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InterNations
Future

Be Still, My Ticking Heart? Introducing The Artificial Organs Of The Future

As demand for organ transplants skyrockets, a new artificial heart and other sophisticated prostheses are among the medical-tech advancements raising troubling questions.

"Rex" and Bertolt Meyer, the man who lent his face to the bionic exoskeleton
"Rex" and Bertolt Meyer, the man who lent his face to the bionic exoskeleton
Paul Molga

PARIS — Meet Rex, the robotic exoskeleton that was presented a few months ago at London’s Science Museum. His heart is made of plastic, his pancreas is an insulin pump, silicon filters act as kidneys, his trachea is made of human tissue, he has an autonomous blood circulation system as well as visual and hearing implants all attached to a structure that can replicate the most important human movements.

Rex is a collection of all the recent scientific progress in artificial organ designing. “These products are not all implantable yet, and this pipe dream still lacks vital organs, like a stomach,” explains Bertolt Meyer, a Swiss psychologist who lent his face to this sort of bionic Frankenstein. “But Rex is proof of how quickly we’ve gone from the wooden leg to such sophisticated prostheses that there is hope that one day they could be as good as or even better than the level of perfection of biological constructions.”

In just a few months, Carmat’s artificial heart, invented by French surgeon Alain Carpentier, will be implanted in four patients, and this will illustrate the imminent future Meyer describes. “This worldwide first will make everything else possible,” says philosopher Roger-Pol Droit, who outlined in his 2012 book Human the physical mutations that will shake up our human condition.

Spare parts

By “everything else,” Droit means the surprising (or worrying?) innovations that are brewing in laboratories: nano pores made out of composite polymers so as to produce insulin in place of a failing pancreas, bionic retinae with tiny electrodes that can replace damaged photoreceptors, and prostheses made from collagen and glycoprotein fibers to build resorbable scaffolding that enable bone recolonization. Then, of course, there are the artificial uteri for “outside womb pregnancies” that would make babies born like soil-less plants.

“Rex shows that we can reproduce up to 60% or 70% of a human being, but we’re still a long way away from reconstructing a whole body,” explains Rich Walker, managing director of the robotics team Shadow that built Rex. “What we’re starting to obtain are prostheses that resemble human parts. But they still lack the ability to transmit sensory information.” In other words, what science delivers, for now, are mere spare part of a body, like a jigsaw puzzle.

Substitute organs

Even as things stand, doctors have no doubt whatsoever that these evolutions are positive. In France, the number of organs is nowhere near enough for transplants. Since the end of the 1990s, the number of people donating organs increased by 56.5%, but the number of people on waiting lists also rose significantly. There were a total of 5,023 transplants performed in 2012, according to the French Biomedicine Agency.

Surgery itself is not to blame: surgeons can successfully — and with very low rejection rates — transplant the following six vital organs: kidney (which represent 60% of operations), liver (23%), heart (8%), lungs (6.4%), pancreas (1.4%) and intestines. With an aging population, one in five people over 65 in France have already had at least one body part replaced, be it a new organ, a prosthesis, a dental implant or a valve.

Carmat, a company valued at more than half a billion euros, symbolizes the hopes aroused by new technological substitutes. Philippe Pouletty, its founder, explains how the artificial heart they have invented functions. “It mimes exactly the human heart. It has two ventricles that mobilize the blood like the cardiac muscle would, and sensors that allow it to accelerate or decelerate the beats, depending, for example, on whether the person is going up or down the stairs,” he says.

“From the point of view of anthropology, we are now reaching a breaking point that will represent a fracture from the totality of human experience,” says sociologist and philosopher Marcel Gauchet. “I am convinced that scientific and technical mutations will have deep repercussions on human identity. By increasing life span, the medical world is already blurring the definition of death. We used to have the impression of a clean frontier, but with organ transplants, it appears that we don’t really know when we die,” he explains

Upcoming revolutions will raise this and other issues even more strongly. For instance, artificial uteri will undoubtedly spark debates about the descendancy chain. “Imagine that for the sake of equality, men demand to be allowed to use it,” suggests anthropologist Françoise Héritier. “The male gender will then be able to give birth to children, and women will lose the fundamental certainty they have acquired thanks to maternity.”

The ethical challenges that these technological breakthroughs raise are at least as important as the scientific barriers they overcome. Rex’s artificial organs were created to restore lost functions or to replace failing parts of the body, but what will it be tomorrow? Will we have substitute organs that offer better possibilities than the original ones? Who will be allowed to have them? How will the selection be made? How much will it cost? And what will be our legal and moral relationship with post-humans whose capacities will be superior to our own?

In the end, will the announced revolution of the “enhanced human” be digested as easily as the invention of the steam engine? “On an individual scale, there’s no doubt about that,” argues psychologist Bertolt Meyer, who was born without a left hand. “I have such a sophisticated bionic prothesis that it allows me to make the finest movements. I have developed a very emotional relationship with this limb. Just like my right hand, it’s part of my identity and of the image I have of my own body.”

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FOCUS: Israel-Palestine War

As Israel Hunts Down Hamas Leaders, Are Their Patrons In Iran On The Hit List Too?

Iranian media has long blamed Israelis for targeting military and political officials inside Iran. Will Israel's Mossad teams of intelligence operatives resume these eternally murky strikes as retribution for the Oct 7 attack by the Tehran-backed Hamas?

Photo of Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) soldiers waving an Iranian flag during an anti-Israel rally in Tehran on Nov. 18

Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) soldiers during an anti-Israel rally in Tehran on Nov. 18

Two months after the Hamas terror attack in southern Israel and Israel's massive retaliation in Gaza, Tehran insiders say Israel's threat to eliminate those behind the initial Oct. 7 attack is likely to go beyond just the leaders of Hamas.

Though it was Hamas that carried out the attacks that killed more than 1,000 Israelis, many believe it was done in coordination with the Iranian regime, considered the top regional patrons and financial backers of the Palestinian militant group.

For the latest news & views from every corner of the world, Worldcrunch Today is the only truly international newsletter. Sign up here.

So far Israel has avoided directly threatening Iran, but it is believed in past years to have struck sites inside Iran and even interrogated and possibly shot an unspecified number of Iranian personalities including scientists working on its nuclear program.

Last week, Israel suggested it would not limit its targeted killings to Gaza, and would seek out some of Hamas's top leaders living in exile in different locations in the Middle East.

Hasan Hanizadeh, a regional affairs specialist in Tehran, recently told the ILNA news agency that he believed "Israel will not just focus on the physical elimination of leaders of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. The Zionist regime's intelligence apparatus aims to remove all the leaders of the resistance," referring to the regional militias that have declared their hostility to Israel and the West.

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