Engineer a Human

[AitchJay]

OK, the year is 2300. Bio-engineering is well-established, and we can modify the human form genetically in order to improve it for generations to come.

You are the intelligent designer. What modifications would you suggest?

Modifications must be biologically viable.

If possible, the resulting form should be one which would still survive in a palaeolithic society without technical assistance.

(Thanks to JanetW)

[Ronald Brak]

Biological viable? You mean we're still stuck with being meatbags? Oh well.

Let's think. You want to modify humans genetically and modifications must be biologically viable. Hmmm, tricky. Some things are hard to get rid off without screwing up other stuff. If it was easy to just get rid of the appendix we we'd already be without it. But let's assume we can make any reasonable changes.

Some stuff should be easy to do because we have working examples in other vertebrates or it just improvments on what we have: Four colour cones in our eyes instead of three to improve colour vision, bird type lungs for better efficency, extra sets of teeth (just two sets isn't enough), bonobo type social and sexual relations, better immune systems, improved rationality and intelligence. More mentally stable and cheerful. Longer healthy lifespans.

Harder stuff - The brain is a mess. It should be rearranged to cut down on reaction times. Do visual processing closer to the eyes instead of routing the optic nerve around to the back. At some point the brain got twisted around back to front. We need to straighten that out. And smooth out the front of the brain case so it provides as much protection as the top, sides and back. (I guess our ancestors were fond of swinging their clubs instead of just jabbing.)

Oh, and everyone should be a cheap drunk. And ugly people should be considered just as hot as good looking people.

[AitchJay]

:lol:, I hadn't thought of any of that..

Here's me thinking of the obvious stuff like wings and extra arms..

[farmerjumperdon]

Separate the air and fuel intakes. I'm a doctor Jim, not a carburetor!

Too bad we couldn't have kept the gills and had both air and water-breathing options.

Wings for flying would be nice, but my guess is too much would have to be sacrificed in order to get the weight way, way down.

An eye on top of the skull so we wouldn't get neck aches from stargazing.

A trailer hitch so I could keep both hands free when pulling the kids in the wagon.

I'll get busy documenting requirements. Is there a developer available? And who's got the budget on this one?

[HenrikOlsen]

An extra set of teeth for old age,
Don't pipe food/water and air through the same hole,
Remove the vermiform appendix or get that part of the digestive system back to being able to get energy from cellulose,
Vision extended to the infrared,
Better immunity to parasites,
Conscious control of the pain response, (Yes I know it's broke, now stop hurting so I can fix it!)
Detection of electromagnetic fields,
Synthesizing of all amino acids and all vitamins,

[AitchJay]

I'm curious: why the detection of electromagnetic fields?

And for arguments sake; an unlimited budget. This is general medicine, available to all who desire it; not just upgrades for those who can afford it.

[farmerjumperdon]

Don't pipe food/water and air through the same hole

Hey, I got that one already.

I can see I'm going to need a patent.

[farmerjumperdon]

You know, if human genes can be patented, why not other physical characteristics.

I'd like to apply for a patent on the human brain. Everybody owes me royalties.

And the opposable thumb. Everybody give me your money or give up your right to use your thumbs in opposition.

I'm going to get so rich.

[pghnative]

Except that no one would be able to grasp their wallet (or sign the check, or credit card receipt).

[farmerjumperdon]

The devil is always in the details.

OK then, online payment. I'll be swimming in cash just from the "handling" fees.

[snarkophilus]

A gland in the roof of my mouth that secretes ethanol, and a set of retractable front teeth that can produce sparks when gnashed properly. The ethanol can be used for things other than breathing fire on people, too, though I suspect this will cause all sorts of social problems. Lips and tongue may need to be re-engineered to support this, but that will have beneficial the side effect of making sure I never get burned by my soup.

I wouldn't mind a rhino horn, either. Or a pachycephalosaur skull. Or both. All sorts of new sporting events become possible at that point.

[HenrikOlsen]

I wouldn't mind a rhino horn, either. Or a pachycephalosaur skull. Or both. All sorts of new sporting events become possible at that point.
With woodpecker like shock dampening for the brain.

