July 29, 2014 • 22 mins
Can science give us the wings we've always envied in birds? Can plastic surgery elevate us to a higher human form? In this episode, Robert and Julie discuss Joseph Rosen's posthuman philosophy and ponder what we'd have to do to transform arms into wings. Learn all about it in this classic episode of STBYM.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, they're welcome to stuff to Blow
your Mind. I'm Julie Douglas, and this week Robert Lamb
is out getting his dendrites cleaned, so we thought, hey,
why not run an encore presentation of one of our
(00:23):
favorite episodes, The Wind Beneath My Surgical Wings. It is
a nice, juicy topic that delves into the transcendence of
our limited biological capabilities with a dream of light, of course,
So enough preamble, hope that you enjoyed. Julie, who is
not dream of either having wings themselves or just dreams
(00:47):
of winged humanoids flying about? I mean, it's the stuff
of just ancient myth, the stuff of fantasy, the stuff
of religion, the stuff of of art. It's there's something
just irresistible about the idea of a human with the
wings of a bird, or even the wings of a bat. Yeah.
The desire to fly, I think is pretty universal. Even
(01:08):
Dorothy from Oz right somewhere of the rainbow, bluebirds fly,
birds fly over the rainbow? Why then, oh, why can't
I go to singing the rest? Okay? But yeah, one
example that always comes to my mind. I mean there
are a lot of aiconic ones. Obviously, the myth of
Acarus and dayalists big the idea that you know, they
(01:30):
built these wings and then they fly too close to
the sun and then they plummet. It's just a fantastic
metaphor for so much in human endeavor, human technology, um,
humans reaching to achieve things that they were not necessarily
biologically gifted with, but via their intelligence, are in a
sense genetically gifted with. I also think back to a
(01:50):
book called Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves, British
author who famously wrote I Claudius Um. It's probably what
he's most known for, but this was his biography and
he was talking about his um, his service in World
War One. There's a bit about mountain climbing in that
as well, because he was one of these just really
adventurous dudes. He'd go out with his his pals and
they would scale these these towering cliffs. And there was
(02:11):
one point where he's talking about, you know, clinging to
the side of this this rock face. Uh, you know,
pretty to someone like me who is not a mountain
climber and will never mountain climb terrifying idea, just to
imagine myself clinging to the side of a mountain face.
But he was unfazed by it. He was an adventurous dude,
had bravery in just a natural inclination for this kind
of thing. But one time he said, they're scaling, They're
(02:35):
they're a little tired clinging to the side, and a
bird like sort of float flies by, but given the
altitude and the wind kind of floats out there to
the side, and and he mentioned he was just so
unnerving the idea that it was like the bird was
was coaxing him into letting go, as if there was
another way, as if he could fly, which which also
(02:55):
gets into these weird impulses we sometimes have of almost
like off destructive impulses. The the idea that, oh, if
I get too close to the edge of the building,
I might jump off. I was to say, because I
have that. So even if I'm say, like a fairly
like simple structure like a mall on the second floor,
I don't want to go to the edge because I
feel as if I'm going to plunge off. So it's
kind of interesting that there's this idea of him, you know,
(03:19):
clinging to the side and this bird sort of mocking
him to the limits of his own morphology, right, like, hey, dude,
you're never gonna have wings. You might think you're this
cool that you can, you know, rock climb up here,
but you know, let me just buzz around you and
remind you of this. Yeah. It's like, in a sense,
we see the birds flying and we we ended it,
(03:39):
and we feel to a certain extent like it's our
birthright because vast empty air, vast heights are terrifying, because
we know that that's a limitation to us. We know
that those are those are heights that we cannot really
ascend to. Yes, we you know, we we have airplanes
at our disposal. We have various, uh methods of flight
and gliding and skydiving and every think, but they're all
(04:00):
kind of cheap imitations of the natural biological gifts of
a bird. That's right, We're greedy. We want it for ourselves.
It's not enough that we have created flight in the
form of jets and planes and uh, you know, various
other modes of transportation. So the question and the question
for this podcast is is it would it be possible?
Is it really possible that we could somehow create wings
(04:25):
for ourselves? Um? And I'm not talking just like strapping
on wings, because there are wingsuits which are phenomenal. There's
an article on them on how stuff works dot com
that I wrote, how wingsuits work, and it's phenomenal technology
and the people who use them are insane and also
highly skilled. Um. But yeah, could we actually have biological
(04:46):
wings that are a part of us, that are an
extension of us? Right? Could we gain our bodies in
our minds in order to actually have this be a
part of our own morphology? And why not? Right? Because
we've talked about this, this is this is not so crazy, uman,
it's absolutely out there. But there are so many different
ways that we have augmented our reality in our physicality
that uh, no doubt one day this could be a possibility. Yeah,
(05:10):
I mean you'd, like you said, there's so many things
we do to our bodies. Anyway, we went into this,
We've got into this a number of times. We talked
about posthumanism quite a bit, and and cybernetics. We did
an episode called the Werewolf Principle um, which probably wasn't
the best title in the world because it doesn't have
anything to do with werewolves. It's about that has to
do with a sci fi story I was reading at
the time, but the idea that we change our but
(05:31):
potentially we change our bodies in order to explore space
and to explore the world. Instead of attempting to bring
a portion of our atmosphere in our environment with us,
uh and and and our limitations with us, we instead
alter ourselves. And certainly we make a lot of augmentations
to ourselves anyway, so many things such as glasses, contacts,
(05:53):
various biomedical equipment is added to the human body. We're
making these changes anyway, for things that are generally thought
of it is necessary. Um. And then we also make
changes that are cosmetic in nature. But what about wings? Well, yeah,
And in order to actually really get to the meat
of this conversation, we have to bring up Dr Joseph Rosen.
