Post by Tirion Seymour

There will be an exciting addition to the blog in coming weeks. The writer Pippa Goldschmidt, currently a visiting fellow here at the Science, Technology and Innovation Studies department at the University of Edinburgh, has kindly agreed to write a short story for the blog around medical devices.

Keep an eye out for Pippa’s work. You can check out her website and her previous work at http://www.pippagoldschmidt.co.uk/

By Tirion Seymour

Gill and I are lucky enough to be attending a workshop this week in the Brocher Institute on Lake Geneva based all around the topic of 3D bioprinting. This workshop brings together academics from science and social science interested in different aspects of this emerging technology, including current scientific developments, and the potential ethical and legal issues that might arise:
http://www.brocher.ch/en/events/223/3d-bioprinting-a-new-medical-and-ethical-frontier

We will be tweeting while in Geneva, and reporting back after, so keep an eye on us here and at our Twitter presence@AMandMe .

So I am presenting the One-Stop-Human-Body-Shop at CODI in August (excited? nervous!). See here if you want to buy a ticket  https://edinburghfestival.list.co.uk/event/578417-one-stop-body-shop/. Meantime in order to get the gist of the dangerous idea I will be proposing for my OSHBS here is a poem. Its based on my understanding that the last word in most of the sentences needs to rhyme. Yeah. I know. Wont be giving up the day job. Here goes:

‘Pigs and machines” v1

In a future I can see,

A special way of being human for you and me,

You see the longer we live for, the more we are going to need,

Organs that are broken and diseased, indeed

All of the things in the visceral space we know nothing about

Until we know these parts are things

We simply can’t do without.

Prosthetics are supports for the limbs and joint,

But they cannot replace whole organs,

not at this point,

Organ replacement needs human donors,

Donating body parts after brain dead,

Apart that is,

From their head.

Pigs – well there’s load of them for a bacon butty

So there is no need to make a fuss

Like a vegetarian,

Using parts of them to replace parts of us.

Indeed, spare heart valves can be porcine

And no one cares whether this is ethically “out of line”,

The next step then is a pig heart – and heh! its all fine.

But what is that you say?

You might not feel that great

Using for organ replacement an animal that you ate

It might make you want to oink, and roll in the mud,

Can you imagine the state?

Of identity befuddles with pig-human muddles.

Try instead a machine – much cleaner than an animal host,

Really the benefits of IT has so much more to boast,

Turning a person into a cyborg half human and half machine

Would make us all much more keen,

To live a hybrid life in-between

The question of where metal stops and I begin…..

A small detail to be ignored at the cost of a ‘what-might-have-been’.

Friday 21st April

So yesterday the In/Valid Youth squad descended on Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and got to meet Debbie (Head of Cardiac Physiology). She spent time with us talking about implantable cardiac defibrillators and showing us some demo ICD systems. We took some photos so Ali can take them back to show the young people; it’s really inspiring.   For some reason I have ‘zips’ written in my notes….

Gill Haddow

Friday 8th April 2016

I don’t get out very often (as most people I know will agree with) but last night I went to an event at the Edinburgh International Science Festival called ‘Level Up Human’.  Simon Watt (President of the ‘Ugly Animal preservation society’ http://uglyanimalsoc.com/ ) does a fantastic job of helping the panellists and audience think about what it would mean if ‘evolution was prodded;’ that is, with a little bit of extra help from xeno- or cybernetic enhancements.  It was a light-hearted look and so the two panellists Eli Sheppard – studying brain-computer interfaces and automatic speech recognition (http://www.edinburgh-robotics.org/students/eli-sheppard and Michael Wheeler,  a philosopher, http://www.hdc.ed.ac.uk/prof-michael-wheeler were invited to pitch to Gemma Flynn comedienne and criminologist (http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/people/gemmaflynn) so that she could choose her favourite ‘level up human’.

Despite the winner being a language chip for pets; other proposals included night vision (for environmental reasons); implantable nano-bots; additional limb prosthetics to reach the items on the supermarket top-shelf or synaesthesia-type vests so that you can feel what is being said to you.  I enjoyed the evening; what was not to like?  It was fun, light-hearted and not to be taken too seriously although issues such as gender inequality, data security, consent, interpretation and translation, and the Turing test were actually all in there.

