The case for merging human bodies with machines

From robot helpers to smart body parts, the line between human and machine is blurring. This hour, TED speakers design tech that enhances us without diminishing our humanity. Guests include robot choreographer and computer scientist Catie Cuan, engineer and biophysicist Hugh Herr, material scientist Anna Maria Coclite and biochemist Jennifer Doudna. TED Radio Hour+ listeners now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and deeper conversations with Manoush. By signing up for Plus, you directly support our work and public media, so all your episodes (like this one!) come to you without sponsor breaks. Learn more atplus.npr.org/ted http://plus.npr.org/ted. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from Planet Visionaries. Host Alex Honnold sits down this season with extraordinary doers creating real climate solutions. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:11Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 0:19Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 0:33Manoush Zomorodi?

  Challenge you.

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• 0:36Manoush Zomorodi?

  And even change you.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  I literally feel like I'm a different person.

• 0:39Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yes.

• 0:41Speaker 02

  Do you feel that way?

• 0:42Manoush Zomorodi?

  Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. In 2014, Katie Kwan was a professional dancer in New York City, living her dream.

• 0:59Speaker 05

  Taking the train to Lincoln Center and dancing at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and traveling all over the United States to be in various shows. I did The King and I at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. I did Cinderella at the Gateway Theater. I had my own dance company, actually, and we did something between like six to 10 shows a year.

• 1:24Manoush Zomorodi?

  But then her father got sick.

• 1:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was very scary for our family. He had a stroke. And my dad, you know, English is his third language. He was in his mid-60s at the time.

• 1:39Manoush Zomorodi?

  Katie found herself there with her dad in his hospital room, surrounded by medical equipment.

• 1:45Speaker 05

  So he had a heart monitor, you know, the thing that blips and bloops on the screen. And he also had quite a few issues with his lungs. And so there was something that was helping to track his breathing. You know, seeing my dad so small and surrounded by all of these machines, I thought, these things are meant to help assist him and empower him, but he feels very alienated and afraid of them. And that struck me as such the wrong relationship between humans and our technologies.

• 2:15Manoush Zomorodi?

  She wondered, was there a way these machines could keep someone alive without being so terrifying? Maybe they could even come across as nurturing.

• 2:25Speaker 05

  And it started to open the door to so many questions about how we could live with our technologies in a way that we weren't living with them.

• 2:34Manoush Zomorodi?

  Katie's dad made a full recovery, but these questions continued to nag at her. She'd always been good at math and science, so she decided to go back to school to try and find some answers.

• 2:47Speaker 05

  So even though there were lots of valid assertions that grad school was going to be very hard for me, I kind of did it anyway. And I did my master's, my PhD, and then my postdoc, all at Stanford in mechanical engineering and computer science.

• 3:02Manoush Zomorodi?

  At Stanford, people were building technology to change the way we live with machines, well beyond hospitals. Designing robots to do everything, from cleaning our homes to offering companionship. So just imagine.

• 3:18Speaker 05

  What's it going to be like when not only you have autonomous vehicles on the road, but then you have autonomous robots who are showing up to deliver your burrito? And you have an autonomous robot that might fly in to drop off a package? And then you go to your doctor's office, and there's an autonomous robot that takes your temperature? Like, this is a completely different way of living and working.

• 3:42Speaker 05

  I think we're about to undergo one of the most consequential shifts to our built environment in a long time. So the question for me is, how can we then build robots that make people feel empowered, inspired, legible, and clear? That they feel safe around and know how to control? Because it's not a question for me of whether or not the robots are coming. It's simply a question of how quickly and what are those robots going to look like when they do show up?

• 4:13Manoush Zomorodi?

  Forget sitting down at a laptop or tapping on a screen. Technology is being woven into our physical world in all kinds of new ways, from robot helpers to smart body parts that turn us into cyborgs. But what are the challenges with creating devices that feel less robotic and dystopian and more organic and useful? Today on the show, augmenting humans. Ideas about designing tech that enhances us physically without diminishing or even hurting humanity. Where do we draw the line between improving a human life and augmenting it beyond recognition?

• 4:55Speaker 05

  We are arguably the first generation at mass scale to be interacting with robots. That is a huge impactful difference.

• 5:07Manoush Zomorodi?

  So, back to Katie Kwan. She ended up merging her love for dance with her interest in technology and is now a robot choreographer. Because even though countless engineers are building machines to act intelligently, she says we also need to consider how they move.

• 5:24Speaker 05

  We know that movement is incredibly impactful to us. We've created all of these adaptations to very quickly experience and observe emotion and then to categorize, is this safe? Is this unsafe? Is this welcoming? What does it mean? And this is why when people talk about nonverbal communication, you can express so much through simply the way that your body moves. Okay, why is that relevant for robots? Because robots will often perform motions that are, quote, "utilitarian," right? That are picking up a cup, moving it to a different part of a table, screwing a bolt into a piece of equipment.