(06:14):
He is a Dartmouth plastic surgeon and reconstructive surgeon. And
it's um, I think would be pretty mild just to
say that he's a futurist. Yeah, And he's a definitely
a futurist, definitely a post humanist and a he's he's
one of these amazing individuals that if you look him up.
You'll find various articles about his work UM, but in particular,
(06:36):
there was a two thousand and one UM interview slash
profile in Harper's Magazine by Lawrence Slater. Highly recommend anyone
read who's fascinated by this topic. It was called Dr Dadalus.
It's an excellent article. Actually, the way that it was
written reminded me of Mary Rich in the way that
she approaches her material, So it is well worth checking out. Alright,
(06:58):
we're gonna take a quick break, stay tuned for more
so with Rosen here's the thing he is. He's totally
steeped in his profession and he takes on something like
five hundred patients a year to do mostly reconstructive surgery,
but some plastic surgery as well. I mean, this is
(07:18):
someone he was an absolute expert in his field. He is, uh,
he's steeped in the practicalities of it, but he is
also a big thinker. Yeah, he's a plastic surgeon, but
but not a mirror cosmetic surgeon. And the article in
question went into sort of around the turn of the
millennium where plastic surgery stood about the idea that it's
(07:39):
sort of sort of in this place where it's often
looked down on um by people outside of the medical profession,
and sometimes within the medical profession may be seen as
as a as a lesser medical practice, which of course
is not not the case when you look at the
the the non cosmetic applications, when you're looking at people
(08:01):
who have undergone a serious injury, particularly facial injuries for instance,
and finding ways to correct that and and bring a
certain amount of normalcy back to that person's life. When
you look at cleft palate and cleft lip reconstruction, yeah,
I mean, there's there's a lot that goes on in
plastic surgery that is not breast jobs. But but that
tends to be sort of the the easy association that
(08:23):
people make when you just hear plastic surgeon on TV. Oh,
she went to the plastic surgeon's office. That means she
had something superficial and unnecessary done. But plastic surgery is
bigger than that, much bigger. And uh, you know, as
you could said that he has he's worked on reconstructing
faces um winded warrior winded warrior causes, right, So we're
talking about catastrophic poly trauma. So if you're in if
(08:47):
you're a soldier and you have undergone this trauma, what
that means is that you have so many various problems
going on um that you can't necessarily find a solution
to all of those injuries. But what Dr Rosen can
do is he can fashion a new knows um. But
he can't restore that soldier's sense of smell, he can
at least give some sort of normalcy back to that person.
(09:09):
So that's a lot of work that he does there. Um.
He also is working on healthcare reform that this is
really interesting. This is in the form of cybercare. He
argues that our hospital system is just uh, you know,
an outgrowth of the Civil War. In other words, it
was set up to administer to a huge amount of
massive casualties. And he's saying that that's just not the
(09:31):
way that the world works today. And he is helping
to revamp the national healthcare system Vietnam using cell phones
and laptops to link clinics, hospitals, and rural physicians. So
this guy is a renaissance man. And like I said,
he's a big thinker, which is extended over to his
ideas about what we can do in terms of improving,
(09:53):
not just augmenting, I should say, but really heightening our
senses as a human being, in augmenting our experiences as
a human being. Yeah, he's an amazing thinker. And then
he really he's the cliche, you know, thinks outside the box.
He is the he's a bit of a rebel. He's
he's questioning authority and questioning sort of normal approaches to
things all the time. And you see that with with
(10:16):
with various gifted minds out there. You know, it's it's
not merely that they work really hard and are just
geniuses within the confines of their profession, within the confines
of their their role in society, but they actually think
beyond the typical constraints. It's true. Like, for instance, he
says that a salamander can regenerate an arm in forty
(10:38):
two days, So he says, somewhere in your own genome
that ability still exists. He says, why can't we go
ahead and find that figure that out so that we
can regenerate a whole limb for ourselves. And he says,
we can do it. It's just a matter of you know,
twenty to fifty years to coming up with that. Um
so you know, he also looks at soldiers again who
have had those catastrophic A traumas, and he says, why
(11:02):
can't we use a whole body prophesis, like you know
that's made out an exo skeleton. Um. You know, obviously
cost is a factor in perception because it's not to
it's not too normal. They see someone trapesing through a hallway,
who's you know, in case in excess skeleton. But he's
got these ideas of how to make it work for
humans and how to, as I said, augment the experiences
(11:25):
for people and make it better. Yeah, he wants to
make it better. He wants to fix it. You see
that both in in healthcare reform, as you mentioned, but
also but more importantly, in the human body. There's a
great quote from that article that I think really sums
up a lot about Rosen's outlook on not just plastic
surgery but life. He says, you know, I'm really proud
of that face. And he's talking about some facial reconstruction
(11:45):
that he performed on an individual who lost a lot
of it to cancer. Because I'm really proud of that face.
