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

1. Introduction

What does it mean to be normal, ill or enhanced? There is no sharp distinction between them (Hofmann 2017). Therapy and enhancement are overlapping concepts. Indeed, any successful medical action reflects an enhancement of the condition of the patient even if not all enhancements enhance by being therapeutic (Dekkers and Rikkert 2007). And there are already socially accepted enhancement practices such as reconstructive surgery which became esthetic surgery, or even vaccination, that can be seen either as prevention medicine or enhancement of the immune system. Therefore, the normal, the pathological and the enhanced have blurred frontiers with human enhancement (Hofmann 2017). In this article, we will consider human enhancement as “any kind of genetic, biomedical or pharmaceutical intervention aimed at improving human dispositions, capacities or well-being, even if there is not pathology to be treated” (Giubilini et al. 2016). The corresponding technologies have the goal to make a better version of the human body and go for some of them beyond the traditional medical enterprise. The aim of human enhancement is not a political and social perfectibility in the sense of the Enlightenment (Le Dévédec 2014). It has been the subject of great debate in different fields and several economic and political strategies for the last 20 years or so (Roco and Bainbridge 2002; Le Dévédec 2014; Giubilini et al. 2016; Malet 2015; Pio-Lopez 2018). This social phenomenon impacts different domains, from sports (Miah 2006), the bioeconomy (Lafontaine 2008) to the military (Malet 2015), and even found its way in the workplace (Le Dévédec 2020).

The human enhanced by technologies, this organic/technology hybrid leads us to the figure of the cyborg. The new fusions of human and technologies renewed interest in cyborgs (Dalibert 2014; Oudshoorn 2020; Haddow et al. 2015; Mauldin 2014). The term is the contraction of cybernetic organism (Clynes and Kline 1995). Originally, it appeared for space exploration (Clynes and Kline 1995). The aim was to adapt the human to space and not the contrary by incorporating cybernetic technologies to the human body. The figure of the cyborg is pervasive in popular culture and is often the incarnation of power and strength. The concept of the cyborg has also been used in feminist and science and technology studies (Haraway 1991; Haddow et al. 2015). The cyborg can use technologies to enhance its health (Haddow et al. 2015) or to obtain new functions and there exists different kinds of cyborgs:

There are many different types and levels of cyborgization. The incorporated living elements (viral, bacterial, plant, insect, reptile, rodent, avian, mammal), the technological interventions (vaccination, machine prosthesis, genetic engineering, nanobot infection, xenotransplant) and the level of integration (mini, mega, mundane) can all vary, an infinite number of cyborgs, life multiplied by human invention and intervention. (Gray 2012, 29)

Besides this infinite gradation of cyborgization, we identified four main types of cyborgs in the literature: the original cyborg (or the “space cyborg”) from Clynes and Kline (1995), the SF cyborg, the everyday cyborg (Haddow et al. 2015) and the concept of the cyborg coming from the seminal work of Haraway (1991). In this article, we describe the rise of a new type of cyborg: the biocyborg. Indeed, recently, various scientific and technical advances have emerged. In the context of human enhancement and the cyborg, we think two of them are of particular importance: synthetic biology and gene editing (considered in this study as a sub-field of synthetic biology). Synthetic biology is essentially the application of engineering principles to biology: “Synthetic biology brings together engineering and molecular biology to model, design, and build synthetic gene circuits and other biomolecular components and uses them to rewire and reprogram organisms for a variety of purposes” (May 2015). This involves building biological organisms from biological components, such as the genetic code, to develop new functions. This technoscience denotes an evolution in the epistemology of biological science. Synthetic biology adopts a constructionist and creationist stance towards biology (Kastenhofer 2013). The Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)-Cas9 technology allows gene editing with ease and speed (Shalem et al. 2014). This technology is the result of research in bacteriology and is similar to a genetic scissor allowing the editing by “cut-and-paste” of the genetic code in a very specific manner, for example by giving the possibility of changing a single nucleotide of the DNA sequence. Gene therapy has been booming since the discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 technology by the Nobel prices Jennifer Doudna, Emmanuelle Charpentier and their team (Doudna and Charpentier 2014). Before CRISPR, editing the genome was a long, complex, and expensive work. The genetic body is now controlled, abolishing the physical frontiers between the flesh and the technology.

In this article, we advocate that contemporary biotechnological advances of synthetic biology (including gene editing) are transforming the line of forces of biopolitics and are raising a new figure of cyborg: the biocyborg. After having described the different versions of the cyborg in the literature, we describe the technoscience which is at the basis of this cyborg: synthetic biology. We then present the existing biocyborgs and specific niche group of genetic self-experimenters. We show why the biocyborg is different in terms of hybridity and embodiment of the synthetic biology technologies and takes the form of artificial chimerism. We finish by the new form of evolution the biocyborg is developing, and we will conclude.

