“It works, Scott. I can’t say it’s perfect but the controllability, the containment and the speed of nerve cell growth are all within parameters. Bone encapsulation is possible, but it’s fraught with problems and the applications are miles away. The problems with bone are worse for brain.”
“Incredible! Congratulations on that milestone, Jim! I’ve always been impressed by you, and proud. Doubly so now.” Scott reached out his left hand. Only James’ left arm was under his full command. “What’s next?”
“There are plenty of options but… it depends on how you look at it. I’m close to getting what I want. What comes after that is the question. This is Pandora’s box but you’ve always known that.” Scott studied James closely as he spoke, feeling for intent, masking, any giveaways and contradictions. His brother was difficult to read and Scott was reluctant to invade James’ privacy, which would have profound consequences for their relationship. As the CEO of a bleeding edge research company, James was skilled in self-control. Since his paralysis he had become emotionally impenetrable to many people. James had now arrived at his milestone but Scott’s objectives lay beyond and could not be achieved in the open.
“Well, I’m all ears, bro. We’ve got a couple of hours so I’d love to hear about progress. Time for a cocktail.” Scott winked and rose, heading for the drinks cabinet in their parents’ study. “Amaretto sours. It’s a bit early for anything stronger, right?”
James’ company, Resurgenesis, was at the bleeding edge of integrated stem cell therapy. Several things differentiated Resurgenesis from every other company: its overt and covert objectives; the source of its funding; its aggressive and complex integration of multiple fields of diverse technology. On the surface, James was a gifted bioengineer who was on a personal crusade to fix his own neurological damage that was the cause of his paralysis and Resurgenesis was his privately owned company whose funding streams came from diverse but tolerant sources of private and venture capital. Below the surface, the company pursued much more sophisticated but opaque objectives that had the potential to directly biomechanically augment organisms. The public objectives and story were potent enough to keep the company afloat. The potential of its secret objectives was even greater but they were not for public consumption. Resurgenesis was actively integrating the fields of stem cell research, electromagnetics, nanoengineering, material sciences, and myriad other fields to achieve all of its objectives.
The field of stem cell therapy and regeneration was fraught with technical and ethical complexities. James was trying to repair his own nerve damage and needed to successfully and reliably turn stem cells into the nerve cells and tissues that would effect repairs without causing mutations, tumours or incomplete nerve tissue structures that didn’t fully function. Typically, the methods by which any of the three kinds of stem cell were differentiated into specific cell types occurred outside the body under lab conditions, using complex biochemical and purification processes. James had worked to bring all of these processes under nanocontrol and containment, inside the human body. The result was extremely focused control over stem cell differentiation that was localised exactly around the damage site, with a massive increase in the rate of repair and reliable function, and reduction of mutation, tumours and general failure.
James had managed to create a microlab around the damage site using a graphene mesh, inside which stem cells were directly differentiated under exacting biochemical conditions. Sophisticated, precisely controlled electromagnetic fields were used to build the mesh and others were found to accelerate the entire repair process by 300%. The method effectively eliminated the purification, mutation, toxicity and repair functionality problems.
“Honestly, Scott, I’m fucking astounded by the results. I’ve been fixing endless numbers of chimps with my exact spinal and brachial nerve damage consistently for the last six months. I know… long term risk outcomes are what you will ask about next. Well, biologically the repairs are autogenous, so they’ll never be rejected. Genetic sampling shows no sign of genotoxicity or mutations in the repair site, meaning that the biochemistry of in vivo stem cell differentiation inside the mesh lab isn’t damaging the stem cells or the surrounding tissues. This is probably due to the precision of the process and of the exact control over quantity, duration and containment of the biochemicals. As for the mesh, well, nature gave us a way to safely remove it.”
Scott laughed knowingly. “It’s biodegradable. I read about that last year.” James nodded. “OK, Jim, dare I ask what’s next?”
“You know what’s next.”
“Time to put your money where your mouth is, right? Are you Alexander Shulgin or the Green Goblin?”
“Self-experimentation is totally valid on a number of levels. I’m the perfect test subject because I’m treating my own condition with a process I built for exactly this condition. My risk benefit is maximal. I know the entire process therefore I exercise fully informed consent, long term risks notwithstanding, but I knowingly become the long term human risk trial. On a company level, if I wheeled myself out on a stage then stood up and danced a jig, that’s Resurgenesis into the stratosphere. On a personal level, I would have achieved my life’s ambition by fixing myself.”
“Shiiiiit, bro! I think this calls for a celebration! Amaretto sours ain’t gonna cut this! High motherfuckin’ five!” James reached out his functioning hand for Scott to slap.
“Amen to that. I’ll have a dirty Martini.”
Aside from the direct implications of James’ breakthrough on medical treatment, there were profound implications for Resurgenesis’ subterfuge work. Scott chose to delay that conversation until James chose to raise it, which took until the Martinis had been drained.
“Do you want to hear about bone encapsulation?”
