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| photo by Jean-Luc Dugast@photographyjeanluc77 |
Some readers may remember him, my former student, my friend, who lost both feet and much more to an attack of meningococcal purpura in 2017. If not, you can refresh your memories by reading his portrait in my article of May 2019.
Today, Mickaël Gayen is back as a cyborg, a human repaired and enhanced by mechanics and technology, strong, handsome and wonderfully articulate as he speaks via video about his life as a double below-knee amputee. He and his story are part of an exhibit that opened October 13th at the Musée de l’Homme, a museum devoted to humanity: who we are, where we come from and where are we going. The name of the exhibit is “Aux frontières de l’humain,” at the boundaries of the human.
This exhibit, which takes us to the limits of what it means to be human, explores the fusion between humans, machines and technology. It also incites us to reconsider our kinship, real and imagined, with animals. Finally, it makes us think about what kind of future we want for ourselves and our planet.
Let’s begin at the beginning, with Adam in the Garden of Eden, when God gives him dominion over all the animals, placing him above them as master, giving him the power to name. For centuries, humans were at the top of the totem pole, lording it over the animal kingdom. In the 17th century, the French philosopher Descartes went so far as to claim that animals were no more than machines, foreign to suffering and pain.
Today, many boundaries between humans and animals have collapsed. Already in the 19th century, Charles Darwin maintained that animals, even the least complex, feel pleasure and pain, happiness and unhappiness. Since the mid-20th century, with the development of the field of ethology, the study of animal behavior, we humans have been brought down a few pegs, to the status of one primate among others.
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| "Totem" copyright Marcus Coates |
As far as what makes us human, it’s not language or our ability to collaborate or recognize ourselves in a mirror. We share those traits with other animals. Among primates, we are unique in having legs longer than arms, but in many areas, other primates easily surpass us. A cheetah could outrun Usain Bolt any day, and there’s no Olympic swimmer capable of moving as fast as a swordfish.
Yet, we humans are the only ones who use language to ask questions about ourselves, about the boundaries between us and other animals, and about how far we can push the limits of humanity. Because of hybridity and technology, we’re confronted, not with boundaries or walls, but with shifting borders and ever-expanding frontiers when we try to define ourselves.
Take, for example, a surgical procedure reported earlier this month. At NYU Langone Transplant Institute, surgeons, with the consent of the patient’s family, successfully attached the kidney of a genetically altered pig to a brain-dead human. The kidney began to function almost immediately and the surgeons were quick to declare a major scientific breakthrough. This is a perfect example of the marriage of hybridity and technology, leading us to ask: If a pig keeps us alive, are we any less human? Is it ethical to use genetically modified animals to repair, prolong and enhance human life?
We humans ask a lot of questions like that, and we’ve always fantasized about hybrid versions of ourselves. In mythology and folklore, there are centaurs and mermaids; in comics, movies and Japanese mangas, superheroes and heroines like Iron Man, Edward Scissorhands or Alita Battle Angel, a pure cyborg except for her human brain.
Fiction and fantasy are one thing, but what does it mean to be a living, breathing cyborg today? Here is where Mickaël comes in. In the exhibit, surrounded by an exoskeleton sculpture, by posters and photos that document “cyborg art,” a video screen projects his image as he relates the hurdles of a life intimately and intensely linked to technology.
He begins by establishing an essential fact: film and fiction overlook the pain. In Mickaël’s case, this is the pain of losing both legs below the knee, the pain of several operations, of learning to walk again, of walking each day with the pressure of his legs against artificial limbs. Science fiction celebrates the technological prowess. Mickaël celebrates what his protheses have given back to him: the ability to walk, to go up and down stairs, to go out in the world, to dance and soon to drive, all achieved through technology saddled to his indomitable will.
Speaking about himself, Mickaël makes us look at ourselves, at the miracle of our toes and fingers (he lost most of his fingertips), of the legs that take us where we want to go. Soon after having been amputated, he asked himself: “Will I still be loved in this new, altered state?” Will friends, family, strangers accept him as a “cyborg,” a technically repaired and enhanced human being?
Nearly four years after his loss, Mickaël can answer those questions with a resounding “yes.” More than accepted, he has become a model for all who know him. French political parties are currently selecting their candidates for next April’s presidential elections and, as no particular candidate stands out, I’m ready to propose “Mickaël Gayen for President!”
Yet, technological prowess also has its dark side. Today researchers have the potential to create mutants through the modification of the human genome, and PGI, or preimplantation genetic diagnosis, is a step towards eugenics, allowing parents to pick and choose their child. Already in 2013, in Philadelphia, a “perfect” test-tube baby was born, thanks to in-vitro screening of embryos through genetic sequencing.
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| "The Bond" copyright Patricia Piccini |
In the United States, in 2016, the Human Genome Project-Write set out to create synthetic human cells that could lead to the production of embryos without parents. Today, in California, transhumanists aspire to “live forever,” or at least, to technologically extend their life span far beyond the record held by Jeanne Calment, a French woman who died in 1997 at age 122.
At a time when urgent decisions and sacrifices must be made (and most of us don’t want to make them) to save a dying Earth, while transhumanists dream of colonies on Mars and survivalists build their bunkers, this exhibit ends by reminding us that our human limits are inseparable from those of planet Earth.