I didn't follow any protocol. There's no textbook to tell
you how to fashion of face eaten away by cancer.
Plastic surgery is the intersection of art and science. It's
the intersection of the surgeons imagination with human flesh, and
human flesh is infinitely malleable. People say cosmetic surgery is
(12:06):
frivolous boobs and noses, but it's so much more than that.
The body is a conduit for the soul, at least
historically speaking. When you change what you look like, you
change who you are so well, and it doesn't that
kind of speak to a lot of what we've talked
about in the podcast in terms of studies having to
do with psychology the whole, like you you know, take
(12:27):
it till you make it, or you know, if you
assume a powerful posture, then your body responds physiologically, So
you know, a lot of what he's saying is is
there's a truth there that if you can change yourself
in that way, then certainly physically and mentally, things will follow. Okay,
So let's get into some of his really fun post
(12:48):
humanist dreams for the human body. Yeah, because he again
he's all about making the changes necessary, arguably necessary in
some cases to make us better beings. For instance, ocular
implants new rods for the eyes to give a super
binocular vision. UM soldier implants like, this is great a
nose flash light because you know your nose is just there.
(13:12):
You know it's important for breathing. But you know optics
to optic technology grow smaller and smaller, why not have
a light up there? Imagine you sort of you know,
you click one nostril and then a light shines out
the other nose and you it's perfect for reading. It's
a great idea. Really, now, I can just see eight
year old really having fun with that when they blow
their nose. Yeah. Yeah, like light flashes, like really bright
(13:35):
light every time you sneeze. But it's stuff like that,
like when you say it, like we're even laughing because
it's ridiculous. It's so different from what we're used to.
But Rosen is the kind of guy that says, no,
why are you laughing? Because this is actually really practical. Right,
he's saying, in a military sense, why wouldn't you want
your soldier outfitted with us? Right? Because it makes perfect sense. Um.
Cochlear implants, of course, are already in existence, but what
(13:56):
he is suggesting is that you have cochlear implants that
the hands are hearing, essentially giving us far superior auditory powers,
so we'd be able to detect things miles away, again
becoming superhuman. And uh, because, as we've mentioned before, the
senses that we used to perceive the world are in
varying degrees limited or extremely limited even compared to other animals. Um.
(14:20):
You know, it's like the mantis shrimp, which sees and
all this vast array of colors that we can scarcely imagine.
We've talked about when we're talking about bats, how it's
almost impossible for us to really imagine what it's like
to to quote unquote see the world as a bat.
So instead of being limited by this this world that
we've painted in just a few different colors, he's saying,
(14:42):
why don't we paint the world in more colors? Why
don't we update our our machinery so that we can
paint a more brilliant world. You know, that's an interesting
concept to think about when, especially in the U. I
guess in the context of how we are bombard did
with stimuli these days, and we've talked about this and
(15:03):
the multitasking episodes quite a bit, so I wonder if
if doing that, if sort of upping your experience of
that stimuli would would make sense in this sort of
new world where you're getting thrown things all the time.
So if you can, other words, if you can kind
of tune in a little bit more, things are a
little bit louder, things are a little bit brighter. Does
(15:24):
that make sense for the modern human mind? Yeah, sort
of opening ended question there, But I wanted to point
out that Rosen is also a fan of equo location
implants and fins fins, Yes, why not? I mean it
comes down to a lot of you know, biomimicry. If
you want to see how to swim, look for it.
Look at an animal that has evolved over the course
(15:45):
of millions and millions of years to be an incredible swimmer.
That's what you need to do. And that we do
that to a certain extent, and looking at the shark
skin and then adapting that into swimwear. Um. But he's
talking about taking it even even further, and of course
his pet project, his pet thought experiment. I guess you
could say surgical wings, because this is really where his
(16:06):
engineering brain meets his his his reconstructive brain and brushes
up against the brain of mad science for sure, But
it is important to think of it as as a
thought experiment. Um, he is not trying to do this
or anything that we know of, uh, but but it
is a great thought experience for just what are you know?
What are we willing to do? What can we do?
(16:26):
And why are we why do we feel weird about
going into some of these areas? Like for instance, so
one of the examples he brings up just in plastic surgery,
and one, I mean he brings it up. He brings
it up at conferences because this this dude has been
an amazing figure in plastic surgery. He travels all over
the world, speaks a big conferences. He's an influential character.
So he's not just his voice out on the fringe.
