LS 59 - Transferring Consciousness, AI, Head Transplants and Synthetic Body Parts with Humai's John LaRocco

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And now, here's your host, Jason Hartman.

It's my pleasure to welcome a guy who is working on some fascinating stuff. It's John Larocco. He's head of engineering at Humai Humai. John, welcome. How are you?

Pretty good. How are you doing, Jason?

Doing well. You're coming to us from Maryland, right?

Correct.

Fantastic. Well, tell the audience about some of the fascinating, fascinating stuff you're working on and how technology is going to interface with humans.

Well, the technology I'm working on is a life support system for an isolated brain. Essentially, that means it's a way to keep a brain or a head alive using machinery. Then the brain or the head can use a brain computer interface to control a prosthetic body through this system. Essentially it's the same thing as if you've seen anime Ghosts, the prosthetic bodies and Ghost in the Shell or something similar to the robocops. But the ironic thing is that this technology is not new. Both brain computer interfacing and isolated brain life support have been around for over 50 years, though they've been more of a niche topic.

Certainly a niche topic and the topic of quite a few sci fi movies. John. I think our listeners have seen this on a sci fi movie once or twice, right?

Several of them, yeah. One of my favorite sci fi films, well, is actually a bit of an older one, Reanimator, if you've ever seen that. I've also read the Lovecraft story. I'm a big Lovecraft fan.

Well, tell us more about the technology and what this means to us. You know, I mean, we're about, what, two years away from the world's first head transplant. They've already done a face transplant and I think that's been done more than once, by the way. But with this head transplant, I mean, this is just mind boggling. They basically have a Russian person who's I think about 30 years old, if I recall correctly, and he's got what's known as locked in syndrome. So his body is useless, but his brain works. So they're going to transplant his head. Now, what I've read and correct me anywhere I'm wrong, John, is this is a team of 90 doctors that will take part in this. And what they do is they basically put his body. He's in a coma for like 30 days as they reconnect all of these nerves. I mean, this is a mind boggling. How many nerves do they have to reconnect? This is insane. I mean, is this gonna work? What do you think?

I think, well, the big question I have would be, can they reconnect the spinal column or find a, like some kind of microchip? Because otherwise the patient might be paralyzed from the neck down. In this case, they're lucky because they have what's called a donor body. The patient, the Russian fellow with the terminal disease, has a brain dead cousin who's being kept alive on life support. That's where the donor body is coming from. But we have done head transplants successfully on monkeys back in the 60s and 70s. There's a guy named Dr. Robert White who did the same research in that period. The applications for head transplants are actually a bit broader than you might think. For instance, a lot of the systems that you might use to keep a head alive during the transplants have applications in open heart surgery, cardiac bypass, some of the more conventional kinds of surgeries. The application that I'm working on with UMAI essentially is a more efficient mobile life support system, which is an area that the whole world can benefit from. Because one issue with artificial organ research is that many different research groups around the world are designing their organs in isolation. That is, they don't consider how to control those organs in an organ system. The nightmare scenario you might end up with is someone who has a lot of different organ transplants, but they all don't get along with each other. It's kind of like the early 90s computer scene. Parts from different manufacturers don't play well with each other. So in addition to designing the full body prosthetic, as I call it, I'm designing a control framework for artificial organs to interface with each other. Kind of a biological API.

Wow, amazing. It is truly an amazing time to be alive. As I always say with the monkey head transplants, if that was successful, I mean, how many times has that been done and has it been successful? You know, I mean, there are varying shades of gray, if you will here, obviously, as to what you call success. But has that worked? How many times, if you know, has it been done? And what's really the big difference? I mean, is it just that humans have a Lot more nerves to reconnect in the spinal column.

There's some other factors, but some of those other factors are things you might take for granted. In Dr. White's case, I believe he did it once in the big paper that I mostly read. But in that paper, the head survived for nine days because of xenograft rejection because the new body didn't get along with the transplanted organ. So I imagine that in the human head transplant case, immunosuppressants or compatibility at a genetic level is going to be a big issue. They're lucky that the donor body is a relative of the patient in this case. Likewise the fellow. Even if surgery succeeds, if they're unlucky, and the fellow might be paralyzed from the neck down and may have to take immunosuppressants, that's the worst case scenario.

You're talking about the head transplant that's about two years out, right?