2. The cyborg: a (short) conceptual history

The cyborg is the hybridization of the human and technology. Historically, the term cyborg is the abbreviation chosen by Clynes and Kline in the 1960s to designate a cybernetic organism. For the two scientists, in order for humans to go into space, their body must be technologically altered and enhanced (Clynes and Kline 1995). The cyborg is referred as man and the technology is silent in the sense that the cyborg is not aware that it is functioning and regulating the vital physiological signals in order to leave the man “free to explore, create, to think, and to feel” (Clynes and Kline 1995). The notion of homeostasis is central, the cyborg representing “an exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic system unconsciously” (Clynes and Kline 1995). The state of the cyborg is also seen as temporary, the enhancement of the human body happening only for space exploration and the technology would be easily removable: “Cyborgs would be humans with some organs only temporarily altered or replaced by mechanical devices. On returning to earth, the devices would be removed and normal body functions restored” (Kline 2009). The technological transformations of the body do not alter the heredity. They named this particular case of evolution the “participant evolution”:

Clynes and Kline called the optimistic enterprise “participant evolution” and predicted that this human-controlled endeavor would drastically reduce the time it would take natural evolution to adapt humans to the environments of outer space. (Kline 2009)

For these authors, the cyborg is a temporary evolution to adapt humans to space and not vice versa.

Another version of the cyborg has been developed in the feminist science to challenge the dualisms in gender. One important cyborg scholar in this context is the feminist philosopher Donna Haraway. Her cyborg vision differs greatly from the ideas of the “space cyborg” of Clynes and Kline in terms of body perception or authority of science. In her “Cyborg Manifesto”, she uses the myth of the cyborg to directly confront the distinctions between organism and machine, male and female or nature and culture (Haraway 1991). Haraway defines the cyborg as “cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well a creature of fiction” (Haraway 2004, 16). She writes “the cyborg is our ontology” (Haraway 1991, 150). She uses the cyborg figure to create alternative views and languages on the body and the practice of technoscience (Oudshoorn 2021) and challenge the dualisms in order to rethink the human ontology. For cyborg scholar Haddow: “Haraway deploys the cyborg as a positive feminist metaphor, a means of not only highlighting but also invalidating the inherent impurity of any dualistic system of thought or mode of being in the world. The cyborg for Haraway was our ontology and our existence” (Haddow et al. 2015). The concept of the cyborg from Haraway inspired a lot of scholars but the concept remained mainly metaphorical and silent on the materiality of the bodies (Sobchack 2006).

To fill the gap in the literature, Haddow developed the concept of the “everyday-cyborg”. This cyborg is not an icon of liberty as the Haraways's cyborg. The human became a cyborg by necessity, in order to avoid cancer or death (Haddow et al. 2015). The process of incorporation of the technology in the body is also not straightforward, this is a gendered process of embodiment. There is also an ambivalence in being cyborg. They are not really enhanced in the sense of the addition of a new function, their health is enhanced, it is a question of life or death that drove the decision to incorporate a vital medical implant. The cyborgization is mediated by the medical system and the participants accept it. The hybridity is also a special case of cyborg:

The everyday cyborg becomes a hybrid of the organic-mechanical. And this hybridity is not extraordinary or monstrous but becomes ordinary and mundane. A person cannot physically touch inside their own body handling the major organs, and indeed the organs themselves may be (or become) alien to the person. In the same way as we do not own our organs most participants asked felt that they did not have ownership of the biosensor. It was felt to belong to the UK NHS […] The biosensor, as a mechanical device, would be controllable by others, by experts, in a way that human organs are not for example. (Haddow et al. 2015)

The “everyday cyborg” is therefore this individual willing to live with internal techno-mechanical modifications in order to enhance its health and stay alive. This cyborgization comes with new vulnerabilities as the medical device can stop functioning and needs to be monitored. The “everyday cyborg” is close in this sense to the “resilient cyborg” of Oudshoorn (2020).

Last but not the least version of the cyborg and probably the most well known in popular culture is the one coming from science-fiction, that we will denote as the “SF cyborg”. This cyborg, usually male, is the incarnation of strength, intelligence, and power but shows difficulty to express emotions and feelings. They are closer to the machine. We can cite Cyborg in the Marvels or the Borg in Star Trek and their evil opposites sometimes seen as inhumane or less humane like Robocop and Terminator (Goldberg 1995). The “SF cyborg” is also usually a hybrid organic-mechanical, as the “everyday cyborg” or the “space cyborg”.

The everyday cyborg and the space cyborg rely on implantable medical devices (cardiac devices, pacemakers, glucose monitors, drug pumps , etc.). Haddow defines them as follows:

Implanted medical devices are relied upon by medical professionals and patients alike, offering the possibilities of an increase in the length and quality of lives. While a broad understanding of the term “implantable” might include those technologies that are consumed (e.g. pharmaceuticals), such products are not intended to be permanently incorporated as an active medical device which is placed inside the body. An active medical device is an instrument, which, with its software, can be used for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes, relying on a power source other than that generated by the body. (Haddow 2021)

The hybridity is organic/mechatronics (as for most of the SF cyborgs). The technology cannot evolve without complete replacement, it is still an artifact external to the body in terms of materiality. With the development of medical synthetic biology and gene editing, we think a new version of the cyborg is rising, the biocyborg, with a new type of hybridity and different social practices.

