The Road to Creating the First Human Being

Sounds like science fiction right?

Yes.  However, many who have followed my blog noticed that many of the things I write about sounds like science fiction, yet I write about current valid research in laboratories, in trial or in application.  So science fiction?  Not so much.

If the idea of creating human beings scare you, don't worry.  We're quite a ways away from that particular step.  There are many steps between what we can do now and then.... but we're getting there faster than people think.

I discuss this further in this video:

Synthetic organs
I've published several blogs and videos on the topic of creating full organs that can be used for transplants.  It would be terrific if people in need of organ transplants could get one within only a couple weeks of a problem arising instead of waiting a long time for the appropriate donor to be found.

There is also the question of the patient's immune system attacking the donated organ once implanted, causing all sorts of issues over time and most importantly forcing the patient to take immunosuppressants in an attempt to prevent their own body rejecting said organ.  Remember, immunosuppressants also makes a body weaker against ANY foreign body and disease, so the patient has the potential to be sick way more often and needs strong medicine to counter disease, unlike healthy individuals who can just ride a disease out.

New research has come to my attention where labs were able to grow full organs from a certain species into another, then transplanting the organ into the host with the missing organ.  At the University of Tokyo, researchers conducted very encouraging experiments that show that soon we may be able to grow healthy human organs in other species like pigs and once the human organ has grown enough, it can be extracted and transplanted into the host that donated the cells that started the growth process in the pig in the first place.

Doing this allows for the resulting organ to be made up of a large amount of the patient's own cells, allowing the immune system to accept the organ as its own.

And I guess, we get to eat the pig (why not?).

Other teams are working on ways to grow these organs from patient stem cells on some form of structure that has a vascular system.  We have been able to grow very simple or small organs on organic structures and molds before (see some of my previous blogs) because they could be grown without the need of blood vessels carrying oxygen deep into tissues.

So these teams have been using plants as scaffolds with existing vascular systems to successfully grown complex tissues like heart tissue.  With the developed techniques using plant vascular systems, there is a good possibility we'll be able to soon grow full organs that way as well, without the use of animals (another way to use existing vascular systems to bring oxygen to a growing organ).

Pretty exciting stuff with multiple approaches being researched and developed.

I cannot predict when we'll be able to rely on these or other techniques to replace malfunctioning or lost organs, but it's looking good!


The next step 
The creation of whole organs is interesting for treatment purposes, that's for sure but what about creating a whole human body?

That process has usually been the domain of Mother Nature starting off with a human embryo right?

Well, human embryos can be harvested from human eggs and sperm combined, just like what we do for in vitro fertilization.  However, that requires donors and a whole process involving approvals and meetings etc...

Interestingly enough, a team of scientists at the University of Cambridge has found a way, not too dissimilar to what was described above for creating full organs using an organic scaffold of some kind, to create brand new embryos instead that have the potential to grow to adulthood afterwards once we find a good way to either implant these new embryos into surrogates or into artificial wombs (which are being created by other teams at this time).  The team doesn't know yet if the embryo created this way could develop into a fully functional human being, a clone of the original donor of stem cells used to grow the embryo however.  They just can't let these experimental embryos grow beyond the 14 day mark for legal reasons.

Still, this technique could be used to create novel human beings, genetically engineered beyond the need for one or 2 biological parents in the future.

Synthetic humans?
Once all is said and done, with our enhanced understanding of all these biological processes and with techniques allowing us to grow genetically engineered adult bodies (animal or human), we are a getting pretty close to the day when we can actually create new full sized human beings.

Why would we do this?  The main argument would be that it is a great way to fully understand our own genetic code.  Makes sense doesn't it?  The best way to make a new automobile engine with a new design is to take apart existing engines and see how everything fits and work together.

Well, as far as creating synthetic humans, the process of understanding it all comes through our creation of organs, then embryos but also in being able to read our own DNA as well.

There are teams such as those found at Human Longevity, Inc, and the Human Genome Institute that are looking at ways to truly understand human DNA in order to resolve a wide variety of problems including longevity, genetic diseases and yes, eventually, creating a completely synthetic human being.  

And why not?  Making a synthetic human would teach us all the more about ourselves.   If you think about it, throughout history we've been doing just that through childbearing, then in vitro fertilization and  more recently cloning.

Is it going to be useful?  That remains to be seen but what is certain, once we achieve this goal, we'll be many steps closer to understanding our own bodies and making our lives all the better for it.