[AitchJay]

Thanks for the responses, that's great!
Not sure about the rhino horn, but whatever blows your hair back.. :)

[Maksutov]

After the redesign, two of everything, and I mean everything. Always good to have a backup, right, Zaphod?

[yuzuha]

I'm a go for separate food/air intakes, avian style pass-through lungs, gills optional for swimming freaks, extra sets of teeth (or maybe just make them out of something more damage/decay resistant), 4 color receptors + IR and UV plus a more reflective back coating like a cat and move the blind spot somewhere else that won't interfere with star gazing, tougher hide, nails strong and hard enough to open those stupid blister packs and slit the plastic wrapper on dvds etc., more efficent heart, lower cholesterol levels, smaller more efficent brains (halve the size and power requirements but double the power, and add more peripheral processing), fix the structural problems of using a modded quadupedal skeleton for bipedal locomotion, longer lifespan, and restore the ability to sense magnetic fields that we lost somewhere along the way.

[pghnative]

After the redesign, two of everything, and I mean everything.
Does that mean four of the things we now have two of?

That would be udderly ridiculous.

[farmerjumperdon]

An expectant father is in the waiting room (old school) and the nurse emerges and announces unexpected twin boys.

The father is in tears of joy and proclaims they will both be named Ed.

The nurse asks why, and the father replies . . .

Because two Eds are better than one.




Thank you, don't forget to tip.

[korjik]

Redesign the spine so that there is less failure and is stronger. Get rid of telomere reduction when DNA copies. Add compensation to repair the effects of ageing. Breathing water and flying would be fun, but so would living 1000 years :)

[Maksutov]

Does that mean four of the things we now have two of?

That would be udderly ridiculous.Well, think of the increase in milk production with two udders! ;)

No, where there's already a backup, then those already meet the requirement. Although I'd be willling to compromise along the lines of the Martian lady-of-the-evening in Total Recall. :)

[Swift]

- How about a more variable metabolism, so that you do not get overweight (just crank up the thermostat and burn it off).
- I agree with better knee and spine, particularly for protection of the spinal cord.
- Ability to regrow the sensing hairs in your inner ear (repair deafness)
- Ability to regrow nerves
- Better regenerative abilities (like the lizards that regrow their tails)
- Conscious control of pain response (you still know it hurts, but you can "turn down the volume" of the pain)

[Ronald Brak]

- How about a more variable metabolism, so that you do not get overweight (just crank up the thermostat and burn it off).

A lot of people have already got that. (Lucky *******s!)

[snarkophilus]

A snake-like ability to detach the jaw, so as to be able to eat really big burgers.
Every hinge joint bends both ways.
No kidney stones.
Porthole to stomach, making it easier to throw up when you have food poisoning. Also, so scientists can reach in and check on your digestion, just like with those cows. That's too awesome for words.
Bioluminescence. Better if it can turn on and off. Really talented people will be able to spell rude words.
Opposable big toes.

[Maksutov]

A snake-like ability to detach the jaw, so as to be able to eat really big burgers....Or live rodents, as in V.

Chow down!

http://img224.imageshack.us/img224/2310/bunnyjump2dj.gif (http://imageshack.us)

[mugaliens]

With all these design considerations, we're going to weigh 300 lbs (that's the slender version), be a big, fat target for those hungrier than us, starve to death because we no longer have enough energy to produce our food, and only live 35 years because the lack of efficiency translates into excessive load on the body's various systems.

As we exist today, we're a good mix of functional, efficient, and long-lived.

[TheBlackCat]

Let's see:

-Have the female birth canal around where the belly button is now. Having the birth canal go through the hips is great for a 4-legged animal since it prevents the baby (or babies) from falling out, but it has the opposite effect on bipedal organisms like us. Babies don't fall out usually, but the muscles needed to keep them in are so strong and the hips so narrow that birth is extremely difficult and the baby must do most of its brain development after birth or it won't fit. Putting the birth canal at the belly button would eliminate both those problems, making birth easier and less dangerous and allowing the baby to be more mentally developed at birth. There is a reason cesarian sections are done at that place in the body.