3. The rise of the biocyborg

3.1. A new kind of technology: synthetic biology or biology as technology, and conversely

Most of the cyborgs we cited are based on the science of cybernetics (Wiener 2019). This is the science of communication and control in the animal and the machine. For the biocyborg, there is a paradigm shift and it is based on synthetic biology and genetic engineering.

Although practitioners and observers define synthetic biology in different ways, the dominant strand and our focus in this article is synthetic biology as the application of the engineering principles to life. Synthetic biology is defined as “the design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems”, and “the re-design of existing, natural biological systems for useful purposes” (Silver 2009). The aim is not to regulate physiological signals like in cybernetics or not only to restore a function like in prosthetics, the aim is to develop new functions in living organisms. These functions encompass all areas of the bioeconomy, from agriculture to energy and medicine. This (techno)science denotes an evolution in the epistemology of biological science: “Conceptually at least, biology is becoming technology. And physically, technology is becoming biology. The two are starting to close on each other, and indeed as we move deeper into genomics and nanotechnology, more than this, they are starting to intermingle” (Arthur 2009). The advocates of synthetic biology adopt a position from which they distinguish this field from traditional genetic engineering: “synthetic biologists position themselves as building an enterprise that will deliver where genetic engineering has failed. This estrangement from established science serves to demarcate synthetic biology and assert its novelty. It also works as a rallying cry and mission statement: synthetic biology will ‘make biology easier to engineer'” (Schyfter, Frow, and Calvert 2013). In this article, we consider new developments in genetic engineering as gene editing with CRISPR as sub-part of synthetic biology understood in a broad sense of engineering life.

Synthetic biology is developing in all fields of engineering (Andrianantoandro et al. 2006; Purnick and Weiss 2009) but it is more particularly in the biomedical field that it finds its ramifications with human enhancement and the figure of the cyborg. This technoscience has applications in the fight against infections, regenerative medicine (Ruder, Lu, and Collins 2011). And it is now possible to inject complex genetic constructs which implements logical programming, by introducing certain molecular compounds into the cell if, and only if, a certain protein is present on the surface of the cell (Macia, Posas, and Sole 2012). It is the biological version of electronic circuits. There is even now a biological implementation of methods from artificial intelligence such as formal neural networks (Nesbeth et al. 2016; Stano, Kuruma, and Damiano 2018). Artificial intelligence can be potentially biologically encoded and injected in the human cells.

One of the most recent large-scale project is the Human Genome Project-write (HGP-write). This scientific project aims to build a synthetic human genome from scratch to better understand the complexity of genetic interaction networks, their functions and mechanisms. This is a typical technoscience effort in order to advance basic science while reducing the costs of large genome synthesis technology. In a nutshell, HGP-write aims to do for DNA synthesis what the Human Genome Project (HGP-read) has done for the advancement of sequencing. Recently, experiments have also been conducted on human embryos (Hirakawa et al. 2020) raising several ethical problems on the design of CRISPR babies (Greely 2019).

It seems that all organisms are now a potential object of engineering. The European Biotechnology Report entitled Making perfect life identified two “megatrends” to describe current research and developments in synthetic biology: biology becoming technology and technology becoming biology (van Est and Stemerding 2012a).

Biology becoming technology expresses the idea that scientists and engineers increasingly look at living organisms in mechanical terms. It concerns the way in which physical and engineering sciences such as nanotechnology and information technology enable progress in the life sciences. Technology becoming biology is driven by the convergence in the opposite direction, whereby insights into biological and cognitive processes in the life sciences inspire and enable progress within the engineering sciences. Both megatrends point to a future in which the distinction between biology as a science of life and engineering as a science of artefacts will gradually disappear. In other words, both trends evoke a future in which we engage in m“aking perfect life”, with “life” conceived of as a phenomenon that can be controlled and constructed. (van Est and Stemerding 2012b)

Therefore, this evokes an epistemological shift towards an engineering, constructionist or creationist stance in biology (Kastenhofer 2013; Potthast 2009). Life can be controlled, optimized and created. This echoes several studies on biopolitics. Indeed, Nikolas Rose founded the concept of “politics of life itself" to describe and understand this transformation of biopower (Rose 2009). For him, biopolitics is changing towards the control and optimization of life, or in other words to the engineering of life:

It is neither delimited by the poles of illness and death, nor focused on eliminating pathology to protect the destiny of the nation. Rather, it is concerned with our growing capacities to control, manage, engineer, reshape, and modulate the very vital capacities of human beings as living creatures. It is, I suggest, a politics of “life itself” (Rose 2009, 7).