Tweet your ideas for levelling up to @LevelUpHuman

Post by Tirion Seymour

The In-valid You/th Project is part of a wider project called ‘Animal, Mechanical and Me: the Search for Replaceable Hearts’, which looks at the different ways that we might repair or replace parts of the human body: https://animalmechanicalandme.com/. The young people involved in making the film for In-valid You/th will be thinking about this topic and the experiences of people who live with mechanical, donated or artificial body parts or limbs.

The last few years have seen many scientific advances when it comes to the ability to make therapeutic interventions that are tailored to individual patients. One of the areas of technology that is getting lots of media attention with relation to medical uses is the area of 3D printing. This involves using machines that often look like advanced versions of ‘2D’ printers that are currently used to print words onto paper.

In 3D printing, a computer moves a printer arm in a precise way to build a model layer by layer following a specific design made on computer modelling software. For many objects that can be ‘3D printed’, the material being used in the place of ‘ink’ is often a form of plastic which hardens as it is layered. In non-medical areas, 3D printing has been used to create everything from toys, to food, to houses. The video below features some very interesting examples of 3d printed objects:

In the medical world, there are already many areas in which 3D printing using plastics and similar materials is already having an impact. One area has been in the development of usable prosthetic hands using this technology. A company called Enabling the Future has built a community of volunteers across the world interested in helping develop these tailor-made prosthetic hands for people in need of them, at a fraction of previous costs: http://enablingthefuture.org/about/.

Other uses of 3d printing for medicine have included the first skull transplant using a 3d printed skull: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/26/3d-printed-skull-transplant-utrecht-_n_5036665.html. 3D printed objects have also helped the medical process in other ways, such as through the printing of detailed 3D models of parts of the body for educational purposes http://3dprint.nih.gov/about/medicine.

While the printing of plastic or synthetic medical devices is one application for this 3D printing technology, there is also research underway about the feasibility of printing biological human tissues such as cells and even the fabrication of whole printed organs. A BBC article published in just February of this year talked about the first 3D ‘printing’ of body parts in a lab in the USA: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-35581454 Scientists have so far had success in growing these tissues in the lab, but are not yet at the stage of implanting these living tissues into a person. Researchers across the globe are exploring how we might get closer to this goal of producing tissue and organs usable for transplant. Scientists Dr Shu and Dr Faulkner-Jones here in Edinburgh at Heriot Watt University have themselves been hailed as ‘bioprinting pioneers’. They have had success in developing human organ bioprinting techniques using special gels made of synthetic DNA: http://www.scotsman.com/news/3d-printing-of-organs-for-transplant-step-closer-1-3686872. The social scientists Dr Gill Haddow and Dr Niki Vermeulen, along with myself, are working with them to understand the development and implications of this emerging technology.

Much of the research discussed above might seem closer to sci-fi ideas to some, but is already being developed in labs around the world. This will give the In-valid Youth team lots to think about when considering the different types of implants or prosthetics from a range of sources. Will we get to a stage where we can ‘mould’ our own mechanical or plastic limbs or organs? How would we want these to look if we could? If we could ‘grow’ what we needed out of human tissue, what would this be like for patients? In future weeks we will be exploring many issues around these kind of questions.

We will be returning to the topic of 3D printing and bioprinting in this blog in future weeks. In the meantime, if you want to listen to more on this topic, BBC Radio 4 last year produced a short radio documentary on ‘bioprinting’, accessible at the following link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05pn3t4

In last week’s post (https://animalmechanicalandme.com/2016/03/10/the-sounds-of-the-in-valid-youth-project/) we introduced an initial track to set the scene for the In-Valid Youth film project that had been put together by the sound artist on our team, Patrick Walker.

You can find out more about Patrick and the rest of the team here: https://animalmechanicalandme.com/in-valid-youth/meet-the-in-valid-youth-project-team/

Below, Patrick shares some insights on the fascinating process behind developing such a track:

Initial experiments – Patrick Walker

After setting up the studio to work on this project, I decided to look at some toys and little gadgets, the smaller the better! The first thing I picked up is a tiny music box which when you turn the handle plays the theme tune for the pink panther. For such a small machine, it produces a very haunting tone which is delicate yet resonant.