-Eliminate RNA primers. Currently DNA cannot by synthesized without an RNA primer to grow off of. This is a real waste, overly complicated, and is the reason we need telomeres in the first place. Eliminating that would greatly simplify things and eliminate the need for telomers.

-Flip the retina so the photoreceptors are facing towards the lense, not away from it. That would eliminate the need for a blind spot and eliminate the need for a fovea. Cephalopods have retinas with this structure so it is not impossible.

-7 colors receptors, 3 in the visual range, one into the UV spectrum (doesn't need to go very far since UV is only transmitted by air a little outside of our range), one bridging the gap between IR and optical, then 2 in the IR. Also spread out the existing 3 receptors so there is more overlap between the "green" and "blue" receptors.

-Vascularize cartilage, tendons, and ligaments so they can re-grow.

-There are currently two sets of arteries feeding the heart. One goes around one side of the heart and the other goes around the other. I would have them meet up and merge in several places. That way if one get blocked you have a backup blood supply coming from the other that can take over. The brain already has this in its blood supply (called the "loop of Henle"), so there is no reason the heart couldn't also. This would greatly reduce the incidence of heart attacks, especially if there were several such connections, but would not cause any adverse affects or really any costs.

-I would make it so cerebrospinal fluid is synthesized outside the brain and flows in. Currently it is the other way around, leading to life-threatening problems if the flow is blocked as the fluid-filled spaces inside your brain swell and eventually crush your brain against your skull.

-I would add a second opposable thumb on the opposite side of the hand. I would also eliminate the link between the ring finger and other fingers that prevents the ring finger from operating independently of the other fingers. Your ring finger moves when a finger on either side moves. This isn't an issue now since it seldom needs to move that independently, but would be a serious problem if you had a thumb on that side as well.

-I would fuse the 4 toes besides the big toe. The big toe is needed for walking, but the other would be more secure if they didn't move independetly.

-I would move the point where the trachea (breathing tube) meets the esophagus (feeding tube) up to the back of the nasal cavity. I would keep the opening between the nasal cavity and throat open, but with the trachea that high it would be nearly impossible to get food or water in there (unless you are actually underwater) but would still allow you to breathe through your mouth without a problem.

-Changing location of various sensory processing areas really would not help. They all travel through the thalumus (bedies smell), which is located at the center of the brain. So it really doesn't matter where they go after that since all points are roughly the same distance from the thalamus. I would route smell through the thalamus, though. That would better intergrate it with the other senses. I would then upgrade the olfactory lobe to neocortex like the rest of the senses (it is currently much simpler and less sophisticated alocortex). I would also re-activate most of our olfactory (smell) receptors. Mammals have about 1000 of them, but the genes for 700 of ours are non-functional. I would make them functional again, improving our sense of smell. I would also just get rid of the vemeronasal system (a second smell system) and integrate its receptors into the olfactory system.

-Move the rest of the mitochondrial DNA to the nucleus. It is unnecessarily complicated to have just a little bit in the mitochondria and the vast majority in the nucleus. Then the nucleus wouldn't have to make mitochondrial RNA synthetase and ship it all the way to the mitochondria, so mitochondrial RNA senthetase could be eliminated completely.

-Eliminate the pitituary gland. Move all the stuff from the pitituary gland to the hypothalums. Have the hypothalamus synthesize the hormones directly instead of synthesizing one set of hormones that then tell the pitituary gland to synthesize another set of hormones.

-Put the adernal glands inside the kidneys. Currently it sits on top of the kidney, sends most of its hormone to the kidney, but has not direct connection to the kidney. Combine the two so they are more directly connected.

-Make our ears slightly asymmetrical in shape and orientation. That way we would be much better able to localize sounds, both by the difference in intensity because of the different orientation and different frequency content because of the different shape. This would be particularly useful for localizing sounds above and below us, which we are extremely bad at right now.

-Eliminate wisdom teeth.

-Allow hair cells in the cochlea to re-grow. They can in birds, so there is no reason they couldn't in humans.