Synthetic biology and its tools like CRISPR are in a sense the scientific and technological embodiment of this transformation of biopower. They simplify the manipulation of life for engineering purposes and by an epistemological shift towards engineering, synthetic biology produces inevitably a new truth discourse on life and impacts the ethical debate (Potthast 2009) and how the individual considers its own body and the potentialities of human enhancement.

The biocyborg is this new kind of cyborg emerging from this technoscience. By developing technologies at the genetic, molecular and/or cellular levels, synthetic biology is pushing the boundaries of the hybridity organic/technology and seem to abolish them.

3.2. Biocyborgs: from patients to self-experimenters

Biocyborgs are already among us. The most emblematic case is probably the one that received gene therapy. The application of this therapy is usually applied to monogenic diseases. We can cite the case of Molly Troxwell that suffers from Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), a debilitating condition responsible for congenital blindness. It is caused by genetic mutations in more than a dozen genes and affects roughly 3 in every 100,000 infants. She received a gene therapy targeting the mutated gene RPE65 and she can now see the world that was once described by her parents. Several other patients received gene therapy in vivo, for the central nervous system, liver, neuromuscular or other eye disorders (Dunbar et al. 2018). These cases were under the control of the medical system similarly to the “everyday cyborg” and the implantation of medical devices. They are also implanted for life as this therapy targets rare and important medical conditions. One difference with the technologies of the “everyday cyborg” is that the technology is implanted in the genome and as such follows the laws of nature, including evolution. We can also cite the patients that received organ transplantation. Their body hosts two types of cells and under an immunosuppressant treatment they can continue to live with an organ coming from another individual.

Besides gene therapy and transplantation, other biocyborgs integrated genetically modified bacteria in their bodies. This bacteria are developed to treat conditions that affect the brain, liver and other organs, and even kill other, harmful microbes. For example, studies have shown that naturally high levels of Lactobacillus in the vagina can help to protect women against HIV (Gosmann et al. 2017). The company Osel is modifying it to carry a human protein that prevents HIV from infecting immune cells (Reardon 2018). Very recently, another company started clinical trials to treat enteric hyperoxaluria. The disease affects 200,000–250,000 people in the U.S.A. and tends to first present with kidney stones caused by high levels of oxalate excreted in the urine. The company is also targeting irritable bowel syndrome, ulcerative colitis, and even cancer. Synthetic biology develops technologies for all parts of the body and also for the different organisms of the body. Given the human cells/bacteria ratio in the body of 1:1 (Sender, Fuchs, and Milo 2016), the biocyborg can also change large parts of its body with these genetically engineered bacteria when implanted into the gut.

With synthetic biology and gene editing, a niche group of biocyborgs emerged that greatly differs from the previous cases. Indeed, we can observe a new form of biosociality centered on genetic enhancement and self-experimentation by means of genetic enhancement tourism and biohacking. This niche group of self-experimenters wants to enhance their bodies at the genetic level and raised questions on the role of science or the ethics of self-experimentation. By pushing their bodies on the frontline and by transforming it at the genetic level outside any medical mediation, they are also moving the lines of forces of biopolitics.

Elizabeth Parrish is one of these biocyborgs. She claimed two gene therapies in Colombia in order to increase the size of her telomeres, fragments of DNA at the end of chromosomes that become shorter with age, and to block the effects of myostatin which causes muscle wasting during aging (Hamzelou 2017). She is the CEO of Bioviva, an anti-aging company and she describes herself as “patient zero” (Regalado 2015) and perfectly represents the post-mortal society (Lafontaine 2008) when she says “I have aging as a disease” (Regalado 2015). Her vision of the future of health is the following:

Those humans alive 200 years from now will have exquisite control over their health and wellbeing through advanced cell technologies that can only be imagined by people living today. The risk takers – those who can already envision surpassing the limits of their bodies and those who are unwilling to accept the disability of old age without a fight – will be the ones pioneering a bold future and reinventing our concept of health. (Parrish 2017)

She is one of the risk takers she describes. Indeed, she pushed her own body on the front line by receiving a highly experimental gene therapy procedure to fight aging. The result of her gene editing has been partially verified by the scientific community. The MIT Technology Review spoke with the director Matthew Andrews who accompanied Parrish during the medical procedure and who confirmed that it had indeed been carried out (Regalado 2015). In September 2015, before her gene therapy, she sent her white blood cells for analysis to the SpectraCell laboratory and in March 2016, in post-therapy, she had them analyzed by this same laboratory. Analyses show that her telomeres are indeed longer and have gone from 6.71 kb (kilobases) to 7.33 kb (Garcia 2016). According to Parrish, from a biological point of view, this would be equivalent to the addition of 20 years of life more or less.