Correct. Okay. So I've actually been in contact with the main surgeon, Dr. Canavro, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. Interesting fellow. He's been a very interesting person to talk with about prosthetic body, because one of the issues that you'd have for, say, replicating this surgery is that not everyone might have a donor body waiting for them. So if you develop a synthetic alternative, it can literally save a lot of lives, especially for disabled people.

Okay, so you're doing the system that keeps the brain alive during the transplant. Right.

The design of UMAI has always been to design a robot body that can indefinitely sustain a head or a brain. That's how it's designed. But for the head transplant, the way that Dr. White did it and the way that the surgery in two years is going to do it is essentially reconnecting the blood vessels of the donor body to the new head and transfer it over after cutting the spinal cord. It's more like a kind of really macabre version of shop class than you might think, because you have to get through a lot of nasty bone and tissue to get what you want. But during this time, the challenge is to keep the blood going in through the arteries, out through the veins, right in the neck. And our system is going to do much the same, but it's going to be Everything from the neck down is going to be synthetic.

Wow. Tell us about the synthetic. Everything from the neck down. I mean, if our consciousness is just in our brain, which some argue that, but if it is, then this basically means indefinite life, potentially. What is the difference between this and singularity? You don't want to call this singularity, like Ray Kurzweil calls it. Right?

Kurzweil, I think, has a too broad definition of the term. It's a very loaded term because it can mean a lot of things in a lot of different places. Places. In the transhumanist context, it often refers to creating a superhuman, AI or brain uploading, alternatively. But in mathematics, it can mean everything from a point that approaches an unworkable solution to an exponential growth series, to a whole lot of other things. In physics, there's different ones. In robotics, the term singularity simply means a set of coordinates that your device does not work at. So the term singularity in this case is not what I would call a very appropriate description. I would simply call this an algorithm of logical biomedical engineering and tissue engineering applied to a very specific problem. But the applications that I'm mostly excited about are keeping a brain alive and using that framework for other things. Like, for instance, you can use this to develop automated systems that can maintain some kind of steady state using a lot of different types of chemicals, for instance. So there's a lot of applications with chemical engineering, with controls, with mechatronics. That's the kind of nitty gritty stuff that I'm really interested in. Because when you take homeostasis, that is the body's ability to regulate itself, you have to design a series of artificial organs and a control system for them to mimic what goes on in the body every day. So essentially you need glucose nutrients going into the brain and the waste removed in a way to reoxygenate the blood, plus a lot of the other stuff, like immune systems, getting rid of infectious diseases, reoxygenating the blood, having the right pressure and temperature, maintaining the right velocities and flow rates. A very complex engineering problem. But we're designing it so it's modular and each organ is interchangeable with other ones.

This is mind blowing. So we should mention to the audience that your background is in electrical engineering. You're an electrical engineer, right? Okay. Why an electrical engineer? I mean, we know that the brain is an electrochemical organ. Maybe cross that chasm for us a little bit, will you?

Well, my background actually isn't as a bachelor's degree. It was in biomedical engineering. I studied biomechanics, even though my degree is in electrical engineering. For my master's and PhD, I focus more on what's called biomedical engineering, in this case, brain computer interface controlling prosthetic devices through eeg, electroencephalography, essentially electrochemical Signals from the brain. I've also got a background in controls, that is, systems that are able to regulate and adjust themselves. So this is really a fusion of those particular aspects of my background. And personally, I've always had a big interest in cybernetics and robotics and applying it to very novel situations. One of the problems in medicine nowadays is that a lot of the life support systems are not as reliable as we need them to be. By miniaturizing them and making them modular, we can make them applicable to not just full body prosthetics, but more mundane and conventional surgeries. Because once a technology is developed, it will be extrapolated to dimensions the inventor often never originally considered.

Wow. Yeah, this is mind boggling. If you can keep a brain alive, can this be done yet, or is this. We can't transplant the head two years from now as scheduled, if they can't keep the brain alive, obviously. So can they do this today, at least for a short period, 20 minutes, whatever?

Yes, they can, as I said, I.

Mean, we do it with hearts, we do it with other organs, of course.

But yes, it's mostly about keeping nutrients going in and waste going out.

How long can we do it now? Is there a time limit?

Well, on monkeys it's about nine days, according to Robert White's record. I'm not as familiar on the records of other types of animals, like pigs or rats, that are otherwise done in some of the animal research I've read. But one thing that is also relevant to this is what's called an animat or a hybrot, if you're familiar with those.

I am not.

