 Most of human history is about making biology better. It's breeding new kinds of plants, building prosthetics, finding ways to go beyond what our bodies can let us do. Two years ago, I tested this for myself. I got a magnet implanted in my finger so I can sense metal in motors, and later I added an NFC chip so I can read it with my phone. They've become part of my body, but homebrew implants can only do so much. So what's happening on the cutting edge of biohacking, where people are changing nature in ways we never thought possible? Founded by two former Columbia University researchers, EpiBone isn't trying to add new tech to our bodies. It's trying to replace something, the pieces of bone that people lose because of cancer, accidents, or congenital defects. And it's come up with a completely new way to do it. Around the time that interchangeable parts began to be used on the assembly line, we started kind of to view the body in a similar way. If you needed a new heart, you might get one out of a person or engineer a new one using technology, but the idea was let's replace body parts. But now we're really at this stage where a lot of people think of the body as a renewable resource of cells as opposed to just a summation of parts. And so lots of groups around the world are dedicated to growing different body parts. So how would you describe what you're doing here? It's pretty simple to describe. We're growing bones from stem cells. We've grown human bone for years. We have not put this human bone in a human yet. We hope to do that next year for the first time. What would it look like to actually, if you have a bone problem, how would you get a bone grown? So we take two things from the patient. The first thing is we just take an image, so a CT scan will do. That has three-dimensional data that we can map to digital fabrication devices. We use 3D printers and 3D micro-milling machines to mill a perfect-shaped bone scaffold and to machine a corresponding bioreactor. We also take a sample of fat tissue from the patient, and out of that fat tissue we take the stem cells. So we put the stem cells into this bioreactor with the scaffold, and after three weeks we have a piece of living bone that we can then use in surgery. So right now you take a sort of segment of bone that exists and you use it as sort of a structure to build the actual bone around? Yeah, or inside. We're using a decellularized bovine bone, so a piece of cow bone. We strip it of all cellular material and then re-infuse it with human cells. Once we extract the cells, we can take the CT of the patient and design a graft that would perfectly match the defects that we want to graft. So you remove all those cellular materials that is foreign for the patients, then you live with just the structures. And we reintroduce the patient cells in there. That actually seems really conceptually simple. Oh, that's a key thing. We want to make the process as simple as possible so that eventually we can scale up. So that's why we have this bireactive system that allows us to just put the materials we need in, put the cells in, set it up, and let it grow. So if we're starting from a bone block with no cells on it, we're limited by the size of the starting material. But with 3D printers, it's just the size of the printer that's the limiting factor. Exactly. Yeah. And if you think about, well, there's a lot of people that are working on making 3D printers be able to print all kinds of things. We watch that with excitement. Right now we can do 3D printing. It's a nice system that allows us to create the exact structure. But the microarchitecture of the scaffolding material is still very different from the microarchitecture of the bone. The quality of it still hasn't matched the native structures of the bone. So what makes this better than the current procedures for transplanting a bone? So right now if you transplant a piece of bone, it's from a cadaver. So either from a cadaver or from yourself. If it's from a cadaver, you have to kill the bone before you put it in the body. And so it's not alive, and it doesn't interact with what's there. If you cut a piece of bone out of yourself, it's alive, and it can theoretically connect pretty well with the host tissue. But then there are oftentimes mechanical mismatches, and the shape isn't perfect, and you have to have a second surgery. So after time, our bone becomes more and more integrated into the body while the alternatives become seen as scar tissue. So EpiBone is working on real-world, practical solutions to a problem we've had for ages. Creative Studio New Deal Design, meanwhile, thinks cyborg bodies are coming. So how will we use them? Among other things, New Deal has worked on the design of the Fitbit, Lightro's Lightfield Camera, and Google's Project ARAphone. This is Gadi Amit, the president and founder. This is a sketch rendering of the Underskin project. This is essentially an implant that has two nodes going under the skin. And that brings this provocative notion of actually implanting things under the skin, and then how do we interact with it? What do you think is the kind of interaction that people would want to have with these implanted devices? Like, what do you think they want to think of them as? It's a very distilled and personal form of UI. Interaction with the space around you or with other people. The other side would be more your personal health and your personal control panel. Some of the graphic user interfaces is a little bit far-fetched now, but it could be there if needed. You can convince people that it's not actually this scary thing that they've seen in a bunch of movies where you have tracking devices attached to you. You already see that there's so many implants and so many technologies that are coming, replacing organs and so on. I think we don't like to discuss it because of the creep factor of it, but it's right there. People are replacing joints, replacing eyes. It's just around the corner. So I'd rather have a design opinion or even a debate over it rather than leaving it only to doctors and technologists because I do feel that some of the humanistic elements are missing from their discussion topics. But that's not to say scientists aren't making any tangible leaps. You probably know Autodesk for its architecture software, but for the past couple of years, it's been working on something called Project Cyborg. A design platform for biology research on a molecular scale. And synthetic biologist Andrew Hessel, a distinguished researcher at Autodesk, thinks that's just the start. In fact, he even thinks he can use these tools to treat cancer. So this is a model of Autodesk's first synthetic virus, Phi X174. It's a virus that kills E. coli bacteria. You can think of it as an antibiotic. So this is a 3D printed model of that virus and wherever there's a different color, it's a different protein. But you can see that there's repeating patterns. When the virus infects an E. coli cell, the genetic material goes into the E. coli and it starts to produce these proteins, which then goes to produce these particles. And it kills the E. coli cell and makes so many of these particles, it splits the E. coli open. What's really significant is we demonstrate that the digital infrastructure for synthetic biology is now so accessible and so capable that we can start to make these agents really fast and really cheap. One thing I thought was really interesting that I saw was the sort of open source cancer curing project that you were working on at one point. What was sort of the idea behind that? Your cancer can now be studied to the molecular level and a custom designed drug be manufactured in a very short period of time and tested on your own cancer cells in a laboratory and you can score and gauge the results of that. It was just estimated a few weeks ago that it's costing upwards of two billion dollars now to research and develop and bring to market a new drug. That's just not sustainable, especially when it can take 15 years to make a new drug. Well, how do you hack that system? How do you change global pharma? And I realized, well, you can do it if you stop making mass market drugs because the longest and most expensive part of developing a drug is going through phase clinical trials. So if you make a drug for just one person, you kind of get around that. Your cancer is different than anyone else's. Not only will your experience in being treated be differently, but you need a unique drug. I was fascinated by something called an oncolytic virus, which are viruses, really weak viruses that can only infect cancer cells. They can't infect normal cells because they're too weak, but they can kind of get an in on the cancer cell, start to grow, kind of giving a cancer cell a cold, break the cancer cell open and actually release more viruses that could go on and infect other cancer cells. So the idea of synthetic biology to make oncolytic viruses done in an open framework, so you can engage lots of researchers and kind of build on their experience and do it for just one person at a time. One of the most compelling cases was published earlier this year by the Mayo Clinic, where they treated two people with resistant multiple myeloma with a measles virus. They demonstrated in both patients that the measles virus targeted the cancer selectively. That's great. In one patient, they had full remission of the cancer with a single treatment of measles virus. So going from really an end stage resistant cancer to being cancer free is about as miraculous a result as you could expect. It could be years before 3D printed viruses or a standard cancer treatment or our bones are grown in tubes or our health sensors are built into us, if it ever happens. But these are only a few of the things that people are doing to try to change our very bodies to fix us or make us better. And in a few years, who knows what's going to happen.