Her case highlights a new aspect of medical tourism after reproductive tourism and last chance tourism for terminally ill patients. Individuals can now practice a new form of medical tourism by buying an enhancement in a foreign country. Even if it has not been clinically tested. It is to our knowledge an isolated case of enhancement tourism, nevertheless, it raises several questions on contemporary biopolitics. Indeed, Parrish decided to apply a highly experimental genetic engineering operation in a foreign country because her own does not allow such an intervention. She claims about how to develop new gene therapies:

“I would have to go raise almost a billion dollars. It would take about 15 years of testing. And when I'm looking out there, I'm seeing people who don't want to wait 15 years.“ The crowd began clapping, and Parrish fed off it. “How do we actually change this paradigm? Well, what we do is we burn and raze everything to the ground. And we start over.“ (Funk 2018)

Parrish does not want to follow the terms of the bioethics of biomedical research. “Here, the research process is individuated, collapsing the researchers–subject relationship. If we view the person as single, bounded and continuous, then when the practitioner and subject are the same person, their duty of care is arguably void” (Addison 2020). This kind of self-experimentation is not an isolated case, a new social phenomenon appeared with the decreasing cost of the synthetic biology technologies: enhancement via biohacking.

The former NASA biochemist Josiah Zayner injected himself a CRISPR solution (October 4, 2017) on live streaming. He is the CEO (like Parrish) of The Odin which sold CRIPSR-Cas9 kits for 1700 dollars. The goal of his procedure was to inactivate the gene responsible for myostatin production to see if it will allow him to build more muscle. This project aimed to establish the proof of concept that it is possible to practice gene therapy at home, with a minimum of material and cost (Ignasse 2017). As Zayner himself claimed it, “I want to help humans genetically modify themselves” (Ireland 2017) and it just seems easier: “People don't know that generally the same resources that are available to scientists are available to non-scientists. I can just order DNA online and they ship it to my house. If I want to get some sequencing done I send it off to a company and they'll do it for me. It's really inexpensive – we're talking 6 dollars to get a sample sequenced, or 10 dollars to get a piece of DNA” (Ireland 2017). As Parrish, Zayner envisions a bright future where genetic enhancement is a common practice:

To me it's like Bladerunner, where he goes into that backalley science lab and there's the guy making eyes. I imagine people going to some place like a tattoo parlour, and instead of getting a tattoo they pick out some DNA that makes them muscly, or changes the colour of their hair or eyes. DNA defines what a species is, and I imagine it wouldn't be too long into the future when the human species almost becomes a new species because of these modifications. (Ireland 2017)

The result of his genetic editing does not appear to have been scientifically and medically verified, but was nonetheless emulated. On February 4, 2018, it was the turn of Aaron Traywick, CEO of the biotechnology company Ascendance Biomedical to practice genetic biohacking by injecting an experimental treatment against herpes in front of the cameras at the Body Hacking conference in Austin (Mullin 2018). His company had already been involved in this kind of experiment in October 2017 with the injection of an experimental gene therapy against the HIV virus (Lussenhop 2017).

Until now, these activities of gene enhancement can be reported as self-experimentation. However, when this self-experimentation is undertaken by groups coordinating their efforts, these activities may look like “decentralized clinical trials” (Zettler, Guerrini, and Sherkow 2019b). In addition, biohackers are approached by individuals asking for help to treat their own diseases or those of related and a possible case is that biohackers could try to experiment on others (Zettler, Guerrini, and Sherkow 2019b).

These cases of self-experimentation show how individuality and body identity are changing in our societies and how they are used by the bioeconomy of enhancement. With post-genomics and predictive medicine, the goal was to maximize its biological potential with the existing body:

For example, the entire predictive medicine and personalized medicine project is based on the idea that each individual should know their genetic profile in order to prevent certain physical failures or, more positively, to maximize their biological potential. In fact, identity in the post-genomic era is more biological than ever, as the life sciences have completely changed the way human life is conceived. (Lafontaine 2014, 55–56)¹

In the case of Parris, Zayner or Traywick, it is not only a question of knowing her genetic profile in order to anticipate the onset of diseases linked to aging but to transform their own bodies, to change the hardware in a sense, to alter their genetic profile. Previously, the biocapital of one individual was fixed and the goal was to maximize it. With the new technologies of the synthetic biology, using a financial metaphor, their goal is to diversify their biocapital. A new form of biocapital risk in a sense, by paying for highly experimental therapies and assuming the associated risks. It is a new form of “clinical labour” (Cooper and Waldby 2014). The biocyborg is therefore very different from the previous versions. As the “everyday cyborg”, the changes are made to be permanent but happen completely outside the medical system and the willingness to be a cyborg is not driven by necessity, they just want to enhance themselves, to improve their bodies as if it was upgradable.

Authorities are therefore concerned by these biotechnologies of enhancements and their use. Synthetic biology and CRISPR kit have recently been the subject of a new biopolitics centered on security and regulation (Kelle 2009). But the particular case of self-genetic enhancement has been investigated only recently by the law. In 2019, California enacted the first CRISPR law that prevents companies from selling CRISPR kits designed to modify human DNA and the same year California's Department of Consumer Affairs investigated Josiah Zayner for the unlicensed practice of medicine (Zettler, Guerrini, and Sherkow 2019a).

