Swallowable Perfume

Body architect Lucy McRae is taking her extraordinary transhumanist aesthetic from low-tech to high-tech as she is currently collaborating with Harvard scientist Sheref Mansy to create a pill that acts as a perfume. This pill would contain cells that are engineered to be recognized by the human body as fat cells, and absorbed in a similar way. As these cells are broken down then, they could release certain molecules that come out through the skin and act as a perfume.

Lucy has come up with an interesting teaser to wet our appetites, which you can see below.



I'm not so sure that the appetite for these pills will be big though, from a commercial perspective. Of course there are the early adopters who like to show off or provoke the people around them by showing them something new and radical. These are the important people through which a new technology can start evolving, as Kevin Kelly also explains in his book 'What Technology Wants.' But for the larger public, there would probably be more to these pills than just acting like a perfume. One major selling point where a pill may take over from spray-on perfume is that the scent may last for several days, but even then I think the threshold may be too high to start ingesting things.

What is happening here seems to be the same as happened to other major technological breakthroughs like the automobile, movies, and radio. They started off as literal replacements of the previous technology, but in a new embodiment. The first cars were designed like horse carriages, and the first movies were made in the same way as written stories and theater plays. It was only later that the larger inherent potential of the new medium revealed itself, and people started to align themselves with what almost seems like the intention of the technology. The technology then ends up not just a more efficient replacement of the former technology, but bringing about an entire shift of behavior and mindset in its users.

This will probably be the same for these new intimate technologies that enter the human body. The mindshift this will bring about is that the body is just another object that we can manipulate. It is not us, our identification with it that started in early age was too limited a conception, it was an illusion keeping us blinded from the larger whole. Now, this technology opens us up towards this mindset, as we can continually alter our own body to the needs of the situation, or simply to play around with it. The swallowable perfume pill will probably not remain just a perfume, but integrate more functionalities inherent to the capabilities of the pill-form. Maybe it will turn out to become an 'experience-pill', where different pills are created to generate different sensory and mental experiences. Next to fragrance molecules, it might also contain skin and hair colorants, or neurotransmitters to generate a certain subjective experience. Who knows what will happen. But that the next major technological shift is coming is certain.

A car that is grown instead of assembled

The chance that you are anywhere near L.A. lies probably near 0.5%, but if you are, and like terrific concepts, go to the Los Angeles Auto Show. It is there that you can see the result of a design competition for a future car below a thousand pounds of weight, including some radical but mind-opening concepts.

For once, innovative thinking goes into changing the entire means of production of cars, and draws its inspiration from biology. The Mercedes Benz Biome concept is one of the most extreme ones I have seen, if not the most extreme. It imagines a car that is grown out of one module, submerged in a `Nursery´ where cars are developed in a matter of days. Like the human body, the car would essentially be one integrated system, with except for probably the wheels, no separate parts. The car has no engine. Power deliverance is biologically integrated into the system by having it feed on a nectar that is synthesized from plants and from solar energy. This way, we make technology dependent, or in fact an intrinsic part of, our natural environment, so we have to take care of it very well. It´s a fair idea to me that we do not only create economic, human value out of nature, but that also we create natural value out of human endeavors.




Other almost equally far-out concepts are the Toyota Nori, made out of seaweed and carbon fiber, the bionic Nissan iV, and the Smart 454 that is produced by knitting robots. Is that hinting at an answer to how an aging population can still add value? Personally, I will be quite excited to see either one of these concepts on the road in my lifetime.

the first steps of regrowing the human body

Anthony Atala explains at TED how the first steps are taken to regrow human tissue, his ultimate goal being to regrow entire body parts, and who knows, maybe entirely new body parts too. Watch if you are interested in engineering your body, tissue conditioning outside of the body, baking organs in an oven, and inkjet printing a heart in 40 minutes.

Honey can you bring me a beer, and print out my new heart for tomorrow please?

WIRED SCIENCE | Body Builders | PBS
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So in some years from now, we'll be able to recreate our own body using our own inkjet printer.

growing someone else's organs

The realization of the idea of having a body that you can change almost instantly in whatever way you like is coming ever nearer. It is now possible to create human organs inside a laboratory or inside an other animal, hence creating a kind of hybrid species, or an extreme form of parasitism. Take a look at this video:

human organs made to order

In this time where boundary after boundary is being blurred, dichotomy after dichotomy being dissolved, we need to start reflecting in a forward direction, see that understanding how everything is becoming united lies in the understanding and feeling that it already is united, that nothing really changes because all there is is one big cosmic process of which the understanding lies not in the modelling of it, the theorizing, the creation of mental images, but in the resonance with the direct experience and optimization of its beauty as perceived by you. A fundamental realization, the ultimate dichotomy we need to overcome, is that of seeing that life is the same as death, that our classification of things being living as opposed to dead is a mere concept, that there is a fundamental beauty transcending this dichotomy too, and that this transcendence is a critical point towards a state of being where we are enlightened with our minds, and later also with our bodies with which we will have lost identification completely, seeing them both as objects and as subjects so also this dichotomy disappears, making way for a supreme, holistic, invulnerably blissful mode of being.

windmill skin

Where once our technologies used to be mechanical and centralized, after the invention of electricity the form of products started to be less and less a factor in their functioning. In fact you could even say that we live in a dualistic world, where form and information have become separated. The information surrounding us that we call physical is mostly distinct from the information we say belongs to the mental realm.

With the advent of bio-engineering and nano-manufacturing, this is changing. The material physicality will more and more be able to match the patterns of the electronic; complex, parallel, minuscule and fast. A concept depicting beautifully how new technologies will mean a paradigmatic shift in our manufacturing processes and interaction with technologies is Nano Vent-Skin, by designer Agustin Otegui. He designed a building with an outer layer that can generate energy from the sun and the wind. This skin would consist of nano-scale elements that transform sunlight into electrical energy, and moreover contains tiny turbines that rotate when the wind blows against them, subsequently conferring this energy to micro-organisms that generate electrical energy. The structure also contains nano-wires that can send information about potential failures to a central system, that in turn sends new micro-organisms, so the system can regenerate through self-assembly.

This way, we can integrate functionalities holistically into a structure that hence becomes more like a biological organism than a 'piece of technology'. It all sounds too good to be true.

Here is a link to the website of the project: NanoVentSkin