The rise of the biocyborg: synthetic biology, artificial chimerism and human enhancement

Abstract

Applying technologies into the human body makes a hybrid human/machine: a cyborg. We identified four types of cyborgs in the literature: the original cyborg, enhanced temporarily for space exploration, the science-fiction cyborg, the “Haraway cyborg” used to critic the dualisms and the “everyday cyborg” who became one by necessity, and learns to live with the implanted technologies. We propose in this article a fifth version: the biocyborg. Such a cyborg presents a new kind of hybridity that we named artificial chimerism, it leads to a multi-scale non-Darwinian evolution and the willingness to become a biocyborg is not only driven by necessity but also by the desire to be enhanced and to push the physiological boundaries of the human body. Becoming a biocyborg comes with new vulnerabilities as any embodied technologies but the associated risk is multi-level and also concerns the human species.

Keywords:

• biopolitics
• biocyborg
• synthetic biology
• human enhancement
• gene editing
• self-experimentation
• biohacking
• cyborg
• chimerism

Acknowledgments

I thank Damien Depannemaecker, Maxime Lucas, Michael Levin, and the anonymous reviewers for comments and discussions that greatly improved the manuscript. I also thank Lolita, Lou, Yasmine, and the “La Muse” staff for the great support during the writing of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A titre d'exemple, tout le projet de la médecine prédictive et de la médecine personnalisée repose sur l'idée que chaque individu devrait connaître son profil génétique afin de prévenir certaines défaillances physiques ou, plus positivement, maximizer son potentiel biologique. En fait l'identité à l'ère post-génomique est plus biologique que jamais, dans la mesure où les sciences du vivant ont complètement modifié la conception de la vie humaine. (Lafontaine 2014, 55–56)