Discovery Channel: Future Experts

The Future of Sight

It is hard to predict how the human of the future will look; however, it is possible to speculate on how the human of the future is likely to look at things.

All sorts of crazy (and interesting) developments have been happening recently from pixie dusts to re-growing injured tissue to artificial livers. I am guessing we will see two types of development for making the "new and improved" human of the future. One type will rely on using what is available from the machinery of the body -- say, as in cellar DNA or the tissue -- to evolve it to something useful. This could be for repairing injury or reducing the effects of aging. This type of work will need some heavy duty biochemistry, and is likely to face some serious moral and societal questions. The second type of development may get help from high-tech to augment the human performance or to fix it if it needs some extra help.

We have seen this later type of development for a long time now. Any device from prosthetics to pacemakers fits the description. My guess is that in the near and mid-future, we will see more of these types of devices and definitely more sophisticated ones before we switch to solutions that evolve and use the body itself in the more distant future. Here is one example of a high-tech device that can augment the human performance that you might find interesting:

Sight is one of the main venues for us to explore the outside world. For the longest time, we relied on what the body had until the advent of optics gave us spectacles for correcting vision, and microscopes and telescopes for augmenting the visual power of the human eye. Any person who uses glasses is using a device that manipulates the light rays on their way to the retina to modify the image that is perceived. We are quite used to this now and do not consider it something strange.

Let's extend this to contact lenses. Any person who wears contact lenses is using a device that manipulates the light rays that enter the eye. So far, the contact lenses have been passive polymer structures. But! It is possible to imagine that we can integrate functional devices into a contact lens and turn it into a functional system. What if we had a contact lens that had an integrated semi-transparent display and wireless telecommunication capability ... This lens would be able to project images for the person and at the same time give him/her full mobility. If you had a contact lens that could image what is seen by the person, analyze it, and superimpose some computer-generated graphics onto the scene, you have the opportunity to tailor-make "reality" for each person. This is an interesting way -- to put it mildly -- to augment/alter the visual capabilities of the future human.

Is the idea of building a functional contact lens with an integrated display and wireless capability completely crazy? If recent advances in nanoelectronics, photonics, ultra-low power circuits, miniature power sources, and making biocompatible microstructures are any indicator, the answer is no! Actually, our research group currently is working in building functional contact lenses ...

It is "perceivable" that the human of the future may be using a contact lens that is packed with sensors, electronics, optics, etc. That would be truly a sight to see!

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About this Week's Guest Blogger:

Babak A. Parviz
Assistant Professor
Bionanotechnology, Self-Assembly, Nanofabrication, MEMS
University of Washington

PHOTOS: University of Washington | Courtesy of Babak A. Parviz

Clothes Get Smarter

We’re used to interfacing with the Internet via a PC or handheld device, but in the next 20 years, the Web is going to make its way into our bedrooms, our bathrooms and even our clothes.

The faint beginnings of this trend are all around us today. British Technology futurists Ian Neild and Ian Pearson have forecast that 60 percent of our mobile devices will be Internet accessible by the end of the decade. A firm called Textronics has created undergarments and sports equipment that can monitor your vital signs.  Nike is already marketing a shoe that lets you track your jogging route on Google Maps.  And a Finnish company called EMFIT has developed a wireless-sensing mattress that their government is using in hospitals and jails.

Industry watchers estimate that a $400 million market for Smart Fabrics and Interactive/Intelligent Textiles (SFIT) is already in place.

A U.K. designer named Jenny Tillotson has come up with one of the most interesting ideas yet: a fragranced fluidic fabric system that releases atomized bursts of perfume or cologne. In the years ahead, she hopes to combine the design with body-temperature sensors. Imagine if you could slightly adjust your scent depending on whether you were talking to someone you liked or someone you wanted to repel? Gives new meaning to the phrase "awkward encounter," doesn't it?