• 6:05Speaker 05

  But the way that the robot performs that motion is deeply impactful if it's done near humans.

• 6:15Manoush Zomorodi?

  You ended up working at a place called Everyday Robots. At the time, this was Google's Robot AI Moonshot Lab, as they called it. And the idea there was to design robots that could help people in their everyday lives. So how did you bring your perspective as a choreographer and a dancer to making that a reality?

• 6:37Speaker 05

  It was such an ambitious moonshot because we really did want to bring robots into people's everyday lives at the same scale that people are used to with all different kinds of technologies, whether that's a smartphone or a car. And so it was not only about can we get robots to do things that are useful, like sort trash or wipe tables, but also can we build robots that are welcomed in these environments? So that if you have a robot inside of an office or a shopping mall, or many years in the future, inside of a school or a nursing home, what are the levers that we can push and pull to make these robots evoke sensations that are positive instead of negative?

• 7:22Speaker 05

  If a robot slides politely out of a doorway to let you pass, it might make you feel seen and acknowledged.

• 7:30Manoush Zomorodi?

  Here's Katie Kwan on the TED stage.

• 7:32Speaker 05

  If a robot marches quickly towards you and avoids you at the last second, it might cause revulsion and fear. Robots are beginning to show up in our everyday environments, from sidewalks to offices, backyards to hospitals. And they will be threatening and confusing to us if we do not carefully examine how they move. Before AI, programmers needed hours to script a simple dance sequence for a robot to perform, just like they needed hours to script the robot to open a single door. With AI, you can teach the robot to open just a few specific doors, and it will learn to open all of them, even ones it hasn't seen before.

• 8:16Speaker 05

  It's also true for dance. You can teach the robot to dance with a specific person, and it will learn how to dance and move with many others in many different environments and circumstances. This is what I did at Everyday Robots at Google. Rather than teach one robot, I used AI to teach 15 robots how to move together as a flock.

• 8:44Speaker 05

  We imagined a world where you could walk down a hallway filled with robots and they would part to make space for you, like a flock of doves or a crowd of people on a city street, where a robot could navigate seamlessly and even beautifully through a busy, chaotic Times Square.

• 9:05Manoush Zomorodi?

  Just so people can picture these robots, they kind of look like factory arms attached to platforms that wheel around and sway. And they're strangely kind of cute. But I think the idea of walking through a hallway of robots, I mean, it sounds pretty intimidating. Are you envisioning that someday it will feel totally normal and comfortable to live with robots? Because the way they move around us will be so fluid and I guess gentle, that it won't feel scary.

• 9:38Speaker 05

  Hmm. I hear you on the walking down a hallway filled with robots. It's fascinating because my mom actually came and saw the flocking project at Google X. She was watching me from the side and thinking, oh, I don't know. These robots are following Katie around and they're moving according to her commands. And she was a little bit skeptical. But when she wandered through this group of robots, the smile that she had on her face, I don't think I've seen my mom grin like that interacting with any piece of technology in her whole life. And I asked her, what was that for you? Why did you notice yourself smiling and laughing? And she said, well, it felt like I was interacting with a bunch of puppies

• 10:23Speaker 05

  or sort of this alien species that I wasn't afraid of, that kind of opened my eyes and opened my imagination to a different way of being with robots. And mom was like, it was fun and different and unexpected.

• 10:41Manoush Zomorodi?

  Is the goal, you know, we always hear with technology, the goal is to remove friction so that you're not even thinking about the technology that you're using. Is part of adding grace and choreography and smooth movement to these robots, is it part of letting them recede into the background so that it does feel sort of seamless, our interaction with them?

• 11:06Speaker 05

  I would say that removing friction is certainly a way of describing it. You know, I tend to describe it also through the lens of safety. You know, if you feel safer around these tools because you can anticipate and understand how they're going to move, then that's always an A+. I do think it's possible that we see a world in which people like my dad, who's now in his mid-70s, can live at home for longer with some assistance from technology that allows him to continue to be safe and independent. A robot that's going to be inside of my dad's house might do a lot of simplistic things like remind him to drink a glass of water, or to notify me if my dad has fallen, or to remind him that the mail has arrived.

• 11:49Speaker 05

  These are the kinds of tasks that a robot might do in an environment with my dad, and I want that robot to be safe, legible, clear, and empowering to him. But even more than that, and this is where I like to nudge my fellow roboticists and my fellow engineers, I also like to think about it through the lens of fun. I'm like, we get to choose the kind of world that we want to live in. Is that future going to include robots that play beautiful music when they wander by us while they're wiping tables and sorting trash? That makes you feel like your environment is fun and exciting?

