http://www.wtec.org/ConvergingTechnologies/Report/NBIC_report.pdf
Converging Technologies
for Improving Human Performance
NANOTECHNOLOGY, BIOTECHNOLOGY,
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND COGNITIVE
SCIENCE
NSF/DOC-sponsored report
Edited by
Mihail C. Roco and William Sims Bainbridge
National Science Foundation
2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers (currently Springer)
Dordrecht, The Netherlands
(482 pages, Web version. See ISBN 1-4020-1254-3 for archival print versi)on.
Any opinions, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the
authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States Government.
EXCERPTS, by page number (not exact order, but by pages)
Page 195
Brain-to-Brain and Brain-to-Machine Interfaces
major goal is to measure and simulate processes from the neuron level and then to develop interfaces to interact with the neural system.
Another visionary project by Nicolelis proposes electrophysiological methods to extract information about intentional brain processes
p. 206
The misconception and fears about genetic determination are so misguided that we are delaying technology that can actually help improve existence for everyone. In medical diagnostic areas, we accept without any reservations tests and assays that try to determine whether we have a disease and the state of that disease. However,
many people view with great concern genetic testing that is more direct and provides
earlier detection. There are most certainly very important ethical issues relevant to the genetic determination. But even these are in some sense clouded by misconceptions, due to past behavior by groups who misunderstood the real
meaning of genetic determination and/or intended to misuse it. It is time to correct
this and gain the full benefits of our technology for everyone.
P. 222
Bioinformatics makes the complexity of biological systems tangible… Ironically, the fulfillment of the Socratic adage “Know Thyself” can now only be
achieved through man’s interaction with and dependence upon computing systems.
p. 223
the aggregation
of individual data into societal data (as in the form of healthcare statistics) is extremely
valuable, since it places the individual’s data within the context of the society as a whole.
… In this
model, it may well be possible one day to determine the cost to society of the
mutation of a single gene in a single individual!
Page 224 Chart:
Table C.3
Tools required to capture human biological information at different
levels of scale, constituting the Continuum Of Bioinformatics
Biological Scale Tools For Information Capture
Ideally, information at all levels of scale would be captured from the same
individual and then aggregated into a societal record.
P. 226
Extracting Value From the Continuum of Bioinformatics
Once the COB is constructed and its anonymized data becomes available, it can
be utilized by academia, industry, and government for multiple critical purposes.
P. 227
Impact on Human Health
The COB will significantly enhance our ability to put individual patterns of
health and disease in context with that of the entire population. It will also enable us
to better understand the mechanisms of disease, how disease extends throughout the
population, and how it may be better treated. The availability of the COB will resect
time and randomness from the process of scientific hypothesis testing, since data
will be available in a preformed state to answer a limitless number of questions.
Finally, the COB will enable the prediction of healthcare costs more accurately. All
of these beneficial reesults will be accelerated through the application of
nanotechnology principles and techniques to the creation and refinement of imaging,
computational, and sensing technologies.
P. 325
Social Engineering
Combined nano-, bio-, info-, and cogno-technologies make it possible to collect,
maintain, and analyze larger quantities of data. This will make it possible to socially
engineer teams and groups to meet the demands of new tasks, missions, etc. The
issue is not that we will be able to pick the right combination of people to do a task;
rather, it is that we will be able to pick the right combination of humans, webbots,
robots, and other intelligent agents, the right coordination scheme and authority
scheme, the right task assignment, and so on, to do the task while meeting particular
goals such as communication silence or helping personnel stay active and engaged.
Social engineering is, of course, broader than just teams and organizations. One can
imagine these new technologies enabling better online dating services, 24/7 town
halls, and digital classrooms tailored to each student’s educational and social
developmental level.
The new combined
P. 334
The prevalence of fundamentalist cultural and religious movements, for example,
suggests that there may be an equivalent of the “auto-immune” response at the
cultural level. Religion appears to be what Talcott Parsons (1964) called an
“evolutionary universal,” essential to the functioning of societies and prominent in
every long-lasting culture. Within the realm of religion, diversification also appears
to be universal, and it may be vain to hope that all people can eventually come to
share compatible religious beliefs (Stark and Bainbridge 1987).
p. 335
We take for granted the assumption that government agencies like the National
Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency, and Department of Energy should conduct fundamental scientific
research that will ultimately be of benefit to manufacturing and transportation
industries and to the military…
As the Human Genome Project drew to its conclusion, it became clear to
everyone that “mapping the human genome” was only part of the work. Also
necessary was studying the great genetic diversity that exists from person to person
around the planet, and discovering the biochemical pathways through which each
gene was expressed in the phenotypic characteristics of the individual. Comparable
work will be required in cultural memetics.
p. 194
Self-Monitoring of Physiological Well-Being and Dysfunction Using Nano
Implant Devices
As the scales of nanofabrication and nanotransducers approach those of the
critical biomolecular feature sizes, they give the technologist the toolset to probe and
control biological functions at the most fundamental “life machinery” level. By the
same token, this technology could profoundly affect the ways we manage our health.
One outcome of combining nanotechnology with biotechnology will be
molecular prosthetics — nano components that can repair or replace defective
cellular components such as ion channels or protein signaling receptors. Another
result will be intracellular imaging, perhaps enabled by synthetic nano-materials that
can act as contrast agents to highlight early disease markers in routine screening.
p. 125-126
Inside the body and permanent: New genes. If the notion of “computers inside”
or cyborgs raise certain ethical dilemmas, then tinkering with our own genetic code
is certain to raise eyebrows as well. After all, this is shocking and frightening stuff to contemplate, especially in light of our inability to fully foresee the consequences
of our actions. Nevertheless, for several reasons, including, for the sake of
completeness in describing the Outside-Inside Framework, this is an area worth
mentioning. While selective breeding of crops, animals, and people (as in ancient
Sparta) is many hundreds of generations old, only recently have gene therapies
become possible as the inner working of the billion-year-old molecular tools of
bacteria for slicing and splicing DNA have been harnessed by the medical and
research communities.
P. 174
Socio-tech — the accumulation, manipulation, and integration of data from the
life, social, and behavioral sciences, using tools and approaches provided by science
and technology — will raise our ability to predict behaviors. It will allow us to
interdict undesirable behaviors before they cause significant harm to others and to
support and encourage behaviors leading to greater social goods.
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