(16:48):
He's a leading figure. Um, So he brought up for instance,
you have a man walks into the surgeon's office and
he has an extra thumb. Um, he's then he is
a doctor is allowed to take that thumb off. But
but if a person comes in and says, hey, I
would like an extra thumb, then he can't. He can't
do that. That's that's just completely crazy. And then nobody
(17:09):
adds extra thumbs to people. But he was saying that
he there was one person that who was I would
give a waiter server and had an extra thumb and
it actually aided that person in their job. This is
an actual person with the second thumb. And he was saying, well,
that that was helping that person out. So, yeah, why
is it beyond the pail to add extra digits? Yeah?
(17:31):
And then there's also the breast uh example that he
brings up, um, And this is he brought this up
when people were pressing him on the wing issue because
he'd mentioned it before, and then at a conference some
people who were kind of you know, they're a little
freaked out by this, and they're saying, would you really
do that? Would you really give somebody wings? Or would
you give somebody, you know, lizard skin? Would you really
do any of these crazy things? And so he's bringing
(17:51):
up various examples to to make his his point. And
he pointed out that that there was a lady that
he'd come across that was the need of breast reconstruction
and she wanted blue areolas and have anything to say
about that, but he said, well, you know what's wrong
with that? Um? You know what why not. If the
(18:12):
person wants to have blue areolas, let him have blue areolas.
How is that different from a lot of the things
we do to our bodies? You know, for some reason,
of all the things that have been said on this podcast,
that's the one thing that made me Bush don't ask
me why, um, you know, And it's stuff like this
I think that makes people sort of look at him
a little sideways. But the fact of the matter, as
(18:33):
I said, this is someone who is an absolute expert
in his field and steeped in the technology. He's on
the advisory panel for the Navy as well as NASA.
His insights on human machine interfaces brought him to the
attention of the Department of Defense here in the States,
and they've sought his views on virtual reality, future warfare,
and bio terrorism. So people want his brain, they want
(18:56):
to know what's going on and rumbling around in that
brain is blue aery, aerials and uh, you know, nose
flashlights and surgical wings. Yeah, because again he's one of
these guys that he thinks or sees something in the
world and it's it's like it instantly, the wheels are turning,
like he doesn't take anything for Granted, he thinks about
it's possible applications, possible ways to improve it, like, for instance,
(19:18):
with rhinoplastic which often is you know, typically about correcting
rebuilding the nose, or or making cosmetic adjustments to the nose.
But he's saying that that hasn't even reached his full
potential that we could we can improve upon the nose
and then ultimately improvements that we make to the human
body need not be a surgical in nature, but a
genetic in nature. Okay, so he's talking about gaming the
(19:40):
body now through genetics as opposed to plastic surgery or
getting married eventually. Yeah. Um, Now again you have to
kind of take his perspective on a little bit if
this seems odd to you. I mean, again, here's someone
who's doing five hundred procedures a year. And keep in
mind that in two thousand and ten, Americans spent over
ten billion dollars on cosmetic surgery. So if you're in
(20:02):
this field and you see this over and over again,
and your futurist you can't help but sit there and say,
how can I actually improve upon this process? And if
this is the way that humanity is going, why not
make it really incredible. Why not chase after the idea
of flight, which is something that humans, you know, have
always secretly or not so secretly wanted for themselves. Yeah,
(20:24):
so he's at this conference again, people keep pressing in
on this issue, and finally he does answer. Because he's
not the kind of guy that's gonna not tell you
exactly what he thinks about a topic. He said, and
they said, would you perform this surgery on someone if
they want the blue arial the one? No, I think
he was talking about wings in this case. Yeah, I'm
just still stuck on hypothetically, and we'll get into the
mechanics possible mechanics of this surgery in a bet that
(20:47):
he said, yes, I would. I can certainly see why
we don't devote research money to it. I can see
why the n i H would fund work on breast
cancer over this. But I don't have a problem with
altering the human form. We do it all the time.
It's only are you Dao Christian conservatism that makes us
think this is wrong? Who here doesn't try to send
their children to the best schools in the hopes of
altering them? Who here objects to palm pilot a thing
(21:10):
we we class to our bodies with which we receive
rapid electronic signals. Who here doesn't surround themselves with a
metal shell and travel at depth defying speeds. We have
always altered ourselves for beauty or for power, and so
long as we are not causing harm, what makes us
think we should stop? And again, that quote is from
the excellent article by Laurence Slater two thousand one Harvard Magazine.
(21:32):
Dr dayalis Um highly recommend everyone check that out. So
we're going to actually close out the this episode right here,
part one of Surgical Wings, and we're going to continue
this in Surgical Wings Part two, where we'll really get
more into the nitty gritty of how you could surgically
make this uh seemingly impossible thing happen. I like this
analogy of surgery, and here we are. We're gonna leave
(21:55):
you guys in the middle, but we're gonna suit tre
you up in the next part. So statuned for that. So,
gentle listeners, that was part one, make sure you listen
in on Thursday for part two. If you want to
check out more of what we're doing, make sure to
go to our YouTube channel mind Stuff. Also you can
see our offerings at stuff to blow your mind dot
(22:17):
com and hey, a show of hands, since we have
been talking about this desire to take flight, to be
able to do what birds and bats do. Um, how
many of you have actually had the dream we're flying?