• 12:30Speaker 05

  Or are we going to choose robots that give you a sense of fear, confusion, and fatigue? Right? So it's very much for me, not only about the removing friction, making things safe, having more legible communication, but it's like, we can also imbue character, you know, artistry, creativity, and that's, for me, taking a robot from simply being a utilitarian tool into an evocative social agent.

• 13:01Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was robot choreographer Katie Kwan. You can see her full talk at ted.com. On the show today, augmenting humans. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.

• 13:25Speaker 06

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Charles Schwab with their original podcast, Choiceology. Hosted by Katie Milkman, an award-winning behavioral scientist and author of the bestselling book, How to Change, Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind people's decisions. Hear true stories from Nobel laureates, historians, authors, athletes, and more about how to make better decisions to help avoid costly mistakes. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/podcast or wherever you listen.

• 14:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from Planet Visionaries. If you're looking for a dose of optimism, Planet Visionaries is the podcast you need. Host Alex Honnold sits down this season with extraordinary doers, creating real climate action. It's a lineup that proves hope isn't naive, it's fuel for change. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. This message comes from Bayer. Science is about asking questions, testing, trying again. It's not easy, but it's relentless. It evolves, and that's why science delivers. Learn more at sciencedelivers.com.

• 14:43Manoush Zomorodi?

  If you've been hanging out with us here on the TED Radio Hour for a while but haven't hit the follow button, take a quick second, follow us. You'll have our newest episodes waiting for you every week. We really appreciate it. Now, back to the show. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, augmenting humans.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  My accident was December 26, 2014. And I was rock climbing in the Cayman Islands with my daughter and some other friends from Maine who just happened to be there coincidentally.

• 15:23Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is Jim Ewing.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  And it was, I don't know, kind of an ordinary day. It was a climbing area that I hadn't been to before at a cliff called Dixon's Wall.

• 15:35Manoush Zomorodi?

  The climb wasn't particularly difficult, and Jim had been climbing for 30 years in much more dangerous and remote conditions. But that day, they only had time for one more ascent, and Jim says he was distracted.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  We were kind of in a hurry, and I wasn't really paying great attention to how things all got set up. And on this one last climb, I was actually standing on a ledge, almost completely what we call a no-hands-rest. And I don't know, I just lost my focus, and I stepped off the ledge and just started falling. So I fell about 60 feet to the ground. Originally, I thought, I sort of felt like I hadn't hit the ground all that hard.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  I would just, I would just lay there on the ground until I could catch my breath. I made eye contact with another climber, and I noticed my wrist was at a funny angle, and I said to him, "Just so you know, I think my wrist is broken." And he, he said something along the lines of, "Well, I hate to tell you this, but your ankle is looking pretty broken, too."

• 17:03Manoush Zomorodi?

  Jim was helicoptered to a local hospital, where he found out that, yes, his wrist and ankle were both shattered. He'd also dislocated his shoulder, crushed several vertebrae, fractured his pelvis.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  Separated my ribs from my sternum. Like, just a huge laundry list of injuries that you might expect from falling that kind of distance.

• 17:27Manoush Zomorodi?

  Amazingly, within a year, after a lot of surgeries and a lot of rehab, most of those injuries had healed, all except that ankle.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  The CT showed that the main fracture was still there, but also, most of the bone was dead. It's a condition called avascular necrosis. And that occurs when the blood supply to a bone is cut off or damaged, and then the bone slowly dies.

• 17:56Manoush Zomorodi?

  Walking was difficult. The pain was excruciating.

• 18:01Speaker 02

  I was in a lot of pain, a lot of painkillers. The doctors just, you know, like, there's nothing we can really do for you. Let's just give you more pain meds.

• 18:11Manoush Zomorodi?

  So Jim began to wonder if he needed to do something drastic.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  Ultimately, my research in ankle injuries and ankle rebuilding kind of led me down the path of, well, I really probably ought to be looking at amputation. And it just so happens that Hugh Herr and I were roommates back in the mid-'80s.

• 18:40Speaker 04

  That's correct. Yeah, Jim and I go way back. We were climbing buddies in our early 20s.

• 18:46Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is MIT professor Hugh Herr.

• 18:48Speaker 04

  And he came to me and said, Hugh, I'm in so much pain. My quality of life is so poor. Does it make sense for, you know, me to consider amputating that leg?

• 19:01Manoush Zomorodi?

  Hugh is one of the top experts in prosthetics and a double amputee himself, who lost both of his legs in a climbing accident as a teenager.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  So I knew, from having known Hugh, that amputation isn't the end of an active life and that you can still do a lot of things as an amputee. You know, life isn't necessarily over.

• 19:26Speaker 04

  So we chatted about it, and Jim's timing was quite insightful because we had just invented a new surgical paradigm called the Agonist Antagonist Myeloneur Interface in 2014. And when Jim called me, we were actually prepared to do the first human surgery with this new technique. And Jim volunteered to be that first, first human subject.

