Two summers ago, scientists removed a tiny piece of flesh from Philip
Ball's arm and turned it into a rudimentary "mini-brain." The skin
cells, removed from his body, did not die but were instead transformed
into nerve cells that independently arranged themselves into a dense
network and communicated with each other, exchanging the raw signals of
thought. This was life--but whose?
In his most mind-bending book yet, Ball makes that disconcerting
question the focus of a tour through what scientists can now do in cell
biology and tissue culture. He shows how these technologies could lead
to tailor-made replacement organs for when ours fail, to new medical
advances for repairing damage and assisting conception, and to new ways
of "growing a human." For example, it might prove possible to turn skin
cells not into neurons but into eggs and sperm, or even to turn oneself
into the constituent cells of embryos. Such methods would also create
new options for gene editing, with all the attendant moral dilemmas.
Ball argues that such advances can therefore never be about "just the
science," because they come already surrounded by a host of social
narratives, preconceptions, and prejudices. But beyond even that, these
developments raise questions about identity and self, birth and death,
and force us to ask how mutable the human body really is--and what forms
it might take in years to come.