Do you fall to the ground? Do you glide at
street level and wave at people? Or do you sore
from way above? Let us know and you can do
that by piping off an email at blow the mind
(22:39):
at how stuff works dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works
dot com.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, they're welcome to stuff to Blow
your Mind. I'm Julie Douglas, and this week Robert Lamb
is out getting his dendrites cleaned, so we thought, hey,
why not run an encore presentation of one of our
(00:23):
favorite episodes, The Wind Beneath My Surgical Wings. It is
a nice, juicy topic that delves into the transcendence of
our limited biological capabilities with a dream of light, of course,
So enough preamble, hope that you enjoyed. Julie, who is
not dream of either having wings themselves or just dreams
(00:47):
of winged humanoids flying about? I mean, it's the stuff
of just ancient myth, the stuff of fantasy, the stuff
of religion, the stuff of of art. It's there's something
just irresistible about the idea of a human with the
wings of a bird, or even the wings of a bat. Yeah.
The desire to fly, I think is pretty universal. Even
(01:08):
Dorothy from Oz right somewhere of the rainbow, bluebirds fly,
birds fly over the rainbow? Why then, oh, why can't
I go to singing the rest? Okay? But yeah, one
example that always comes to my mind. I mean there
are a lot of aiconic ones. Obviously, the myth of
Acarus and dayalists big the idea that you know, they
(01:30):
built these wings and then they fly too close to
the sun and then they plummet. It's just a fantastic
metaphor for so much in human endeavor, human technology, um,
humans reaching to achieve things that they were not necessarily
biologically gifted with, but via their intelligence, are in a
sense genetically gifted with. I also think back to a
(01:50):
book called Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves, British
author who famously wrote I Claudius Um. It's probably what
he's most known for, but this was his biography and
he was talking about his um, his service in World
War One. There's a bit about mountain climbing in that
as well, because he was one of these just really
adventurous dudes. He'd go out with his his pals and
they would scale these these towering cliffs. And there was
(02:11):
one point where he's talking about, you know, clinging to
the side of this this rock face. Uh, you know,
pretty to someone like me who is not a mountain
climber and will never mountain climb terrifying idea, just to
imagine myself clinging to the side of a mountain face.
But he was unfazed by it. He was an adventurous dude,
had bravery in just a natural inclination for this kind
of thing. But one time he said, they're scaling, They're
(02:35):
they're a little tired clinging to the side, and a
bird like sort of float flies by, but given the
altitude and the wind kind of floats out there to
the side, and and he mentioned he was just so
unnerving the idea that it was like the bird was
was coaxing him into letting go, as if there was
another way, as if he could fly, which which also
(02:55):
gets into these weird impulses we sometimes have of almost
like off destructive impulses. The the idea that, oh, if
I get too close to the edge of the building,
I might jump off. I was to say, because I
have that. So even if I'm say, like a fairly
like simple structure like a mall on the second floor,
I don't want to go to the edge because I
feel as if I'm going to plunge off. So it's
kind of interesting that there's this idea of him, you know,
(03:19):
clinging to the side and this bird sort of mocking
him to the limits of his own morphology, right, like, hey, dude,
you're never gonna have wings. You might think you're this
cool that you can, you know, rock climb up here,
but you know, let me just buzz around you and
remind you of this. Yeah. It's like, in a sense,
we see the birds flying and we we ended it,
(03:39):
and we feel to a certain extent like it's our
birthright because vast empty air, vast heights are terrifying, because
we know that that's a limitation to us. We know
that those are those are heights that we cannot really
ascend to. Yes, we you know, we we have airplanes
at our disposal. We have various, uh methods of flight
and gliding and skydiving and every think, but they're all
(04:00):
kind of cheap imitations of the natural biological gifts of
a bird. That's right, We're greedy. We want it for ourselves.
It's not enough that we have created flight in the
form of jets and planes and uh, you know, various
other modes of transportation. So the question and the question
for this podcast is is it would it be possible?
Is it really possible that we could somehow create wings
(04:25):
for ourselves? Um? And I'm not talking just like strapping
on wings, because there are wingsuits which are phenomenal. There's
an article on them on how stuff works dot com
that I wrote, how wingsuits work, and it's phenomenal technology
and the people who use them are insane and also
highly skilled. Um. But yeah, could we actually have biological
(04:46):
wings that are a part of us, that are an
extension of us? Right? Could we gain our bodies in
our minds in order to actually have this be a
part of our own morphology? And why not? Right? Because
we've talked about this, this is this is not so crazy, uman,
it's absolutely out there. But there are so many different
ways that we have augmented our reality in our physicality
that uh, no doubt one day this could be a possibility. Yeah,
(05:10):
I mean you'd, like you said, there's so many things
we do to our bodies. Anyway, we went into this,
We've got into this a number of times. We talked
about posthumanism quite a bit, and and cybernetics. We did
an episode called the Werewolf Principle um, which probably wasn't
the best title in the world because it doesn't have
anything to do with werewolves. It's about that has to
do with a sci fi story I was reading at
the time, but the idea that we change our but
(05:31):
potentially we change our bodies in order to explore space
and to explore the world. Instead of attempting to bring
a portion of our atmosphere in our environment with us,
uh and and and our limitations with us, we instead
alter ourselves. And certainly we make a lot of augmentations
to ourselves anyway, so many things such as glasses, contacts,
(05:53):
various biomedical equipment is added to the human body. We're
making these changes anyway, for things that are generally thought
of it is necessary. Um. And then we also make
changes that are cosmetic in nature. But what about wings? Well, yeah,
And in order to actually really get to the meat
of this conversation, we have to bring up Dr Joseph Rosen.