An animat or a hybrot is actually the reverse of what we're doing. You culture a synthetic brain that is a petri dish full of neurons and you use that to control a robot. But the problem with the hybrid or the animat, is that eventually cells have no way of getting rid of their waste, so they all die a septic death. Now, if you add a simple circulatory system to this, as in a way to move nutrients in and move waste out, you can keep the things going for a lot longer. That's essentially the basis of what we're going for, because our system is designed for a transplanted head. The head provides a lot of benefits over just the brain, because with the head, you have the eyes, you have the ears, you have the nose, you have the lymph nodes in the neck providing immunity, not to mention all the sensory organs. But if you were to Use just the brain, for instance. You would have to rewire all the sensory organs or the sensory parts of the brain, like the visual cortex and so on, as opposed to just using what's already there. Now, for some patients, you may need to do that like someone who's blind or has some disabilities. But my philosophy is keep it as simple as possible. Reduce the life support system to the minimum necessary and then build upon it from there. Because in nature you find systems that are often highly redundant and robust enable this self repair. I just try to replicate that as closely as possible.

Yeah, okay. Wow, this is just mind boggling. If a brain can be kept alive for nine days, for example, and maybe indefinitely in the future, what would it really do? You know, say it's disembodied, permanently, for example, you know, in this possible future. That's kind of weird and macabre. We all agree with that, I'm sure. But it's certainly interesting if that's the case. What would this brain do? Would you hook it up to the Internet and have it just think and communicate with other people or maybe other brains? I mean, this is like a Star Trek episode. It's mind boggling.

One thing about my nine days, that actually was for the head transplant. Keeping the head alive, but keeping an isolated brain alive, just the brain by itself typically lasts about eight hours. The problem is, is that a lot of the organs that the brain often relies on aren't available. Hence why it's very short. But for keeping a brain alive, there's a lot of applications of what you could do. Use it to control robotics, store it somewhere. Because if the brain has no sensory input, I think madness is a pretty logical outcome.

Yeah, wow, that's true.

To say nothing of mental disorders. Because essentially your body relies on hormones and neural signals from all your organs to provide feedback and updated on stuff. When you suddenly have the absence of that, or at least no accommodation of that, you have the recipe for your brain to start wondering what the hell's going on.

Essentially assuming if it's the same, I guess, type of brain that we understand now. Wow, what haven't I asked you that you want to just share with the audience? I mean, I'm sort of stumped as to the questions here. There's so many.

What are some of the other applications of what I'm working on?

Yeah, that's a good one.

One of them, for instance, might actually be what I would call the literal type of factory farming. One thing that is going on in San Francisco right now is a Lot of startups are working on using tissue engineering to produce lab grown meats and even synthetic dairy products.

We're going to be doing a show on that. Pretty fascinating too.

I like to nickname these things cancer farms because essentially they literally lab grow different types of meat and use those as the basis for most of their products.

You mean the way they get cells to replicate is technically cancer? Is that what you're saying?

Well, you're using blobs of sustained tissue to become the basis of your product. Essentially, it's like a lab grown tumor.

So essentially, if people eat the synthetic meat, they're eating cancer.

No, no, no. I'm just using that as a kind of a cynical remark on my part.

Okay, all right. I mean, everybody's so concerned about gmo. Just wait, you think you're concerned about gmo?

Just one of the applications for this is that a lot of the culturing of synthetic tissue relies on very specialized conditions in terms of atmospheric pressure, isolation from other ecosystems, meaning like preventing infections and pathogens from getting in and other nasty stuff and keeping nutrients coming in to sustain your thing and removing waste. You could use an adapted version of our system, for instance, to grow different types of tissue in a bioreactor. A bioreactor being a kind of closed loop system that's used to produce a certain biologically grown product as an output. An example of a common type of bioreactor might be various types of bio artificial organs like livers in one case that take a bunch of cultured cells and use those to remove waste from the blood. Even in civil engineering, there's an application for bioreactors in turning, believe it or not, human waste into fertilizer. They have a big vat full of various types of decomposers. And as a result, when you go into the room, it's very humid and you get a kind of a mildewy smell.

Well, why would that be so odd? I mean, we use animal waste for fertilizer. I mean, what?

