Philip Ball has two brains… In 1818 Mary Shelley wrote the seminal work ‘Frankenstein’, an exploration of the consequences of rivalling God by building a human being using parts stolen from dead bodies. 101 years later, Philip Ball explored in his book ‘How to Grow A Human’ how science is moving us closer to a different possibility, unguessed in Shelley’s novel: not of building but of growing a human artificially. The book arose from Philip’s experience of having a "second brain" grown from his own cells in a lab in London. As a visiting scholar at Harvard, he takes us to Boston to speak to the foremost leaders in the fields of biotechnology, genetics and AI about whether it’s now possible, and desirable, to consider treading the path of Victor Frankenstein in creating our own artificial human.
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