It’s quite a fiddly little device to record, but after experimenting with different positions, I found an angle where I could turn the handle without interrupting the sound of the recording.

After recording the sounds, these were split into individual tones, the eventual goal will be to make a virtual instrument, based on the tones of the music box, allowing us to create new melodies from scratch but for now, I contented myself with simply selecting some notes which could be recombined to make a simple melody.

I did not allow myself too much time to do this. At this stage, the last thing I want to do is get too caught up in creating whole tracks so as soon as I had something which resembled a loop-able melody, I decided to move on to other sounds.I started by dialing up some old things I had recorded, a toy robot – again perfect for the theme of cyborgs and how to make them more friendly.

After a while, I’d recorded and selected a number of sounds, mostly clockwork whirring and clicking. These sounds were then combined with previous sounds that I had used for the last Wellcome Trust project along with selected sounds from my archive – Hard Drives Booting up, Typing and the sounds of old dot-matrix printers (which were used for the introduction to our final video).

This gave me a range of appropriate sounds which I then programmed into one long section, adding little micro-edits here and there, panning the sounds around and experimenting with the use of a soft chorus plug-in to try and make the sounds a little less harsh and a bit more modulated sounding (in turn becoming more humanised and less rigid).

This is something which again I started to play around with concept-wise, not only thinking about how to make machines sound more humanised but how to go the other way – and for this reason there were a couple of little squelchy sounds which were edited in such a way that they ended up sounding more like intricate motors. I then overlaid some of the machine textures with the initial sound of the music box and then added some white noise and very simple textures to fill in some spaces.

The final sketch I have created is very simple, and at the same time, authentic in the sense that it’s all made from delicate little machines as opposed to becoming more synthesised, arranged or produced. Although it’s designed to be a showcase of sounds, I feel that it does retain some musical value, the tones are very haunting.

Today we bring you an early sound ‘mood board’ by our sound artist in the In-valid You/th project team Patrick Walker – https://animalmechanicalandme.com/in-valid-youth/meet-the-in-valid-youth-project-team/

Other examples of work by Patrick and others for North Edinburgh Arts are available here: https://soundcloud.com/north-edinburgh-arts

Below are some thoughts from Patrick about beginning work for this project:

Inspiration and initial creative thoughts – Patrick Walker

For this project I intend on a slightly different approach from the last projects that I have worked on. As opposed to going in deep with mood pieces and lots of different musical ideas right from the off, this time I’m focusing on micro-detail and creating a sound-palette to work with.

Wauvenfold -Ji-Gad

Tirion Seymour

Today we had a meeting of most of the creative team involved in the project (check out the ‘Meet the In-Valid You/th project team’ page to get to know us all.)

Everyone was excited to get going with the project. We were keen to set something up where young people could really play around with the ideas, and explore the different ideas around body part replacement and human enhancement. Films from the sci-fi genre often show either super-humans/ powerful human/machine hybrids, or characters outcast from society. In our project we will change the focus to what might be the actual realities of living as a cyborg?

There is also the technical side of the project that will involve the young people (and some of the less creative ‘academic’ members of the team!) having a complete introduction to ideas around film-making, animation, sound, story-writing and so on. This chance for young people involved to develop skills and confidence is a really important part of the project, and something that we will achieve using the well-established structures of the Muirhouse Youth Development Group, Screen Education Edinburgh and the Zoom Club. We will also bring in the creative talents of our animation and sound artists, who are already developing some ideas around the feel of the project’s theme.

The team are also hoping to get some inspiration through visiting some medical scientists at the cutting edge of regenerative medicine. There is a team based in Heriot Watt University involved with exciting activities involving the printing of cells using 3D printing techniques. Other scientists in the local area are involved with the development of mechanical devices to repair heart valves. Speaking to such experts, we hope, will give us a taster of the possibilities of biomedical technology that will help in firing our imaginations in developing the film.

We will be continuing to chart our progress throughout the whole project, so keep an eye out for us here and on Twitter!