as the alternative energy/climate change solutions market has become now.

Longevity research status
Grossly generalizing, the main focus in aging research is figuring out how to get processes that already occur, in the young and in cancer for example, to occur at other times, in the old. The optimum approach may include both reverse engineering and forward engineering in the form of synthetic biology as has been successful in other biological research areas like gene synthesis.

Aging is multidisciplinary, comprising at minimum the study of stem cells, immunology, cancer, DNA damage, tissue engineering, genetic engineering, regenerative medicine and micronutrients.

A comprehensive collection of anti-aging research findings was presented at the Aging 2008 conference June 27-29 at UCLA. The current developmental stage of aging research is early, perhaps in the second inning. Groundwork is being laid, phenomena are being documented, understanding of general mechanisms is sought, existing processes are being enumerated and early cycles of testing have begun primarily on flies and mice.

The seven primary causes of aging are DNA mutations in the cell nucleus and mitochondria, junk that builds up inside and outside cells, cells sticking together and cell loss and death. These are described at length, together with potential solutions, in aging research pioneer Aubrey de Grey’s book, Ending Aging and in the journal Rejuvenation Research. De Grey’s organization, the Methuselah Foundation, provides grants to anti-aging researchers. Some of the freshest thinking so far has included biomedical remediation, therapeutic organisms purpose-catalyzed in the body and the possibility of removing the overly-prone-to-damage mitochondrial DNA.

Generalized summary of Aging 2008 research findings:

• Applying (non-individual specific) substances from the young to the old appears to work
• With aging, not only does "good stuff" (cells, processes, etc.) decline but "bad stuff" also arises
• The quality of the biological environment facilitates or inhibits activity and repair
• Treatments may be most effective when begun in youth or middle age
• The goal is to extend healthspan not just lifespan

DIY biohacking and the cocktail problem
Every bit as interesting as the scientific talks were the informal discussions of the wide range of interventions, treatments, supplements and other anti-aging remedies in use by conference participants. The cocktail problem is how multiple remedies taken in concert may be impacting each other. Never has there been a market with such demand and so few offerings as for anti-aging remedies.

Paradigm shifts in thinking

Biology has shifted from an art to a digital information science to an engineering problem.

Medicine has shifted from treatment to prevention and from normalization to enhancement.

Health has shifted from passive response to pro-activity.

Scientific method has shifted from hypothesis and experiment to simulation and empiricism.

Literacy has shifted from reading and writing to being able to express ideas in different forms of media such as software, 3d printing, virtual worlds and synthetic biology.

Social media and Enterprise 2.0

There is a much deeper application of Web 2.0 technologies and concepts possible in the enterprise than is currently being contemplated and implemented. Some companies have an early effort to use some of the tools but have not noticed that the concepts themselves can be applied to generate significant benefit. Worse, misapplication is also occurring such as the creation of Social Media Officers oblivious to the bottom-up rather than top-down property of social media.

Future of social media
The long-term future of social media is lifelogging - the auto-capture and permissioned auto-posting or archiving of every person’s every thought and experience. Feedhavior’s digital footprints continue to drive individual actions. The corporation goes away. Artificial intelligence becomes the most efficient form of outsourcing. People and organizations spend more time in simulation worlds than physical worlds. Entrepreneurs and organizations provide goods and services by making offerings proactively to groups of potential customers aggregated through their web-based interest communities. Marketing must be relevant to avoid being perceived as advertising.


Applying Web 2.0 Technologies to the Enterprise
There is no part of the firm at present that cannot make use of Web 2.0 and social media technologies. There are two dimensions for application:

External and Internal
Externally, a firm can use Web 2.0 and social media technologies for branding, re-inventing and testing business models, product and service sales, customer relationship management (CRM), partner ecosystem management, R&D outsourcing and recruiting. Internally, firms can use Web 2.0 and social media technologies for communication, collaboration, work assignment, task and project management, resource allocation and performance feedback.

Tools, Concepts and Values
Some examples of the direct application of social media and Web 2.0 tools are using blogs to supplement or replace marketing, APIs to supplement or replace business development, and crowdsourcing ideagoras to supplement or replace R&D. Applying concepts is for example not just using Digg for the firm’s industry news feeds but Digg functionality to bid up and down work assignments or performance feedback. Using Web 2.0 in the enterprise is not using mash-ups but mashing up internal applications, putting a virtual world front-end on any data application to represent the information in a high-resolution way. Internal trainings and meetings are conducted as open space unconferences. Everyone can participate in everything.

The values of social media are also applied internally and externally: authenticity, openness, transparency, participation, creativity, perpetual beta, new linkages, asking the wisdom of crowds (web, twitter), acknowledgement that everyone can have good ideas and contribute and using freemium and open-source business models (free + fee-based).