Historical cultures have done the same thing. And historical cultures have also done human waste. But nowadays the idea that I'm thinking is simply of extrapolating from there, combining that with a new technology to potentially increase the robustness of the process or the yield. Because one of the problems with a lot of the natural processes is that they're not what you call, optimized for producing output. This way you could use less resources to gain a more efficient output, which is a very key outcome for a lot of engineering nowadays. But one of the trade offs of that has Always been loss of robustness because highly specialized systems can be very sensitive. That's why a lot of the most advanced parts of control theory often rely on making a very fast system into something much more manageable. For instance, in most jet planes, like military fighters or passenger jets, the most complex part isn't necessarily the engine, but the avionics, because the jet engine moves faster than humans can react. Because humans have a latency period of a couple hundred milliseconds to when we can see something and respond to it. That's why with jet engines, the autopilot, the avionics, are often the most complex parts of the system.

Because the humans can't react fast enough to something that changes, obviously, right?

Yeah.

Okay.

If the jet plane moves at a few hundred meters a second, say that plane can move very fast before the human knows how to react. That's why I think a lot of engineering in the future is actually limited by the human response time. Now, one of the potential things that could change in the future is developing a full body prosthetic or a biological interface to your brain. You might be able to automate certain parts of your brain or essentially outsource parts of your consciousness, if you will, to various machines. Now, this can work both ways. There's always the promise of the technological singularity and such, but there's also the possibility that, what if someone inserts malware for your brain, looking for things like credit card numbers or PIN numbers and stuff like that, or more insidious applications like altering your memories or some of the more dystopian sci fi stuff. But whenever you design something that's designed to plug into the brain, one of the more mundane problems is what's called biocompatibility and tissue interface. Because when I insert electrodes into someone's brain for a procedure called ECOG electrocordiography that can produce scarring in the tissue, for instance, because the brain doesn't know how to interact with all these new material that's coming in. So you build scar tissue around the damage and try to interface with it. So that's why developing more biocompatible electrodes and interface systems for the brain and neural tissue is a very key concern as well. But even if you could sustain a head for a while, which we think we can, there's other issues to take into account. Things like old age, like dementia or brain cancer and the like. That's why I think a lot of the neural medicine things like Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's are still going to be very Good parts for medical development in the future. Because even if you design a full body prosthetic that can keep a brain alive indefinitely, there's still mundane issues like equipment failures, neural diseases and stuff like that, or a body becoming destroyed through violence or accident.

Okay, all right. The future. Give us a little prediction as to how this might play out in society. I mean, certainly saving more lives. There's just a whole host of applications in using it with other organs as well, not just the brain. What are we looking at? What's like the time horizon on this type of technology? What are your thoughts on the impact it will have in society and the world?

Well, one of the impacts I think is likely to happen over the next couple of decades is that the demographics of the world are going to change quite drastically because you have the baby boomer generation dying off in the US and Europe, not to mention migration and being a very big and divisive issue now. And also you have the rise of economies in Asia that the generations that worked really hard, like in Japan and China, are all retiring now. So those are some of the sociological implications. Because imagine if some of these older generations don't die as fast as they used to. That means that countries that are developed but have shrinking populations, like much of Europe and Japan, might be able to remain economically viable in the future. And you can get a much bigger economic output with a smaller number of people. Likewise, some of the applications for this modular biology, as I call it, are that artificial organs can replace a lot of regular diseases. Like if someone has a type of cancer in the pancreas. If you have a synthetic pancreas, you can't really get cancer from it after all. But I also see that infection is going to be a big issue, especially if you get really antibiotic resistant bacteria. That's why reliable antibiotics should be a very tough, a very high research priority for most medical companies, I think.

Fascinating stuff. John, give out your website and tell people where they can find out more about this unbelievably fascinating work.

Sure. The website for yumai is yumaitech.com that's.

H U M A I and then T E C H. Correct. Right. Okay. And where's the company located?

The company is located in la.

Okay. Los Angeles. Yeah, Good stuff. Anything else you want to share?

One thing I think would be worth watching is how this head transplant surgery ends up, because there's much insight we can find from that regarding the circulatory system, which is really the most important part of the Yumai prosthetic body because I think that the bloodstream is very much a marvel because it regulates so much it handles delivering nutrients, removing waste, regulating temperatures in the body. That's essentially the basis of how we're building our full body prosthetic. If you can make artificial circulatory systems more efficient and reliable, you can do a host of other things for the body. To quote a certain song, I like Blood Makes noise.

Yeah, it does. It's an amazing thing. And that's why when they talk about cancer research, leukemia really may be the ultimate key because that's the blood cancer. Well, good stuff. Very interesting talk. John LaRocco, thank you so much for joining us.

No problem. Thanks for the interview, Jason.

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