• 19:50Manoush Zomorodi?

  What exactly was Jim volunteering for? A new way to do amputation that keeps the brain-body connection intact. So, a quick anatomy lesson. In a healthy leg, when you flex your ankle, muscles in the front contract and stretch the muscles in the back. Extend your ankle and the reverse happens. The movement keeps muscles strong and registers in the brain, helping you understand where your limbs are in space.

• 20:20Speaker 04

  So, that's called proprioception.

• 20:22Manoush Zomorodi?

  Proprioception. But with a traditional amputation, that connection between the muscles, nerves, and the brain is severed.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  The current amputation paradigm hasn't changed fundamentally since the US Civil War and breaks these dynamic muscle relationships, and in so doing eliminates normal proprioceptive sensations.

• 20:43Manoush Zomorodi?

  Hugh Herr explains on the TED stage.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  Consequently, a standard artificial limb cannot feed back information into the nervous system about where the prosthesis is in space. The patient, therefore, cannot sense and feel the positions and movements of the prosthetic joint without seeing it with their eyes. My legs were amputated using this Civil War-era methodology. I can feel my feet, I can feel them right now, as a phantom awareness. But when I try to move them, I cannot. It feels like they're stuck inside rigid ski boots.

• 21:18Speaker 04

  The limbs are not directly controlled by my nervous system. I can't think and move them, nor can I feel my limbs. It feels like I'm walking on powerful robots, that I'm... It feels like I'm being walked. It feels like I'm in the backseat of the car.

• 21:35Manoush Zomorodi?

  The procedure that Hugh and his team developed preserves the feeling of being connected to the amputated limb. Again, it's called Agonist Antagonist Myoneural Interface, or AMI for short, which brings us back to Jim and the first time the procedure was done in 2016.

• 21:55Speaker 04

  The surgery was done at Brigham Women's Hospital in Boston under the direction of Matthew Carty, a critical colleague and collaborator. And what we did in Jim's leg is we connected his muscles within his amputated residuum in natural ways. The calf muscle to the muscle in the front of the leg called the tibialis anterior, so that when Jim thinks after the surgery, those muscles move dynamically in a similar way to the way, how they moved when he had an intact leg. So what that does is it tells the brain how the ankle should move. Now, it's not a physical ankle after the amputation. It's a phantom ankle. But when Jim closes his eyes and moves his phantom ankle,

• 22:38Speaker 04

  he feels the full dynamics of that sensation. He can point his toes. He can go the other way and from pointing his toes down like a ballerina to pointing his toes to the ceiling. And he actually feels it as if his foot ankle were intact and biological.

• 22:57Manoush Zomorodi?

  Did you know that that was gonna work? Like, do you remember after the surgery, the first time that he came to be fitted? And what happened? What it was like when he stood up?

• 23:09Speaker 04

  We hypothesized that that he would have those sensations and he would be better able to control the prosthesis because of those muscle dynamics. But it was a hypothesis. And when we actually saw it with our own eyes, it was a remarkable day in the laboratory.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  We electrically linked Jim's AMI muscles via the electrodes to a bionic limb. And Jim quickly learned how to move the bionic limb in four distinct ankle foot movement directions. We were excited by these results, but then Jim stood up. And what occurred was truly remarkable. All the natural biomechanics mediated by the central nervous system emerged via the synthetic limb as an involuntary reflexive action. Here's Jim descending steps, reaching with his bionic toe to the next stair tread, automatically exhibiting natural motions without him even trying to move his limb. Because Jim's central nervous system is receiving the proprioceptive signals, it knows exactly how to control

• 24:11Speaker 02

  the synthetic limb in a natural way.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  Now Jim moves and behaves as if the synthetic limb is part of him. For example, one day in lab, he accidentally stepped on a roll of electrical tape. Now, what do you do when something's stuck to your shoe? You don't reach down like this, it's way too awkward. Instead, you shake it off. And that's exactly what Jim did after being neuraly connected to the limb for just a few hours. What was most interesting to me is what Jim was telling us he was experiencing. He said, "The robot became part of me." The first few movements were like, "Oh, wow."

• 24:52Manoush Zomorodi?

  Again, here's Jim Ewing.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  My brain got all excited, my muscles in my leg kind of got all excited, like, "Hey, there's something happening." And this phenomenon that Hugh later called neural embodiment occurs. Your nervous system, your body, your brain recognizes this piece of equipment as being part of you. You have embodied this thing, and it just adopts it and starts using it as if it belongs there. And actually, it got to the point where, while we were doing a bunch of tests, they would occasionally have to turn the robot off to reset things.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  And it got to be kind of a, not a physically painful, it was like an emotionally painful experience every time they turned it off. And I asked them, I said, "You have to warn me when you're going to turn it off, because it's like jarring to all of a sudden lose my foot again." That's how much my body had become accustomed to it. And it did not like it when it turned off.