3.3. Hybridity human/technology or artificial chimerism?

Theories of mediation addressed the problem of hybridization with technologies external to the body (Ihde 1990; Latour 2005). They did not take into account the hybridization with technologies internal to the body that are not bounded by any temporality. In these cases, becoming a cyborg is for life and is most of the time a question of life and death (Oudshoorn 2020; Haddow et al. 2015). The interaction of the body and internal technologies has been more recently studied (Dalibert 2014; Lettow 2011). Dalibert used the concept of somatechnologies to analyze human enhancement technologies: “Somatechnologies are technologies that are acting on and interacting with the body” (Dalibert 2014). Human enhancement technologies, by acting on human physiology, therefore have to be embodied. But this process is not straightforward:

While close to bodies, somatechnologies are not straightforwardly and directly intimate technologies. Rather, they become intimate as they are embodied, embodiment being not only a process but also done by bodies and technologies. For the somatechnology to become transparent, an intensive learning and training process is necessary. One learns to live with somatechnology. This amended embodiment relation – insofar as it is recognized as being done by bodies with technologies and as a (learning) process through which one becomes intimate with somatechnology – does not however exhaust what is at stake with somatechnology. Bodies, their materiality and agency are critical for somatechnologies becoming intimate: they not only influence but also enable it. (Dalibert 2014, 194)

In order to become embodied and transparent, human enhancement technology demands a learning, an interaction with the technology that usually does not share the same materiality, like neural or robotic prosthesis (Dalibert 2014; Lettow 2011). In addition, implantable medical devices do not increase the agency of the wearers, for example for implanted cardiac devices that control the heart rhythm of their wearers by themselves. While the cyborgs we describe above were mainly hybrids organic/mechatronics, synthetic biology allows a complete fusion of human and technology. The materiality of the organism and the technology are the same: biological. The biocyborg differs from the “space cyborg” or the “everyday cyborg” (and most of the “SF cyborgs”) by accelerating the cyborgization process. Synthetic biology solves this problem directly, at least at the materiality level. The biocyborg could potentially be a transparent cyborg, in the sense that the biotechnology is only visible at the genetic, molecular or cellular levels. These technologies are biological matter as the human body, they use genes and their products as a technological process. They re-arrange biological processes and are thus directly integrated into the body. The aim is to give new functions, like decelerated aging, sharper muscles, an orthogonal immune system, etc. The integration of the technology in the body is straightforward. The prosthetic relationship is pushed to the extreme and seems to fade with this technoscience. With synthetic biology, all prosthetic technoscience could be useless since it would then be possible to regenerate damaged limbs or organs using the dormant regenerative processes of the mammalian organism. In addition, by blurring the lines between the natural and the artificial, the technologies of synthetic biology for human enhancement (or bio-somatechnologies) may be less a compromise as their integration can be done at the genetic and molecular levels. As Ihde says:

The gradual accumulation of human-technology hybridization, or the cyborg process, often relates to effects of contemporary aging. […] [C]yborg strategies [which] are often technological attempts to thwart even more severe effects of aging […] remain trade-offs, compromises. It is better to have a pacemaker than to have life threatening arrhythmia; it is better to be able to walk with either a steel-Teflon implant or a prosthesis than not to walk at all […] Yet all these trade-off compromises fall far short of the bionic technofantasies so often projected in popular culture. (Ihde 2008, 38–39)

This primary compromise with synthetic biology of the prosthesis seems to disappear. The cyborg is no longer this human/machine made of flesh and electronic circuits. It is only biological but some of its biochemical processes are artificial and engineered. It is an artificial chimera.

The technology and the body of the biocyborg share the same physicality, they are both biological, the hybridity of the biocyborg seems therefore closer to chimerism. One definition of a chimera is an organism that contains two sets of DNA. We know several cases of human chimeras (with transplantation of organs, bone narrow transplant, twin chimerism or blood transfusion , etc.). Synthetic biology can design synthetic circuits that will be uploaded into cells to target the body's endogenous networks, causing a transition from disease to healthy state for example (Ruder, Lu, and Collins 2011). More specifically:

Of particular importance are genetic manipulations that allow for either the stable introduction of large exogenous signaling circuits in the genome or the ability to engineer changes directly in endogenous loci to rewire native signaling. Synthetic DNA of even very large size can now be produced relatively cheaply and landing pads can be used to integrate these larger synthetic constructs into the genome in site-specific ways. Entirely artificial chromosomes can also be used as carriers of exogenous DNA, either alone or in combination with transposon-based technology. In addition, advances in CRISPR based technologies have allowed for unprecedented manipulation of endogenous loci allowing both genetic replacement and nuanced gene control. (Johnson, March, and Morsut 2017)

This implantation of a new genetic circuit leads to chimerism, except that the DNA used can be one of the hosts but the new activation and repression links in the circuits program new cell functions (cancer kill switch, biological sensors , etc.) (Weber and Fussenegger 2012). Either new DNA is implanted into the cells of the body, either new ways are introduced to express and repress genes of the host, both of them leading to new functions.

