This document provides an overview of the body through history and discusses its future. It covers topics like anatomy, medicine, identity, biotechnology, and robots. The body has been studied through dissection, illustrated in artwork, performed in sports, and maintained through medicine. New technologies may allow prosthetics, brain implants, and a virtual disembodied existence. The future of the body remains uncertain but will likely involve both biological and technological enhancements.

1. Body: An Introduction
For the SMMMASH of January 2013
www.smmmash.com
piero scaruffi
Stanford Multidisciplinary Multimedia Meeting of Arts, Science and Humanities...
SMMMASH!

2. What is it?
• Mummies
• Anatomy
– Galen (Roman Empire, 2nd century AD)
– Sushruta Samhita (India, 4th c AD)
– Ibn Sina Avicenna: The Canon of Medicine
(Al-Qanun fi al-Tibb/ The Canon of Medicine"‎
(1025)

3. What is it?
• Anatomy
– Vesalius: “De Humani Corporis
Fabrica” (1543)
• Dissection of human cadavers
• Scientific foundation of anatomy
• Refutation of traditional doctrines
of Galen
• First major book with engraved
illustrations

4. What is it?
• Anatomy
– Europe, 18th century: Dramatic increase in demand for
cadavers, esp Italy
– Britain, 1832: The “Anatomy Act” to regulate
dissections
– Henry Gray: “Gray's Anatomy” (1858)
– …
– MRI (Raymond Damadian, 1972) and CAT Scanning
(Godfrey Hounsfield and Allan Cormack, 1972)

5. What is it?
• Torture
– To extort information
– To punish (collectively)
– For fun: gladiators, Inquisition, French
Revolution, serial killers, etc but also…
children

6. Where does it end?
• Richard Dawkins: The extended phenotype
– The organism alone does not have biological
relevance
– What makes sense is an open system made of
the organism and its neighbors
– The control of an organism is never complete
inside and null outside
– The very genome of a cell can be viewed as a
representation of the environment in the cell

7. Where does it end?
• James Jerome Gibson and Ecological Realism
– Meaning is located in the interaction between
living beings and the environment
– The process of perceiving is a process of
picking up information that is available in the
environment
– Information originates from the interaction
between the organism and its environment
– Information = continuous energy flow of the
environment

8. Where does it end?
• Humberto Maturana
– Living systems are units of interaction
– They cannot be understood independently of
their environment
– The relationship with the environment shapes
“autopoiesis“, the process by which an
organism continuously reorganizes its own
structure

9. Where does it come from?
• Proteins are the molecules that carry
out all the work in your body
• Proteins are made up of amino acids
(250 on average), and fold up into a
3D shape that allows it to carry out a
specific function
• Proteins fold themselves quickly and
properly into a 3D structure with no
help from any hardware
• We can’t predict from the amino
acid sequence how the
corresponding protein will fold

10. Where does it come from?
• Embryo development
– The ability of
embryonic stem cells to
differentiate into
different types of cells
with different functions
is regulated and
maintained by a
complex series of
chemical interactions

11. Meditation
• If men can't breast feed, why do they have
nipples?

12. A tool to communicate
• Body in visual arts

13. A tool to communicate
• Body in visual arts
Botticelli
Yayoi Kusama

14. A tool to communicate
Da Fo,
• Body in visual arts China
Sanjusangendo, Kyoto, Japan
Monywa, Myanmar

15. A tool to communicate
• Body in performing arts

16. Nadia Comaneci
Martina Navratilova
Pele
A tool to communicate Eddy Merckx
Haile Gebrselassie
Yang Wei
• Sport

17. Maintenance
• Medicine, pharmaceuticals,
surgery, prosthetics…
• The gym

18. Identity
• There are ~100 trillion cells in your body (of
which 100 billion neurons)
• Cells reproduce by dividing - they produce clones
of themselves (mitosis)
• Cellular longevity cap: the "Hayflick limit“:
human cells can only double ~50 times before
they stop reproducing (Leonard Hayflick & Paul
Moorhead, 1961)
• Yes, the Hayflick limit keep us from living forever

19. Identity
• Programmed cell death (apoptosis) is a
clockwork process of replacement of cells
for the good of the organism (John Kerr,
Alastair Currie & Andrew Wyllie, 1972)
• Apoptosis is the main deterrent against
cancer (“immortality” of cells would
increase the chances of cancer)

20. Identity
• Your body is younger than you think: the average
age of all the cells in an adult's body is 7 to 10
years (Jonas Frisen, 2005)
• Every year about 98% of the atoms in your body
are replaced
• The intelligence of the body: It builds itself from
1 cell into 100 trillion cells in 9 months, and it
rebuilds 98% of itself in less than a year

21. Identity
• But that you are physically someone else…
• Good news: neurons in the cerebral cortex
are not replaced - your neurons are the
oldest a cells in your body
• Bad news: many neurons die and are never
replaced, hence you have fewer neurons
than when you were a child.
• Replace a neuron with a computer chip?

22. Identity
• There are 10 times more bacterial cells in your
body than human cells (bacteria are far smaller
than human cells) - 500 species in the intestine
alone (Human Microbiome Project, 2012)
• Where they came from: your mother's uterus, your
mother’s milk, natural water, food, air…
• What they do: help your immune systems and
your digestion (“commensal bacteria”)
• “Human bodies are an assemblage of life-forms
living together” (David Relman, Stanford Univ)

23. The future of Body
• Prostheses
• Brain Implants
• Cyborg
• Virtual Reality
• Singularity
• Personal Genomics

24. Biotech
• 1990: William French Anderson performs the first
procedure of gene therapy
• 1997: Ian Wilmut clones the first mammal, the
sheep Dolly
• 2010: Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith
reprogram a bacterium's DNA
• 2012: Markus Covert simulates an entire living
organism in software (Mycoplasma Genitalium)

25. Meditation
• Is it “murder” if someone kills your clone?
You are still alive, after all.

26. Robots
• Stats

27. Robots
• Valentino Breitenberg’s “vehicles”
– Vehicle 1: a motor and a sensor
– Vehicle 2: two motors and two sensors
– Increase little by little the circuitry, and these
vehicles seem to acquire not only new skills,
but also a personality.

28. Robots
• Rod Brooks/ Rethink Robotics (2012)
– Vision to locate and grasp objects
– Can be taught to perform new tasks by moving
its arms in the desired sequence

29. Robots
• Stats
June 2013:
http://theroboticschallenge.com

30. The future of Body
• No body?
– We spend an increasing amount of time in a
disembodied virtual world of emails, websites,
social media and even e-learning

31. The future of Body
• Meditation:
– The longest living bodies on the planet have no
brain: bacteria and trees.