(06:14):
He is a Dartmouth plastic surgeon and reconstructive surgeon. And
it's um, I think would be pretty mild just to
say that he's a futurist. Yeah, And he's a definitely
a futurist, definitely a post humanist and a he's he's
one of these amazing individuals that if you look him up.
You'll find various articles about his work UM, but in particular,
(06:36):
there was a two thousand and one UM interview slash
profile in Harper's Magazine by Lawrence Slater. Highly recommend anyone
read who's fascinated by this topic. It was called Dr Dadalus.
It's an excellent article. Actually, the way that it was
written reminded me of Mary Rich in the way that
she approaches her material, So it is well worth checking out. Alright,
(06:58):
we're gonna take a quick break, stay tuned for more
so with Rosen here's the thing he is. He's totally
steeped in his profession and he takes on something like
five hundred patients a year to do mostly reconstructive surgery,
but some plastic surgery as well. I mean, this is
(07:18):
someone he was an absolute expert in his field. He is, uh,
he's steeped in the practicalities of it, but he is
also a big thinker. Yeah, he's a plastic surgeon, but
but not a mirror cosmetic surgeon. And the article in
question went into sort of around the turn of the
millennium where plastic surgery stood about the idea that it's
(07:39):
sort of sort of in this place where it's often
looked down on um by people outside of the medical profession,
and sometimes within the medical profession may be seen as
as a as a lesser medical practice, which of course
is not not the case when you look at the
the the non cosmetic applications, when you're looking at people
(08:01):
who have undergone a serious injury, particularly facial injuries for instance,
and finding ways to correct that and and bring a
certain amount of normalcy back to that person's life. When
you look at cleft palate and cleft lip reconstruction, yeah,
I mean, there's there's a lot that goes on in
plastic surgery that is not breast jobs. But but that
tends to be sort of the the easy association that
(08:23):
people make when you just hear plastic surgeon on TV. Oh,
she went to the plastic surgeon's office. That means she
had something superficial and unnecessary done. But plastic surgery is
bigger than that, much bigger. And uh, you know, as
you could said that he has he's worked on reconstructing
faces um winded warrior winded warrior causes, right, So we're
talking about catastrophic poly trauma. So if you're in if
(08:47):
you're a soldier and you have undergone this trauma, what
that means is that you have so many various problems
going on um that you can't necessarily find a solution
to all of those injuries. But what Dr Rosen can
do is he can fashion a new knows um. But
he can't restore that soldier's sense of smell, he can
at least give some sort of normalcy back to that person.
(09:09):
So that's a lot of work that he does there. Um.
He also is working on healthcare reform that this is
really interesting. This is in the form of cybercare. He
argues that our hospital system is just uh, you know,
an outgrowth of the Civil War. In other words, it
was set up to administer to a huge amount of
massive casualties. And he's saying that that's just not the
(09:31):
way that the world works today. And he is helping
to revamp the national healthcare system Vietnam using cell phones
and laptops to link clinics, hospitals, and rural physicians. So
this guy is a renaissance man. And like I said,
he's a big thinker, which is extended over to his
ideas about what we can do in terms of improving,
(09:53):
not just augmenting, I should say, but really heightening our
senses as a human being, in augmenting our experiences as
a human being. Yeah, he's an amazing thinker. And then
he really he's the cliche, you know, thinks outside the box.
He is the he's a bit of a rebel. He's
he's questioning authority and questioning sort of normal approaches to
things all the time. And you see that with with
(10:16):
with various gifted minds out there. You know, it's it's
not merely that they work really hard and are just
geniuses within the confines of their profession, within the confines
of their their role in society, but they actually think
beyond the typical constraints. It's true. Like, for instance, he
says that a salamander can regenerate an arm in forty
(10:38):
two days, So he says, somewhere in your own genome
that ability still exists. He says, why can't we go
ahead and find that figure that out so that we
can regenerate a whole limb for ourselves. And he says,
we can do it. It's just a matter of you know,
twenty to fifty years to coming up with that. Um
so you know, he also looks at soldiers again who
have had those catastrophic A traumas, and he says, why
(11:02):
can't we use a whole body prophesis, like you know
that's made out an exo skeleton. Um. You know, obviously
cost is a factor in perception because it's not to
it's not too normal. They see someone trapesing through a hallway,
who's you know, in case in excess skeleton. But he's
got these ideas of how to make it work for
humans and how to, as I said, augment the experiences
(11:25):
for people and make it better. Yeah, he wants to
make it better. He wants to fix it. You see
that both in in healthcare reform, as you mentioned, but
also but more importantly, in the human body. There's a
great quote from that article that I think really sums
up a lot about Rosen's outlook on not just plastic
surgery but life. He says, you know, I'm really proud
of that face. And he's talking about some facial reconstruction
(11:45):
that he performed on an individual who lost a lot
of it to cancer. Because I'm really proud of that face.
