What Our 3D-Printed, Biohacked Bodies Will Look Like, According to Smart People

It's not often you find a NASA scientist, a Paralympic record breaker, a feminist performance artist and an expert in bioprinted organs inside a geodesic dome—unless you tell extremely complicated jokes. But that's exactly what happened at MoMA's PS1 on Sunday, where a diverse group of bright minds discussed the ethical implications of biotechnology and future of humanity.

The event in Queens was organized by Lynn Hershman Leeson, an artist and filmmaker who is known for her work focusing on intersection of technology and art, and included two panels. The first, called "The Origins of Life, From the Inside Out," centered on the capabilities and ethical boundaries of biotechnology.

"Genetic engineering amounts to writing software for cells, thereby creating a lineage of fresh and unprecedented possibilities," Hershman Leeson said. "While bioprinting can prolong the life cycle of living systems, it can also simultaneously pose a lethal set of what was formerly known as nature."

Luke Masella, one of the first people to receive a bioprinted organ transplant, talked at the event about the life-saving procedure he underwent when he was 10 years old.

"I was in full-on kidney failure, and the options for me were pretty limited at the time, and they weren't sure what they were going to do to help me," he said.

The two-part surgery involved taking part of the bladder out, and using the cells to grow a new, functional bladder that was implanted after two months. Masella, who is 24 now, fully recovered from surgery and is now a high school wrestling coach.

Keith Murphy, the co-founder of bioprinting company Organovo, discussed the future of bioprinted human tissues, saying printed liver and kidney tissue now allow drugs to be tested more accurately and with fewer risks.

"A lot of drugs get out there and cause a lot of damage that was not foreseen, often because they were tested on animals and that's not the most accurate," he said.

Murphy said the next threshold of bioprinted tissues is creating full vascular systems. When it comes to ethical boundaries in the field, Murphy said the question of artificial enhancement is becoming more prevalent. The current technology in development for bioprinted organs is aimed at getting people back to normal body function, but it could soon improve native function of organs, bringing up new ethical questions.

"I think we are always working on the edge," he said. "If you think about it, it used to be on the edge of ethics to get cadavers out of graves and do scientific research on them. I think we are just always at a new edge, and pushing against that is not a bad thing to do."

Dr. Josiah Zayner, a researcher at NASA, said the boundaries of what science can do are expansive, but it will take time before some of these ethical quandaries are even reached.

"I like to think of things in terms of what is possible, and what's probable," he said. "Science is much more complicated than people think. You can't just go into the lab and all of a sudden create a human or a complex organism."

As part of the panel, Zayner played an instrument he designed called a Chromochord, the first-ever bioelectronic musical instrument to run on photosensitive proteins. To play it, Zayner shined blue LED light on vials of LOV proteins to activate them, and translated their reactions into sound.

"I fell in love with this protein, and I wanted to share this nanotechnology with other people," Zayner said before playing a short song for the audience.

Zayner's protein performance wasn't the only musical exhibition of the day: Melissa Logan, founding member of music ensemble and self-described girl gang Chicks on Speed, discussed the group's ongoing work in technology and performed at the event.

"We work with the control and lack of control one has over material, this idea of truth and tracking," she said. "At the moment we are using EEG headsets to record the brain data of people. If Google is doing it, why shouldn't artists do it?

She also talked about a recent collaboration with Julian Assange and led the audience in a drone-themed karaoke session.

"To be an artist is to be introspective and be on the most radical things that are happening in the world right now," she said. "Through digital transparency, we have the positive sides along with the NSA and the scary sides. As artists, it is our responsibility to be aware of where the extent of that is going."

As the event continued, a second panel focused on "the New Second Nature." Speakers included Dr. Oron Catts, an artist, researcher and curator who focuses on biological arts, and Anicka Yi, an artist whose recent work focuses explores gender themes through the medium of bacteria.

Aimee Mullins, an actor, model, women's advocate and athlete who was born without fibulae in her legs, also spoke about the future world of prosthetics. She talked about the evolution she has experienced from the wooden legs of her childhood, to the collaborative projects she has done today, casting prosthetic legs out of everything from the polyester used to make bowling balls to soil with a full potato root system stretched through it.

"For a surgeon, amputation is a failure, he failed to save the limb––but for the people who take over after that, it's a blank canvas of possibility," she said. "I do think the hacking generation is bringing this idea of empowerment and autonomy over your body, and there's much more potential."

With the unprecedented potential of science across these fields comes questions about the ethics of potentially harmful advances in technology.

"American culture has the precautionary principle, which is you go ahead with technology until it proves dangerous," Catts said. "In other places you stop and figure out the technology first before you go ahead with it, and I think this is a major issue."

Hershman Leeson said intent remains an important compass as artists and scientists explore new frontiers.

"Intention really does shape what you do creatively," Hershman Leeson said. "We have now in our particular time the possibility of doing things that are either utopian or dystopian in order to create a planet that continues to thrive, so intention is everything."