In some ways, we're all cyborgs, fusions of human and technology. We put on artificial skins to protect us, store our knowledge on hard disks, and replace our voices with text on a screen.
Some of us are melded in more literal ways — I have magnetic and NFC implants in one hand, and there's a community of "biohackers" pushing the limits of DIY body modification with built-in earbuds and health monitors. But there's only so much you can do in a home lab or workshop.
Instead of revisiting them for this week's Top Shelf, we looked for companies on the cutting edge of design and biotechnology, figuring out how to fix and improve our bodies.
Tandon and her co-founder Sarindr Ick Bhumiratana believe the answer lies in treating the body like a renewable ecosystem: instead of finding replacement parts, you grow new ones.
At their Harlem laboratory, I found a fridge full of incubating bones-in-progress — fragments of dead bone and live stem cells held in a plastic case. The bone scaffold, stripped of any cells, can be cut into exactly the right shape; over the course of about three weeks, the stem cells will grow around it, creating something that's theoretically just as good as the original.
Personal medicine could be the future of much more than bone grafts. At Autodesk's experimental workshop in San Francisco — a playground of sewing machines, construction tools, and high-grade 3D printers — synthetic biologist Andrew Hessel is careful not to oversell his project. But simply put, he's trying to cure cancer.
Hessel is working on Autodesk's Project Cyborg, a software platform that the company hopes can become as important for nanoscale research as AutoCAD is for drafting. Where modeling programs can send their data to 3D printers, Project Cyborg is working with DNA printing, where machines put down layer after layer of genetic base pairs instead of plastic filament.
The human genome has over 3 million base pairs, but Hessel is focusing on something much smaller: a virus that contains only around 5,000.
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