• 26:00Manoush Zomorodi?

  I don't know if it's just because I was getting ready to talk to you, Hugh, but I suddenly noticed that many people were amputees in my neighborhood. And I read a statistic that kind of astounded me, that something like 200,000 Americans have a limb amputated each year?

• 26:26Speaker 04

  Well, because of the precipitous increase, sadly, of diabetes.

• 26:31Manoush Zomorodi?

  Ah.

• 26:32Speaker 04

  Extreme diabetes sadly often leads to the need to amputate a limb, typically a leg. So that the numbers are climbing higher and higher because of the increase in diabetes.

• 26:45Manoush Zomorodi?

  So presumably you expect demand for this procedure to skyrocket.

• 26:49Speaker 04

  For sure.

• 26:51Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's been about a decade since the procedure was first performed. Since then, how many people have had the surgery?

• 26:59Speaker 04

  Of the surgery itself, over a hundred people to date. And at all levels, you know, below the knee, above the knee, below the elbow, above the elbow. The electromechanical integration into those new surgically constructed tissues will take longer. But I think in about five years from now, from a commercial setting, the full bionic reconstruction can be happening clinically, which is quite exciting.

• 27:27Manoush Zomorodi?

  So, so how many people could qualify for this kind of a prosthetic?

• 27:32Speaker 04

  A lot of people qualify. We can apply the surgical technique in an acute case at the time when the limb is amputated. We can also pursue these regenerative and surgical and electromechanical strategies as a revision. So it is possible for someone like myself that already has an amputation to undergo this reconstruction surgery to go from the past to the future.

• 27:59Manoush Zomorodi?

  Wow, I mean, in your TED Talk, you said that you, because of the surgery that you received, you were not a good candidate for this technology. Has that changed?

• 28:08Speaker 04

  It, it has changed. And I'm actually

• 28:11Manoush Zomorodi?

  Wow.

• 28:12Speaker 04

  thinking carefully about when to, to go under the knife, when to receive these interfaces for, for myself.

• 28:20Manoush Zomorodi?

  And right now, if one chose to do this, how much would they have to pay? They, they, let's say they had the surgery covered, but for the limb and the technology, how much would that cost?

• 28:32Speaker 04

  So in five years, when this entire bionic reconstruction is made available clinically, commercially, you know, for a bionic, say, foot ankle with the magnets and the surgery and whatnot, it's on the order of a hundred thousand dollars, including the surgery and the, the robotic components and the sensing components and the computer components.

• 28:54Manoush Zomorodi?

  So expensive.

• 28:55Speaker 04

  Well, it's, it's, it's on par with other surgeries. The bionic legs that I'm now wearing cost about $40,000, about the cost of a car. You know, just what is the value of being able to walk, right? You know, $40,000 sounds like a lot, but it's pretty nice to be able to walk across the room.

• 29:24Manoush Zomorodi?

  I listened to a podcast that you did with someone who has been part of one of your research projects. And the two of you were talking about how much fun it is to have a prosthetic. And this idea that we have normalized the quote unquote "normal body" and that we hopefully are entering an era where this merging of bodies and machines is not only functional, but like sexy even.

• 29:58Speaker 04

  You know, people often talk about the example of eyeglasses, right? The glasses are a prosthesis, but now, you know, it's a fashion accessory. So, yeah, I mean, when technology really works, when we're able to rebuild bodies and give people back their freedom, give people back their ability to dance and to run with the expression that they want to put out into the world.

• 30:27Speaker 04

  Will these new bodies express themselves in terms of good design and aesthetics? Absolutely.

• 30:36Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's going to be an interesting era when part of our bodies begin to age and deteriorate and another part can be potentially continuously upgraded.

• 30:46Speaker 04

  Correct. My own body, my bionic legs are upgraded every five years and my biological body continues to get worse and worse due to age-related degeneration.

• 30:59Manoush Zomorodi?

  Due to age-related, we're getting old, aren't we?

• 31:02Speaker 04

  That's right. So, you're right, that is very interesting. In a sense, the bionic part of my body is immortal, but my biological body, you know, obviously won't be able to keep up unless there's major breakthroughs in aging.

• 31:18Manoush Zomorodi?

  I mean, this speaks to your philosophy that we should, and this is the word you use, if I'm correct, become cyborgs, right?

• 31:29Speaker 04

  Well, I don't know about should, but I do think it's part of humanity's natural progression to go from developing and using tools that are separate from our body to a more profound integration. Half of my lab is focused on technology to augment human capability beyond innate physiological levels. So we're building exoskeletons that if I gave you one of our exoskeletons, you'd be able to jump higher, run faster, walk better. So that type of technological power, if you will, will be very popular and will become quite pervasive in society.