-Add a nictitating membrane to our eye (a transparent second eyelid). I am a bit torn as to weather it should be normal or re-focus your vision so you can see underwater or wether it should just keep your vision as-is. Being able to see underwater would be great, but being able to protect your eyes on land would be too. Perhaps one nictitating membrane coming down from above the eye could change your eye's focal length for working underwater while a second coming up from below would protect your eye on land without distorting your vision.

-Make it so the lense of the eye stops growing when you reach adulthood. This should prevent cataracs and the requirement for corrective lenses as you get older, and also will prevent your lense from getting rigid and preventing you from re-focusing your vision that always happens as someone ages.

-I don't much like the idea of a reflective layer on the retina. It is useful at night when you need to collect as much light as possible, but during the day it will reduce your visual acuity by detecting light and then reflecting it back towards the retina but at a different angle, causing it to hit a different photoreceptors at a different place in the retina, making the image blurry. Try looking very close at your reflection in glass mirror, you will see there is actually a double-image. There would be the same problem with a reflective layer in the retina. However, squid and octopi have a system where they can move pigments up and down on their skin to change their color. Perhaps having two pigments, and light-absorbing one like we have now and a light-reflecting one, and have it so one could be moved to the surface and the other hidden depending on light levels.

That's all I can think of right now.

[snarkophilus]

Let's see:
-Eliminate wisdom teeth.


You have many great ideas, but I disagree with this one. If I had to suffer through getting mine taken out, so should everyone else! (Though not as bad as me... I wouldn't wish that on anyone, really.)


-Make it so the lense of the eye stops growing when you reach adulthood. This should prevent cataracs and the requirement for corrective lenses as you get older, and also will prevent your lense from getting rigid and preventing you from re-focusing your vision that always happens as someone ages.


There are tons of great eye upgrades. I think of ones I could use on a daily basis. Another nice one is a pressure valve for fluid, so people with autoimmune diseases that cause fluid buildup and eye deformity don't suffer vision loss. You could do the same with CSF, too... like a shunt, but biological rather than the ones people get surgically implanted.

Of course, while we're redesigning, we can just build in mechanisms against autoimmune diseases.

The ability to regrow a lost eye would be nice, too.

I wouldn't mind photoreceptors all over my body, even. Extra eyes seems like a waste, because eyes require a lot of energy to run, but something more primitive would still be functional enough to keep people (or wolves, or lions) from sneaking up on you.

And how about a chlorophyll-like addition, something to drive the ATP cycle using sunlight? Instead of eating lunch, we could just go for a walk. It'd be great for marathon runners, too. We could incorporate that into the aforementioned photoreceptors.

[Swift]

-Make our ears slightly asymmetrical in shape and orientation. That way we would be much better able to localize sounds, both by the difference in intensity because of the different orientation and different frequency content because of the different shape. This would be particularly useful for localizing sounds above and below us, which we are extremely bad at right now.

There are at least several species of owls that are asymmetrical in ear location for that reason.

[ggremlin]

I think three things would be great improvements. Enable regeneration, conscious control of the pain system and for females improve the reproductive system for easier deliveries.

[TheBlackCat]

There are at least several species of owls that are asymmetrical in ear location for that reason.
Where do you think I got the idea? ;) Although technically it is not their ears, they are specialized feathers called "ear tufts" that serve the same purpose as our outer ear.

[TheBlackCat]

You have many great ideas, but I disagree with this one. If I had to suffer through getting mine taken out, so should everyone else! (Though not as bad as me... I wouldn't wish that on anyone, really.)
I had 6 wisdom teeth removed, I think they should not exist.



Another nice one is a pressure valve for fluid, so people with autoimmune diseases that cause fluid buildup and eye deformity don't suffer vision loss.
There already is such a valve. The problem is, for unknown reasons it sometimes fails. Without knowing what is causing the problem it would be impossible to design a countermeasure, since any countermeasure could fail for the same reason.

You could do the same with CSF, too... like a shunt, but biological rather than the ones people get surgically implanted.
Once again, this already exists. The problem is it sometimes fails. However, my idea of having the CSF produced outside the brain and not inside it would eliminate the problem entirely, so we wouldn't need to have know the reason if the problem completely disappeared.