I didn't follow any protocol. There's no textbook to tell
you how to fashion of face eaten away by cancer.
Plastic surgery is the intersection of art and science. It's
the intersection of the surgeons imagination with human flesh, and
human flesh is infinitely malleable. People say cosmetic surgery is
(12:06):
frivolous boobs and noses, but it's so much more than that.
The body is a conduit for the soul, at least
historically speaking. When you change what you look like, you
change who you are so well, and it doesn't that
kind of speak to a lot of what we've talked
about in the podcast in terms of studies having to
do with psychology the whole, like you you know, take
(12:27):
it till you make it, or you know, if you
assume a powerful posture, then your body responds physiologically, So
you know, a lot of what he's saying is is
there's a truth there that if you can change yourself
in that way, then certainly physically and mentally, things will follow. Okay,
So let's get into some of his really fun post
(12:48):
humanist dreams for the human body. Yeah, because he again
he's all about making the changes necessary, arguably necessary in
some cases to make us better beings. For instance, ocular
implants new rods for the eyes to give a super
binocular vision. UM soldier implants like, this is great a
nose flash light because you know your nose is just there.
(13:12):
You know it's important for breathing. But you know optics
to optic technology grow smaller and smaller, why not have
a light up there? Imagine you sort of you know,
you click one nostril and then a light shines out
the other nose and you it's perfect for reading. It's
a great idea. Really, now, I can just see eight
year old really having fun with that when they blow
their nose. Yeah. Yeah, like light flashes, like really bright
(13:35):
light every time you sneeze. But it's stuff like that,
like when you say it, like we're even laughing because
it's ridiculous. It's so different from what we're used to.
But Rosen is the kind of guy that says, no,
why are you laughing? Because this is actually really practical. Right,
he's saying, in a military sense, why wouldn't you want
your soldier outfitted with us? Right? Because it makes perfect sense. Um.
Cochlear implants, of course, are already in existence, but what
(13:56):
he is suggesting is that you have cochlear implants that
the hands are hearing, essentially giving us far superior auditory powers,
so we'd be able to detect things miles away, again
becoming superhuman. And uh, because, as we've mentioned before, the
senses that we used to perceive the world are in
varying degrees limited or extremely limited even compared to other animals. Um.
(14:20):
You know, it's like the mantis shrimp, which sees and
all this vast array of colors that we can scarcely imagine.
We've talked about when we're talking about bats, how it's
almost impossible for us to really imagine what it's like
to to quote unquote see the world as a bat.
So instead of being limited by this this world that
we've painted in just a few different colors, he's saying,
(14:42):
why don't we paint the world in more colors? Why
don't we update our our machinery so that we can
paint a more brilliant world. You know, that's an interesting
concept to think about when, especially in the U. I
guess in the context of how we are bombard did
with stimuli these days, and we've talked about this and
(15:03):
the multitasking episodes quite a bit, so I wonder if
if doing that, if sort of upping your experience of
that stimuli would would make sense in this sort of
new world where you're getting thrown things all the time.
So if you can, other words, if you can kind
of tune in a little bit more, things are a
little bit louder, things are a little bit brighter. Does
(15:24):
that make sense for the modern human mind? Yeah, sort
of opening ended question there, But I wanted to point
out that Rosen is also a fan of equo location
implants and fins fins, Yes, why not? I mean it
comes down to a lot of you know, biomimicry. If
you want to see how to swim, look for it.
Look at an animal that has evolved over the course
(15:45):
of millions and millions of years to be an incredible swimmer.
That's what you need to do. And that we do
that to a certain extent, and looking at the shark
skin and then adapting that into swimwear. Um. But he's
talking about taking it even even further, and of course
his pet project, his pet thought experiment. I guess you
could say surgical wings, because this is really where his
(16:06):
engineering brain meets his his his reconstructive brain and brushes
up against the brain of mad science for sure, But
it is important to think of it as as a
thought experiment. Um, he is not trying to do this
or anything that we know of, uh, but but it
is a great thought experience for just what are you know?
What are we willing to do? What can we do?
(16:26):
And why are we why do we feel weird about
going into some of these areas? Like for instance, so
one of the examples he brings up just in plastic surgery,
and one, I mean he brings it up. He brings
it up at conferences because this this dude has been
an amazing figure in plastic surgery. He travels all over
the world, speaks a big conferences. He's an influential character.
So he's not just his voice out on the fringe.
(16:48):
He's a leading figure. Um, So he brought up for instance,
you have a man walks into the surgeon's office and
he has an extra thumb. Um, he's then he is
a doctor is allowed to take that thumb off. But
but if a person comes in and says, hey, I
would like an extra thumb, then he can't. He can't
do that. That's that's just completely crazy. And then nobody
(17:09):
adds extra thumbs to people. But he was saying that
he there was one person that who was I would
give a waiter server and had an extra thumb and
it actually aided that person in their job. This is
an actual person with the second thumb. And he was saying, well,
that that was helping that person out. So, yeah, why
is it beyond the pail to add extra digits? Yeah?