• 32:10Speaker 04

  I predict 10 years, certainly 20 years from now, when you walk down the streets of major cities in the world, you'll routinely see people wearing bionics that are augmenting their capabilities.

• 32:22Manoush Zomorodi?

  So like, the UPS guy is going to be flinging packages with no problem?

• 32:27Speaker 04

  Absolutely. If we don't have humanoids delivering packages or aerial vehicles, if it's still humans, the humans will definitely be augmented, absolutely.

• 32:39Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was Hugh Herr. He is an engineer and biophysicist at MIT, where he co-leads the Yang Center for Bionics. Hugh and his team published a study of patients who have received this new procedure. We will link to the study and Hugh's talks at ted.npr.org. Special thanks also to Jim Ewing for sharing his story. Jim and Hugh, by the way, are both still climbing. On the show today, augmenting humans. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you are listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be back in a minute.

• 33:30Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 33:34Speaker 06

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• 34:05Speaker 00

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• 34:48Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, augmenting humans. We heard how Hugh Herr is taking prosthetics and integrating them into the body in new ways. Now we want to turn to technology being developed to mimic another part of our anatomy, our skin. This research is in its early days because replicating the sensations that the body's largest organ sends to our brains is incredibly difficult.

• 35:21Speaker 03

  So the skin is a complex system where there are a lot of things that are actually all working together at the same time.

• 35:30Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is Anna Maria Koklita. She is a materials scientist who has spent the past decade trying to replicate skin artificially. This idea isn't new. Artificial skin has been around since the 1980s. It's often used for burn victims. But there's something missing from today's artificial skin.

• 35:50Speaker 03

  There is the possibility to Reconstruct the skin, more or less, that it kind of looks similar to before the burn, but still the sensation is lost.

• 36:03Manoush Zomorodi?

  The warmth of your coffee cup in the morning, water running through your hands as you wash them, or all the different textures you touch, smooth, rough, soft, or sharp. All of those sensations are captured by your skin's receptors.

• 36:18Speaker 03

  We have receptors that are for strong touch, light touch, that is for the temperature. We have millions of receptors.

• 36:28Manoush Zomorodi?

  And all day long, those millions of receptors are bombarded with all kinds of information.

• 36:35Speaker 03

  And then they transmit this information through electrical stimuli to the brain, thanks to the nerves, nerve connections. So it's a very complex system.

• 36:49Manoush Zomorodi?

  And because the skin is so complex, replicating all those sensations has been really difficult, until now.

• 36:57Speaker 03

  This is a piece of skin, of artificial skin.

• 37:02Manoush Zomorodi?

  Here's Anna Maria Koklita on the TED stage, where she unveiled smart skin.

• 37:08Speaker 03

  We have, for the first time, produced an artificial skin that can respond at the same time to three stimuli: touch, so force, temperature, and humidity. And it can do this also at an unprecedented resolution. So it's a very tiny device, and so this means that it can sense objects that are actually smaller than the objects that can be sensed with our skin.

• 37:41Speaker 03

  So first of all, imagine burns victims.

• 37:46Speaker 03

  If the burn is very deep, this burns up until the lower level of the epidermis and this makes patients lose sensation. If one could make completely artificial skin, then you know, this artificial skin could be applied as a patch in the area where there is the burn and give back the sensation to the people who have lost it.

• 38:16Manoush Zomorodi?

  So let's talk about what you're doing in your lab. You know, if I came into your lab and you showed it to me, what would I see?

• 38:25Speaker 03

  This artificial skin is actually thinner than the cross-section of a hair.

• 38:30Manoush Zomorodi?

  Huh.

• 38:31Speaker 03

  So it's basically impossible to see and impossible to really feel it when you touch it. So it takes the properties and the characteristics of the support material. So if we deposited on top of a glove, it will look like a glove. We have even deposited on top of this transferable tattoos, you know, the type that kids use. And then what you see is just really the tattoo paper. So it's so tiny that you don't see it and you don't feel it, but it takes the shape of the support material.

• 39:16Manoush Zomorodi?

  The artificial skin is made of a bunch of nanoscopic cylinders.

• 39:21Speaker 03

  This is the architecture of the artificial skin. So we are really able to control the thickness and the chemical composition of a material at the atomic level.

• 39:33Manoush Zomorodi?

  The inner core of each cylinder is filled with a polymer that gets bigger when exposed to a stimuli.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  Like touch, temperature, and humidity.

• 39:43Manoush Zomorodi?

  And the outer part of the cylinder is made of something called piezoelectric material.

• 39:47Speaker 03

  Piezoelectric material is a material that, when it is compressed, produces electricity.