This trend toward ever more -- and ever-more intimate -- computing is making possible a future where we simply assume the presence of wired technology in almost everything with which we come in contact. By 2020, you'll be able to walk into any furniture store and buy a bed to monitor how you sleep. Your bathroom mirrors could inform you of your protein, iron and cholesterol levels and share that information with other “smart” devices you'll interact with during the day, like your clothes. 

On the downside, a lot of developments have to occur, mostly in other areas, before the smart-wear revolution can really spark.  Your smart bed, smart kitchen and smart pants might use a 100 different platforms to communicate with one another.  For computers (at least those of today), dialoguing between platforms takes a lot of juice. It’s part of the reason global energy use is expected to double in the next 30 to 50 years.

One idea for meeting this increased demand is tissue-thin solar film.  In March 2007, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory awarded United Solar Ovonic (www.uni-solar.com) a $9.1 million grant to perfect "ultra lightweight solar arrays on thin stainless steel foils" to power satellites. If the film can be rendered light enough to attach to clothing, solar thin-film solar could provide smart apparel with a 1,000-watt-per-kilogram power source. Hydrogen fuel cells are another option for powering computer-laced clothes. But according to one industry expert I spoke with, "who would want to walk around with a hydrogen fuel cell on them, what with the potential explosiveness?" he asked.

Just goes to show, sometimes intelligence isn't everything.

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About this Week's Guest Blogger:

Patrick Tucker is senior editor of THE FUTURIST magazine and director of communications for the World Future Society.

Learn more at www.wfs.org.

PHOTOS: Courtesy of the World Future Society

Printing Organs is Not Just Science Fiction Anymore

It’s working ...

It started back in 2004. I was working in my office one day when suddenly I heard a roar from the adjacent lab. I rushed over, expecting to find someone dead or badly injured. Instead I saw a few of my students jubilantly gazing at a Petri dish stuck in the new three-dimensional printer we had received a few weeks back. They just managed to print a ring of cellular aggregates. These cellular aggregates -- we now call them bioink particles -- are composed of thousands of cells and placed into biocompatible gels, or biopaper.

This was the first time extended biological constructs, and not just individual cells, were deposited using an automatic delivery device.  I remember closing my eyes for a few seconds and imagining how one day we were going to build blood vessels, hearts and kidneys from the patients’ own cells (called autologous tissue engineering) and solve the looming shortage of donor organs.

We are not yet there, but printing organs is not science fiction anymore. Several research groups have embarked on the exciting path of organ printing. Both redesigned desktop inkjet printers and mechanical extruders are being used for printing biological structures of growing complexity. We just write a computer script using architectural software, such as ArchiCAD, prepare the bioink and biopaper, and push a button; the rest is up to the bioprinter and nature. Once printed, the bioink particles fuse into a continuous structure.

Sounds easy.

But do not yet rush and load up with alcohol. It will take some time before your native liver can be replaced with a bioprinted one. Here is how we will get there. The first task is to print a vasculature -- the branching tree-like structure blood vessels form to deliver nutrients effectively to every cell and organ in the body. Without blood supply an engineered biological structure will not survive beyond a certain size, say a box with a side of half a millimeter, hardly a liver. Thus we spent the last three years learning how to print blood vessels. These are now close to being ready for insertion into an animal, and tested in coronary bypass surgeries. Once we know how to print single vessels, we can combine to build vascularized organs, such as the kidney or liver. Will the printed kidney look like the real one in all its details?

I doubt we will ever be able to reproduce what nature has been experimenting with for millions of years. The engineered kidney will not be a carbon copy of the one we are born with, but it will function just as fine if not better. And when this happens the first time, you know the rest.

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About this Week's Guest Blogger:

Gabor Forgacs
George H. Vineyard Distinguished Professor of Biological Physics
Department of Physics, Biology and Biomedical Engineering
University of Missouri

* Get his full bio.

* Visit the research websites:
http://forgacslab.missouri.edu
http://organprint.missouri.edu