(17:31):
And then there's also the breast uh example that he
brings up, um, And this is he brought this up
when people were pressing him on the wing issue because
he'd mentioned it before, and then at a conference some
people who were kind of you know, they're a little
freaked out by this, and they're saying, would you really
do that? Would you really give somebody wings? Or would
you give somebody, you know, lizard skin? Would you really
do any of these crazy things? And so he's bringing
(17:51):
up various examples to to make his his point. And
he pointed out that that there was a lady that
he'd come across that was the need of breast reconstruction
and she wanted blue areolas and have anything to say
about that, but he said, well, you know what's wrong
with that? Um? You know what why not. If the
(18:12):
person wants to have blue areolas, let him have blue areolas.
How is that different from a lot of the things
we do to our bodies? You know, for some reason,
of all the things that have been said on this podcast,
that's the one thing that made me Bush don't ask
me why, um, you know, And it's stuff like this
I think that makes people sort of look at him
a little sideways. But the fact of the matter, as
(18:33):
I said, this is someone who is an absolute expert
in his field and steeped in the technology. He's on
the advisory panel for the Navy as well as NASA.
His insights on human machine interfaces brought him to the
attention of the Department of Defense here in the States,
and they've sought his views on virtual reality, future warfare,
and bio terrorism. So people want his brain, they want
(18:56):
to know what's going on and rumbling around in that
brain is blue aery, aerials and uh, you know, nose
flashlights and surgical wings. Yeah, because again he's one of
these guys that he thinks or sees something in the
world and it's it's like it instantly, the wheels are turning,
like he doesn't take anything for Granted, he thinks about
it's possible applications, possible ways to improve it, like, for instance,
(19:18):
with rhinoplastic which often is you know, typically about correcting
rebuilding the nose, or or making cosmetic adjustments to the nose.
But he's saying that that hasn't even reached his full
potential that we could we can improve upon the nose
and then ultimately improvements that we make to the human
body need not be a surgical in nature, but a
genetic in nature. Okay, so he's talking about gaming the
(19:40):
body now through genetics as opposed to plastic surgery or
getting married eventually. Yeah. Um, Now again you have to
kind of take his perspective on a little bit if
this seems odd to you. I mean, again, here's someone
who's doing five hundred procedures a year. And keep in
mind that in two thousand and ten, Americans spent over
ten billion dollars on cosmetic surgery. So if you're in
(20:02):
this field and you see this over and over again,
and your futurist you can't help but sit there and say,
how can I actually improve upon this process? And if
this is the way that humanity is going, why not
make it really incredible. Why not chase after the idea
of flight, which is something that humans, you know, have
always secretly or not so secretly wanted for themselves. Yeah,
(20:24):
so he's at this conference again, people keep pressing in
on this issue, and finally he does answer. Because he's
not the kind of guy that's gonna not tell you
exactly what he thinks about a topic. He said, and
they said, would you perform this surgery on someone if
they want the blue arial the one? No, I think
he was talking about wings in this case. Yeah, I'm
just still stuck on hypothetically, and we'll get into the
mechanics possible mechanics of this surgery in a bet that
(20:47):
he said, yes, I would. I can certainly see why
we don't devote research money to it. I can see
why the n i H would fund work on breast
cancer over this. But I don't have a problem with
altering the human form. We do it all the time.
It's only are you Dao Christian conservatism that makes us
think this is wrong? Who here doesn't try to send
their children to the best schools in the hopes of
altering them? Who here objects to palm pilot a thing
(21:10):
we we class to our bodies with which we receive
rapid electronic signals. Who here doesn't surround themselves with a
metal shell and travel at depth defying speeds. We have
always altered ourselves for beauty or for power, and so
long as we are not causing harm, what makes us
think we should stop? And again, that quote is from
the excellent article by Laurence Slater two thousand one Harvard Magazine.
(21:32):
Dr dayalis Um highly recommend everyone check that out. So
we're going to actually close out the this episode right here,
part one of Surgical Wings, and we're going to continue
this in Surgical Wings Part two, where we'll really get
more into the nitty gritty of how you could surgically
make this uh seemingly impossible thing happen. I like this
analogy of surgery, and here we are. We're gonna leave
(21:55):
you guys in the middle, but we're gonna suit tre
you up in the next part. So statuned for that. So,
gentle listeners, that was part one, make sure you listen
in on Thursday for part two. If you want to
check out more of what we're doing, make sure to
go to our YouTube channel mind Stuff. Also you can
see our offerings at stuff to blow your mind dot
(22:17):
com and hey, a show of hands, since we have
been talking about this desire to take flight, to be
able to do what birds and bats do. Um, how
many of you have actually had the dream we're flying?
Do you fall to the ground? Do you glide at
street level and wave at people? Or do you sore
from way above? Let us know and you can do
that by piping off an email at blow the mind
(22:39):
at how stuff works dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works
dot com.
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