• 39:55Manoush Zomorodi?

  So when the cylinder is touched or exposed to heat, for example, the polymer on the inside kind of puffs up and compresses the material on the outside. And boom.

• 40:06Speaker 03

  This produces an electric current.

• 40:09Manoush Zomorodi?

  From there...

• 40:10Speaker 03

  Each of these cylinders could be connected to a series of electrodes. And then we measure the electricity at each of these locations.

• 40:20Manoush Zomorodi?

  And similar to how our own skin sends information about what it's feeling to our brains.

• 40:27Speaker 03

  The artificial skin sends information to a computer. And that's where we read this electric signal. But then, you know, this signal can also be transmitted wirelessly to, for example, a neuroprosthetic. And this is how we actually intend to transmit it to the brain. But that will be a future development.

• 40:53Manoush Zomorodi?

  You mentioned prosthetics. Earlier in this episode, we talked to Hugh Herr at MIT. I'm sure you're familiar with his prosthetics work. How would smart skin be an added value, I guess? Or be important to someone who needs to wear a prosthetic?

• 41:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, so with this type of artificial skin, when this would be added to a prosthetic, then we could produce electrical signals that could send directly the information, could either stimulate the rest of the arm or of the leg, or they could transmit the information to a neural processes in the brain and then help the patient recognize also the characteristics of the objects that they are touching.

• 41:51Manoush Zomorodi?

  So if they had a prosthetic foot, they would know if they were walking on hot gravel or?

• 42:01Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. So a prosthetic hand, for example, would feel a hot cup or a cold bottle of beer and would feel the difference. Another interesting field of application would be robotics. Nowadays, humanoid robots are used in many fields, for example, in medicine.

• 42:24Speaker 03

  But also in household. And these robots are exposed to several stimuli, several interaction with the environment and with the humans. And sometimes they have too many inputs at the same time. And this is the reason number one for robot failure. So imagine a future where actually a robot could be a bit more sensitive, a bit smarter. This would lead also to a higher safety of this technology.

• 42:54Manoush Zomorodi?

  I mean, would that be, this sounds kind of like science fiction, but in the future that you have a burn and you just put on like a temporary tattoo over that part? And it connects to your body?

• 43:08Speaker 03

  Something like that, yes. It could be a temporary tattoo or a patch, you know, that can be applied on the body. And then there could be different way of detecting the electrical signals. Could be even that it is just connected to an app on the smartphone. And then maybe the app is, I don't know, sending a message, a warning, a sound if the temperature goes above a certain level. There could be different options.

• 43:37Manoush Zomorodi?

  In terms of the drawbacks to this, I can only imagine, this is expensive?

• 43:43Speaker 03

  Well, yes and no, actually. In the sense that the instruments to deposit these materials are expensive at the beginning. But then the amount of material that is produced is so tiny that when you do a calculation per centimeter square, the price is not that high.

• 44:02Manoush Zomorodi?

  Oh, interesting. Okay, so this could be something that is accessible to people.

• 44:06Speaker 03

  Yes, that's where we would like really to keep it accessible to people. It's a challenge. And therefore, it's an interesting project. You know, from also the scientific point of view, from the technological point of view. And yeah, this is what keeps me going.

• 44:30Manoush Zomorodi?

  That's Anna Maria Cocletta. She's a materials scientist and a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Bari in Italy. You can see her full talk at ted.com.

• 44:45Manoush Zomorodi?

  So we've talked about adding technology to our lives in the form of robots and prosthetics and smart skin. But technology is also being used to enhance and alter organisms that live inside the human body. The biochemist Jennifer Doudna won the Nobel Prize for discovering the gene-editing technology CRISPR. Now she's using that technology to find a cure for diseases like asthma and Alzheimer's by manipulating the microbiome that live inside our guts. Here she is explaining how on the TED stage in 2023.

• 45:22Speaker 03

  The essence of being human is that we solve problems. And when we're faced with enormous problems like disease and climate change, we need to solve them by collaboration. I'm excited to tell you about a new kind of collaboration that will absolutely create solutions to these big problems. It's a collaboration that's unexpected because it's between humans and the tiniest organisms that populate our planet, the bacteria and other microbes that live in, on, and around us. Bacteria may be small and unseen, but they often have inspired transformative innovations,

• 46:03Speaker 03

  including the one that has become the cornerstone of my own research. Over the past decade, I've been at the forefront of developing a revolutionary technology called CRISPR that has come from the study of how bacteria fight viral infection. CRISPR is amazing because it allows us to precisely edit the DNA in living organisms, including in people and plants. With CRISPR, we can change, remove, or replace the genes that govern the function of cells. This means that we now have the ability to use CRISPR like a word processor, to find, cut, and paste text.