The technology is now restricted to a more abstract level, the information processing level. In addition, by this share of the same biological materiality, social acceptability could be increased. Indeed, currently, prostheses and artificial limbs are not always fully socially accepted:

Despite their resemblance to the human body, corpses, zombies, and prosthetic hands elicit a negative emotional reaction from those who watch. More concretely, the cosmesis of a prosthetic limb generates a feeling of disappointment. While this allows the body with prosthesis to come across as capable and potentially “fully human,” when performance is perceived as mimicry, the body with prosthesis is viewed as deceptive and is “blessed” with insistent, guilty, and even stigmatizing looks. Carried in such a way as to be perceived by oneself and others – that is to say assumed – physically capable of achieving material and visible anonymity, cosmetics, when recognized as a lure, can be extremely damaging and hurtful for the person living with a prosthesis. (Dalibert 2014, 223)

With gene editing and synthetic biology, they can be fully integrated into the body and in fact it could not be possible to distinguish with the naked eye an enhanced human from a normal human (for most of the current synthetic biology technologies). The synthetic biology technology and the human share the same materiality, and potentially the technology is directly embedded and embodied. With the synthetic human or biocyborg, its biology is technology, and its technology is also biology (Arthur 2009). The prosthetic relationship is somehow abolished as it is no longer possible to clearly distinguish the biological body from the technology.

3.4. Multi-scale non-Darwinian human evolution

The figure of the biocyborg raises several questions on what evolution is at the age of synthetic biology. Recently, in the field of synthetic developmental biology, computer-designed organisms called biobots or xenobots have been developed (Blackiston et al. 2021). They designed the biological machines with simulations, and the best designs are then constructed by combining together different biological tissues. This work evolves the notion of evolution. Indeed, the entire evolution history of these living machines happened in the computer. They could be implanted into humans to deliver specific molecules, to be used as biosensors or to inactivate cancer cells for example (Levin, Bongard, and Lunshof 2020). The difference between artificial and natural evolution vanishes. An organism can be evolved first virtually and then biologically once constructed. This raises deep philosophical and biological questions. What does that mean for evolution and the human if part of its body has been first evolved virtually? More speculatively, could we create computer-designed humans one day? The problem gets even more complex when we look at the artificial intelligence methods that have been implemented by synthetic biology. This “bio-artificial intelligence” is developing and allows to implement learning capabilities inside the cells (Nesbeth et al. 2016). The body of the biocyborg could therefore potentially host different kinds of intelligence. The biocyborg seems closer to the holobiont (namely, the host and its microbiota) or the artificial holobiont, an assembly of organisms and cells, artificial or not, with different genetic code and levels of cognition. In this view, the classical notion of evolution, the Darwinian evolution, changes deeply with the biocyborg as the implanted biotechnologies (bacteria, gene therapy, synthetic cells, etc.) can evolve by themselves once integrated in the body. In addition, we know that bacteria evolve much faster than humans (Pepper 2014). Therefore, different evolutionary timescales can exist in the body of the biocyborg, virtual or biological. The monolithic, Darwinian notion of evolution is replaced with this multi-scale evolution with the biocyborg.

The case of the self-experimenters biocyborgs is also particularly important. Indeed, the genetic self-experimentations described above focused on somatic cells. However, genetic engineering of germline cells is now technologically possible and it is not anymore considered as pure eugenics as in the 1980s and is starting to be ethically accepted (Martin and Turkmendag 2021). The self-experimenters encouraged rogue scientific and medical practice (by ways of biohacking or genetic tourism) for enhancement. They practice a liberal eugenics, regulated by supply and demand, that gene editing tries to realize (Agar 2008; Sandel 2007; Habermas 2014). If this was possible on a large scale, it means a lot for humanity and reproduction as the synthetic biology technologies could be transferred to the next generation. Therefore, the risks at stake not only concern the individual (like for the "everyday cyborg" with all the potential side-effects of gene therapy or other biotechnological changes), they also concern the human species. Gene editing has also been applied recently to embryos: gene-edited twin girls are reportedly born, and a second pregnancy with a third gene-edited embryo has been established (Cyranoski 2019). It is therefore possible to apply CRISPR on germline cells.