21 century skillsets: the new literacy

Almost no one in the traditional education world, in both K-12 schools and higher educational institutions, has noticed the new literacy.

Not only is there a necessity to be more generally technically literate, but

the educated person of today must be able to read, write and express thoughts in a variety of technology-based media

MIT’s Neil Gershenfeld notices “From a combination of passion and inventiveness I sense that students are reinventing literacy. Literacy has been boiled down to reading and writing, but the means have changed since the Renaissance. In a very real sense post-digital literacy now includes 3D machining and microcontroller programming.” (Source: a paraphrase of Gershenfeld's Edge interview)

This should really be extended to say that the new literacy includes expression in traditional writing and in computer software, 3d printing, virtual worlds, video games, synthetic biology and visual storytelling.

Does everyone have to excel at expressing themselves in each of these media? No, but the most effective people are able to communicate through multiple forms of media.

An interesting analysis would be in evaluating the types of expression that are possible in each of the media. How is the same idea different in writing, in software, in 3d animation? Which media are better in which cases? Imagine the assignment to create a representation of yourself through biology, by assembling DNA sequences for different actions from the Registry of Standard Biological Parts database.

There has never been such an explosion of venues for creativity and self-expression. The result is very exciting – a richer interconnectedness of humanity and a new level of collaboration opportunities as more people can now connect through their user-generated content.

Next steps for virtual worlds

Interest in virtual worlds is growing, platforms are proliferating and virtual commerce continues to rise but there are several key steps needs to reach the next level: expanding awareness of virtual worlds uses, providing technical interoperability and establishing a financial payment network.

1. Marketing - virtual worlds are not just for recreation
Conceptually, there is a marketing problem. The popular belief, even by technology professionals, is that virtual worlds are exclusively for recreational use, and even more narrowly, that they are children's video games. This stems from three factors: the vast popularity of teen and pre-teen virtual worlds, the fact that this market segment is making the most money in the virtual worlds space and some high profile acquisitions like Club Penguin by Disney in Aug. 2007 for $700m. Maybe this is what happened with the wheel in Peru; it got defined as a children's toy early on and the greater extensibility of the technology went unrealized.

Enterprise Virtual Worlds
Virtual worlds are the natural evolution of the Internet and one of the biggest potential uses is for enterprise applications. Enterprise virtual world killer app #1 is videoconferencing. Companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars annually on video-conferencing. This can all be replaced with the free infrastructure of virtual worlds, and even improves on the traditional methods as participants have higher levels of engagement and use virtual world workforce collaboration apps.

Enterprise virtual world killer app #2 is the application presentation layer. Virtual worlds are the obvious next generation front-end to any data application. Exponentially more information can be seen at a glance and perceived immediately through visual image rather than read and processed (example: Bashiba). Problem drill down and resolution is also quicker and more effective. Many companies are moving to virtual control centers as the front end to their data applications. IBM features green data centers for both internal and client use to provide lower-cost improved control over nationwide data centers and remote process administration (SLurl). Facilities manager Eolus integrates SAP in the back-end with virtual world platforms in the front-end, representing multiple dimensions of information in a 4-tier virtual map for optimized management of global operations.

Enterprise virtual world killer app #3 is eCommerce. Virtual worlds are the obvious next generation platform for eCommerce, with detailed visual representations of products available for inspection and avatar-based navigation instead of locating items through menus. This trend will strengthen as more cell phones are smart phones and mobile virtual worlds clients are available.

For more information and images of Enterprise Virtual Worlds applications, please see Slides 16-22 of this presentation.

2. Interoperability
The 60+ existing virtual worlds platforms are isolated silos (lists of virtual world platforms: Virtual Worlds Review and VirtualWorldsNews). It is as if every website used a different flavor of html and required a separate login identity. There are two levels of the interoperability challenge. First, export and import functionality needs to be standard between 3d modeling software programs (3DS Max, Maya, etc.) and into virtual worlds platforms. Second, avatars and inventory need to be portable across worlds. One idea is to have a namespace registry system and avatar servers like DNS servers. Open-source platforms like realXtend and OpenSimulator are starting to emerge but do not have the traffic of the vast established worlds like Second Life, There and Entropia Universe.

3. Micropayment Network
The third vital step in moving virtual worlds forward is the establishment of a micropayment network. The breadth and amount of activity could be substantial. The network would be like PayPal, spanning any and all gaming and virtual world platforms, and could also handle web-based and brick-and-mortar transactions. The regulatory hurdles are sizable particularly given the international dimension but one possibility could be harnessing the emerging cell phone payment networks for virtual world micropayments.