As lead program manager for Microsoft's Outlook and Internet Explorer programs, Ramez Naam worked on software to make personal computers more useful. Now Naam's focus is enhancing the brain and body. His forthcoming book, tentatively titled More Than Human, will examine how technologies may improve the physical and mental condition of humanity and the ethics of their use. Naam, 30, thinks his past and present pursuits are linked. "Ultimately, what I was working on [at Microsoft] was human enhancement technology," he says. I recently E-chatted with Naam, who is also head of his own company, Apex NanoTechnologies, which develops software for molecular design.
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U.S. News: What prompted you to start researching and writing this book?
Naam: The book has been floating around in my mind for years. I'm a computer scientist by training, but I enjoy keeping on top of advances in other fields. Over the last few years I saw two things happening . . . First, there were really tremendous scientific breakthroughs occurring that, in my mind, have the potential to really improve the human condition. Stuff that might someday make us smarter, extend our lives, help us understand the world we live in better . . . Second, there was this tremendous amount of hostility to new technology coming out of the right wing–the traditional home of social conservatives–and also from the left wing, with environmentalists and others saying, "We don't want to alter humans" . . . So I thought I would write a counterpoint–a book that educated readers on the underlying science, so they're better able to make judgments for themselves . . . and articulated some of the benefits to both individuals and society–some of the reasons we would actually want this stuff.
U.S. News: What technology–realistically–is coming along within the next decade that has the potential to markedly enhance the human condition?
Naam: In the realm of enhancement, it looks like the next decade is going to bring us the first really effective drugs for improving human learning and memory. There are about a dozen companies out there that are working on pills to boost memory. The most promising ones are based on genetic engineering work they've done in animals. For example, Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel founded a company that's developing memory-boosting drugs based on two molecules he discovered, called c-AMP and CREB. When you genetically engineer animals to have higher levels of these molecules in the brain, you end up with mice and flies that have supermemories. . . . These companies are just starting human trials now, so if the trials go well the drugs could be on the market around 2010. Their goal is to treat people with something called "Mild Cognitive Impairment" (or MCI), which precedes Alzheimer's, and those with just the normal loss of memory and learning ability that comes with age. But based on the animal tests, these drugs will probably be able to enhance learning beyond normal human levels as well, and it's likely that they'll be used that way.
U.S. News: How about beyond a decade from now?
Naam: In two decades I think we'll be making significant progress in slowing human aging. I don't mean curing diseases late in life, I mean actually keeping people younger longer. Last year a professor named Andrzej Bartke had a mouse in his lab die just a week before its fifth birthday. It was a genetically engineered mouse, engineered specifically for a slower rate of aging. Normal lab mice live on average around 2½ years and at most three years. So Bartke's mouse was as remarkable as a human living to the age of 200. And when you look at these mice, in old age they're still physically active, they still learn as quickly as much younger mice, they get much less cancer, they get much less heart disease, less diabetes, and so on. . . . And again, there are a number of companies founded around these genetic discoveries and trying to turn them into drugs. No one is close to human trials yet, but give them a decade or so.
U.S. News: OK, given all that, what do you think your condition will be like when you are 65?
Naam: When I'm 65, I suspect I'll be in the mental and physical health of a 40-to-50 year old of today. That doesn't mean I'll be biologically that much younger. But in terms of memory, attention, strength, and endurance, I expect most of us will be hanging on to our abilities later into life.
U.S. News: And what about life span?
Naam: I think I have an excellent chance of seeing 90 or 100 in good health. In the decades between now and my 100th birthday, technologies might lengthen our lives quite a bit more than that. But I'd prefer to set my expectations low and be pleasantly surprised.
There may be few things more frustrating that waiting for your E-mail to download only to find that a good chunk of those new messages are variations on the now ubiquitous Nigerian financial scams. As revenge, some people have been replying to these E-mails, hoping to overload the senders' mailboxes and waste their time. But now you can do that without wasting too much of your time. The page http://www.flooble.com/fun/reply.php contains an automatic Nigerian scam response generator. All you have to do is plug in a few terms, like the country and the "name" of the sender, and the generator does the rest, creating an authentic-sounding ("It's nice and long-winded," the page points out) 800-word E-mail reply that you can then cut and paste and send.