I wouldn't mind photoreceptors all over my body, even.
The problem is brain power. If I recall correctly 1/3 of the human cortex is already devoted to vision processing. Adding that many more photoreceptors would require a much larger brain, maybe even twice as large.

Extra eyes seems like a waste, because eyes require a lot of energy to run,
Try a massive amount. Your eyes use about 1/10 of the oxygen you breathe in.

And how about a chlorophyll-like addition, something to drive the ATP cycle using sunlight? Instead of eating lunch, we could just go for a walk. It'd be great for marathon runners, too. We could incorporate that into the aforementioned photoreceptors.
Photosynthesis requires a lot of water. Marathon runner would dehydrate themselves much more quickly if they had chloroplasts.

[HenrikOlsen]

-Make our ears slightly asymmetrical in shape and orientation. That way we would be much better able to localize sounds, both by the difference in intensity because of the different orientation and different frequency content because of the different shape. This would be particularly useful for localizing sounds above and below us, which we are extremely bad at right now.
They already are, so what you're asking for here is a refinement on an existing system not a redesign.

For the up/down distinction, it hasn't been as useful as the front/back one which is why is isn't as developed.
I haven't noticed any particular problems with up/down directionality within the range relevant to normal life, ie. between ~60° down and ~25° up, but I have noticed lots of other people having trouble with it.
I think it has a lot to do with practice at the right stage of development.

[TheBlackCat]

They already are, so what you're asking for here is a refinement on an existing system not a redesign.
Assymetrical relative to each other, i.e. one ear is different from the other ear. Currently the two ears are pretty much the same.

For the up/down distinction, it hasn't been as useful as the front/back one which is why is isn't as developed.
But it is useful now when living in urban environment with lots going on above and below you.

I haven't noticed any particular problems with up/down directionality within the range relevant to normal life, ie. between ~60° down and ~25° up, but I have noticed lots of other people having trouble with it.
I wouldn't know. I have a inhereted sound locilization defect that leaves me pretty screwed up in that regard.

[HenrikOlsen]

Assymetrical relative to each other, i.e. one ear is different from the other ear. Currently the two ears are pretty much the same.
Pretty much the same is not the same as equal. :) The difference is enough to actually give pretty good directional sense for other than just left/right, though it could still be improved.

[Ronald Brak]

Pretty much the same is not the same as equal. The difference is enough to actually give pretty good directional sense for other than just left/right, though it could still be improved.

You mean my lopsided ears are actually helpful? Cool.

[TheBlackCat]

Pretty much the same is not the same as equal. :) The difference is enough to actually give pretty good directional sense for other than just left/right, though it could still be improved.
The vertical direction sense is primarily due to frequency filtering by your earlobes. The same sound has different frequency content depending on its vertical angle. However, this is no where near as accurate as the combination of sound level differences between the two ears and sound phase differences between the two ears. A combination of those two are what is used to detect horizontal position, and it is extremely accurate for most people. However, because the ears are basically symmetrical neither of these methods help with vertical sound position. However, if the ears were asymetrical, one pointing a little up and the other pointing a little down, the difference between the position as detected by phase differences and intensity differences could be used to determine horizontal and vertical position with very high accuracy. Vertical position changes would only cause level differences but not phase differences, while horizontal changes would cause both. By comparing the discrepancy between the two, combined with sound filtering by the earlobes, a combination of vertical and horizontal position could be determined much more accurately.

[Swift]

Where do you think I got the idea? ;) Although technically it is not their ears, they are specialized feathers called "ear tufts" that serve the same purpose as our outer ear.
Not the tufts, the actual openings to the ear are at different heights on the head.

4th paragraph this page (http://www.owlpages.com/articles.php?section=Owl+Physiology&title=Hearing)

[snarkophilus]

We could just add an extra ear for even better location.

[TheBlackCat]

That would require additional brain power. I hesitate to do anything that would require making our brains any larger than they already are.

Oh, speaking of which another improvement. Currently presynptic neurons cannot have both excitatory and inhibitory synapses as far as we have seen. Make is so neurons can have both types, allowing them to excite some cells and inhibit others. That way the body can eliminate inhibitory interneurons and thus save a lot of space in the central nervous system.