“Sure, if you want to tell me now.”
“I’ve managed to encapsulate bone, in vivo, in a graphene sheath up to 5 atomic layers thick. This is done by mapping the bone, 3D printing the bone sheath, breaking it back down to nanoparticles then injecting it and using the fields to manipulate it around the bone and trigger mesh self assembly. 3D printing the sheath gives us ‘dose control’ so we use exactly the right amount of graphene for each layer of the sheath. There’s multiple problems. If the sheath is impermeable, you’re separating the bone from all other tissues and destroying its ability to biologically interact at its external face. This is necrotic in the medium to long run. We can make it porous to reduce this problem and change the structural design in other ways, but ultimately tissue attaches to bone and if you fuck with that, you are fucking with musculoskeletal integrity. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should, right? So, there’s the question of what you’re trying to achieve. If we can make a biocompatible graphene alloy - titanium carbide, for example - this might bond with the bone via the titanium and so you need less sheath via larger pores. But this doesn’t address the purpose of encapsulation. If the Army wants boosted skeletal strength, you may not get it from external encapsulation because you’ve got other musculoskeletal and electromagnetic trade-offs. Plus, there’s going to be a limit to the thickness of the sheath combined with the strength properties of the sheath material. 5 layers of titanium carbide sheath might not deliver much strength gain for the trade-offs. Then, you’ve got the electromagnetic effects. If your skeleton is encapsulated, you can be directly messed with via external EM fields, plus it seems to have an effect on inherent bodily EM fields and signals. It’s basically a mess. Who wants troops that are detectable on RADAR?”
“OK, well my first thoughts are that this is a military industrial complex gravy train. You tell the Army about the idea of skeletal augmentation and get a grant. Then you trickle out a bit of progress, then you hit a problem, get more cash, make a bit more progress and so on. Then you eventually hit an insurmountable problem and the funding stops and the Army bins the whole thing. You walk off with most of the cash and you stop the Army at the point you want. If you go public with the stem cell progress, a lot of that mechanism overlaps with encapsulation - the manipulation of graphene using fields. If you’ve wrapped all that up in patents, you own all of the mechanisms from the start so they can’t take anything away from you even if they provide grants, assuming the contracts are right.”
“Yeah, yeah, OK. But two things: if Endogenous Regeneration of nerve and other tissue works, I won’t need Army grant money and what the fuck is the purpose of bone encapsulation?”
“It was a way for you to get money from the government in case you needed a funding stream, without having cracked ER. If you found a use or purpose along the way, all the better. Actually… I’ve just had another idea!”
“Sweet Jesus. Go on, I’ve got to hear this.”
“Forget graphene. Encapsulate the bone with a porous titanium matrix, then use the stem cell process to encapsulate the whole bone again with more bone. Effectively, you’d be building titanium reinforced bone on top of the existing skeleton. It won’t necessarily improve joint strength though.”
“Fucking hell, Scott. You’re in the wrong game.”
“Hey, we’re a team, bro. I just get some ideas and you try them out. Now, what’s the state of play with any brain work?”
“Long story short, theoretically, if you can design a stable 3D structure, you could build it either inside or outside the dura mater in similar fashion using the fields. But, what’s the purpose? Such a structure won’t reinforce anything. The obvious purposes are an interface, an EM shield like a Faraday cage, or a scaffold for something else. Oh, I get it. Build a biocompatible matrix inside the dura then it becomes a neuron scaffold. Then you grow more neurons on that scaffold and hope you’ve upgraded the brain somehow. A second cerebral cortex, maybe memory, maybe something else.”
“Yeah, I think the first and last ideas are most valuable. Not sure about the Faraday cage thing.”
“Big testing and ethics problems though. Animal testing won’t help you determine whether a neuron scaffold and extra neurons does anything good because you don’t speak chimp. You’ll only be able to see obvious negative effects. The ethics of necessary human testing for this are off the charts, really. If the interface matrix isn’t directly externally connected, you rely on some form of induction…” James rolled his eyes. “I can already think of a way you could externally connect it, but bald guys wouldn’t like the look, trust me.”
“Here’s what I’m thinking: memory is one possibility; functional capacity is another; replacement of damaged brain areas is another, where stem cell treatment can’t be achieved - you just offload that brain function to the new neurons. If you wanted it to be an interface or memory or functional, the question of how you connect the matrix or neurons to brain structures via reliable pathways without damaging the brain is a whole other question.”
“This doesn’t sound like the sort of military industrial gravy train that I want to be part of. The Army doesn’t want extra brainy recruits. Oh, and it’ll be super fragile. If the brain moves within the skull, it’ll collide with the matrix and neurons. Shockwaves and impacts are par for the course in the military.”
“Yep, this is not for the Army. I’m trying to help my friend Thomas.”
Gives “Put on one’s thinking cap” a visual and unlimited possibilities. And I was thinking I could use my own personal “cloud” to store my memory overload.