• 46:49Speaker 03

  CRISPR, sorprendentement, a déjà guéri les gens de troubles dévastateurs comme la maladie des cellules sanguines. Et il a créé des plantes de riz qui sont résistantes à la maladie et à la pluie. Incroyable, non? Mais l'avantagé mondial suivant avec CRISPR viendra en fait à l'éditation de gènes au-delà seulement d'organismes individuels. Nous avons maintenant la capacité de utiliser CRISPR pour éditer des populations entières de microbes petits, appelés microbiomes, qui vivent dans et sur nos corps. Depuis des décennies, les scientifiques ont étudié une bactérie à la fois, comme si chaque type de bactérie comportait une attitude indépendante.

• 47:31Speaker 03

  Mais nous savons maintenant que les comportements bactériens, bons et mauvais, résultent de leurs interactions dans les complexes microbiomes. Dans les humains, les microbiomes du gout dysfonctionnels sont associés à des maladies aussi diverses que l'Alzheimer et l'asthme. Et dans les animaux infirmiers, les microbiomes produisent du méthane, un contributeur puissant au changement climatique. Mais quand ils sont en bonne santé, les microbiomes humains et animaux peuvent en fait prévenir la maladie et réduire les émissions de méthane. Donc, pour utiliser ces avantages, nous avons besoin d'une façon de contrôler précisément ces communautés microbiennes. Alors pourquoi les microbiomes ont été difficiles à contrôler dans le passé?

• 48:13Speaker 03

  Il s'avère que les microbiomes sont très complexes et difficiles à manipuler. Les antibiotiques affectent l'ensemble des microbiomes, et leur overusage peut conduire à la résistance aux médicaments. La alimentation et les probiotiques sont non spécifiques et sont souvent inefficaces. Les transplantes fécales ont des défis différents à l'efficacité et à l'acceptation. Mais avec CRISPR, nous avons une outil qui fonctionne comme une scapelle. Ça nous permet de cibler un gène particulier et un type de cellule particulier. Avec CRISPR, nous pouvons changer un type de bactérie sans affecter tous les autres.

• 48:53Speaker 03

  Un autre défi est que moins de 1% des espèces microbiennes du monde ont été élevées et étudiées dans le laboratoire. Heureusement, nous pouvons maintenant accéder au reste de 99% à cause du pilotage. pioneering research of my colleague Jill Banfield and her breakthrough technology metagenomics, which is a tool that allows us to figure out what species are present and what they're doing in a microbial community. Metagenomics creates a detailed blueprint of a complex microbiome. And that means that we can use it to figure out how to use gene editing tools in the right gene in the right organism. You might be wondering how we can take this new knowledge and harness it to solve real world problems.

• 49:36Speaker 03

  Well, we're bringing together these two breakthrough technologies, metagenomics and CRISPR, to create a brand new field of science called precision microbiome editing. This will allow us to discover links between dysfunctional microbiomes and disease or greenhouse gas emissions. We can develop modified and improved microbiome editors and show that they're safe and effective. And then we can then begin to deploy these optimized solutions that will be transformative in the future. So, how does this affect our health and the health of our planet? Specific microbiome compositions in livestock can actually reduce methane emissions by

• 50:17Speaker 03

  up to 80%, but doing that today currently requires daily interventions at enormous expense, and it just doesn't scale. But with precision microbiome editing, we have an opportunity to modify a calf's microbiome at birth, limiting that animal's impact on the climate for its entire lifetime. In human health, asthma affects up to 300 million people around the world, a number that grows by 50% each decade, and it disproportionately affects lower-income children. Our team has identified a promising link between a molecule produced in the gut microbiome and asthma development.

• 50:57Speaker 03

  With precision microbiome editing, we could offer a child at risk for asthma a non-invasive therapy that would eliminate asthma-inducing molecules, changing her life trajectory. And what's really exciting is that these same approaches in the future could help us treat or even prevent human diseases that are linked to the gut microbiome, including obesity, diabetes, and Alzheimer's. I think it's fascinating that we

• 51:26Manoush Zomorodi?

  We can now use CRISPR to edit the same tiny organisms that gave us CRISPR. In doing so, we're collaborating with the ultimate partner, nature. Together, we can use CRISPR-powered, precision microbiome editing to build a more resilient future for all of us. Thank you very much. That was Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Jennifer Doudna. You can watch all of her talks at ted.com. Thank you so much for listening to our episode, Augmenting Humans. It was produced by Katie Monteleone, Rachel Faulkner White, James Delahoussaye, and Fiona Guerin. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkhanpour and me.

• 52:09Manoush Zomorodi?

  Our production staff at NPR also includes Hersha Nahada and Matthew Cloutier. Our audio engineers were Patrick Murray and David Greenberg. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxane Hylash, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Balarezzo. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

• 52:37Speaker 06

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• 53:13Manoush Zomorodi?

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