The International Summit on Human Gene Editing summarized different risks associated to gene editing :

(i) the risks of inaccurate editing (such as off-target mutations) and incomplete editing of the cells of early-stage embryos (mosaicism); (ii) the difficulty of predicting harmful effects that genetic changes may have under the wide range of circumstances experienced by the human population, including interactions with other genetic variants and with the environment; (iii) the obligation to consider implications for both the individual and the future generations who will carry the genetic alterations; (iv) the fact that, once introduced into the human population, genetic alterations would be difficult to remove and would not remain within any single community or country; (v) the possibility that permanent genetic “enhancements” to sub-sets of the population could exacerbate social inequities or be used coercively; and (vi) the moral and ethical considerations in purposefully altering human evolution using this technology. (Olson 2016)

Most of the risks are related to the population and by extension to the human species. The risks are not only individual but also at the level of the populations if the technologies or genetic changes can be passed to the offspring. The risk is real, indeed, according to researchers in astrophysics, the minimum viable population to start a new colony (or human species) on another planet is only 98 (Marin and Beluffi 2018). The number seems very low to start a new human species. The concept of evolution is therefore changing, not completely natural or transparent but potentially controlled by the individual itself for the self-experimenters in the case of biohacking with self-genetic enhancement or controlled by rogue scientists in the case of CRISPR babies (Greely 2019). A new kind of eugenics, an extreme version of liberal eugenics, an individual eugenics.

Gene editing and synthetic biology allow a profound control on the biology of our bodies. They differ radically from the technologies of the “everyday cyborg” or the “space cyborg” as this changes can be permanent, potentially hereditary and could also evolve as any biological matter. The last two are a complete novelty compared to the classical implantable medical devices studied in the cyborg literature. These devices are supposed to be permanent when implanted (like pacemakers or drug pumps) but they are still a mechatronic technology, they could not be integrated in the germline cells as they does not share the same physicality, and as such cannot be passed to the offspring of the cyborg. In addition, as these technology are made of genetic material, natural evolution applies to them and these technologies could potentially evolve on the long term. This is again impossible for traditional implantable medical devices of the previous cyborgs. And with the biocyborg, evolution is multi-scale, the body can host organisms that have been evolved first virtually, and therefore the body of the biocyborg can be the recipient of several evolutionary time-scales.

The biocyborg tests the limits of what it is to be human. The artificial chimerism and the embodiment of different kinds of intelligence via the implantation into cells of bio-artificial intelligence is changing the notion of genetic identity and the human species.

4. Conclusion

In this article, we discussed the rise of the biocyborg, a new kind of cyborg compared to the other versions we can find in the literature. The biocyborg shows new traits such as a new materiality of the technology that leads to a difficulty to distinguish between the technology and the body, a new kind of artificial chimerism, an opposition with the authority of the medical system and science, and new vulnerabilities that concern not only the body of the wearer but also of the human species. The willingness to become a cyborg is not driven only by necessity or a question of life or death, the biocyborg also wants to enhance the body to become stronger, healthier and live longer. And the biocyborg carries a new form of evolution, a multi-scale non-Darwinian human evolution, in which different evolutionary time scales are at stake in the body of the biocyborg. The biocyborg seems to be this artificial holobiont capable of hosting different DNAs and possibly different types of intelligences.

The biocyborg poses different types of risks, challenges, and deep questions. The risks are not only at the level of the individual as in the “everyday cyborg” but also at the level of the populations and the human species. The individual invests in his own biological value and takes risks for that. Communities of patients claimed for example the right to test non-approved drugs for cancer and self-tested it taking risks for their health without following the laws on human experimentation in their state. The patient is becoming an entrepreneur of its own biology. In the bioeconomy, the individual has a dual position: consumer and patient-test. Cooper analyzes it as a new form of clinical labour where the patient pays for the risks of the biomedical experimentation (Cooper and Waldby 2014).

Synthetic biology technologies of human enhancement raise several ethical questions. One of them is the question of autonomy. Indeed, similarly to the “everyday cyborg” while it is possible to reject the wearing of glasses and any external prosthesis relatively easily, how to get rid of the addition or deletion of genes? If the body is a technology, this is not without posing a number of political, ethical and body problems. Indeed, is the body a technology? What does that mean for the individual and society? The body could be subject for example to improvements cycles as any technology in the industry. Synthetic biology is the bearer of a new vision of living things, and by applying it to the human biology, it also carries a new vision of the human body that we could increase and transform according to our desires (or those belonging to others) by biobricks updates. In addition, what happens at the individual level can have an impact at the population scale.

The advances of synthetic biology and the easy and low-cost access to biotechnologies of enhancement and gene editing are transforming the power anyone can have on the body. From genome description and anticipated medical action, the tendency has shifted to a profound re-programming of the body and genome. The spread of human enhancement in a self-experimentation context is emerging that needs further investigation in the social and political science. Indeed, if any individual with minimal training can change their genes, the individual paves the way towards a new human species. More speculatively, with CRISPR, a human could even be its own species (if it changes important part of this genome). With the self-experimenters, we observe new modes of subjectivation where the individual do not hesitate to put his body on the frontline for genetic self-experimentation and enhancement. This new “enhancement labour” should be studied more extensively, particularly given the transformations of the human species it implies and how it impacts the role of science and medicine. The capitalist logic turned life to a raw material with the bioeconomy (Lafontaine 2014), and this logic is now strengthened with the advances of synthetic biology and gene editing and in the current state it opens the door to complete liberal or self-driven eugenics. The implications of this research are multi-scale, as it poses biological, political, and philosophical questions on what it is to be human or on the future of human species.

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)