# Future Human Wiki

> A reference work on longevity, gene editing, cybernetics, and the technologies changing what a human being is — with the evidence, the timelines, and the objections.

Future Human Wiki covers 205 topics across 13 portals, with 3495 internal links between them.

Every article carries machine-readable classification fields:
- **type**: concept, technology, intervention, organization, person, event, or risk
- **status**: established, emerging, experimental, speculative, contested, or historical
- **horizon**: when the topic plausibly matters at scale
- **TRL**: technology readiness level 1-9, where applicable

Articles about technologies and interventions additionally state, in one sentence each:
- **humanEvidence**: what has been demonstrated in people, as opposed to in animals or cells
- **access**: who can obtain it today and on what terms
- **reversibility**: reversible, partly-reversible, context, difficult, or irreversible

An article's **updated** date is an editorial claim, not a log entry: the day an editor judged
the text to have meaningfully changed. It is set by hand, it is a date rather than an instant, and
it does not move for every save.

What was actually saved is kept separately. Every save writes a revision holding the complete
article, and revisions are append-only — the database refuses to rewrite or delete one. The log
begins where the database does: the corpus was loaded into it in one pass, so an imported article
has no recorded creation date and this wiki does not invent one.

All 205 revisions on record are that migration — nobody has edited an article since, so the log is a load and not yet an edit history.
Read the log at https://futurehumanwiki.com/changes, or one article's at https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/<slug>/history.

Every field above, with the full definition of each value, is published as JSON at
https://futurehumanwiki.com/taxonomy.json. The corpus itself, with the link graph, is at https://futurehumanwiki.com/corpus.json.
Both are documented at https://futurehumanwiki.com/data.

Claims about the future are attributed to their proponents, never asserted by this site. Animal
results are always distinguished from human results. Content is CC BY-SA 4.0.

## Longevity & Aging

The biology of growing old, the interventions aimed at slowing or reversing it, and the argument over how much of the lifespan ceiling is real.

- [Aging biomarkers](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/aging-biomarkers): Measurable indicators intended to track the rate or extent of biological aging, sought as surrogate endpoints so that anti-aging trials can read out in years rather than decades. (status: emerging; horizon: late 2020s)
- [AI drug discovery](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/ai-drug-discovery): The use of machine learning to select drug targets, generate candidate molecules and predict failure, so far demonstrably faster at making compounds than at making medicines. (status: emerging; horizon: late 2020s; TRL 5)
- [Alcor Life Extension Foundation](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/alcor): A United States cryonics organization, founded in 1972, that preserves legally dead members at cryogenic temperatures under a trust structure meant to fund storage indefinitely. (status: established; horizon: indefinite)
- [Altos Labs](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/altos-labs): A biotechnology company launched in 2022 with about three billion dollars in committed funding to develop cellular rejuvenation programming as a medicine. (status: emerging; horizon: 2030s)
- [Aubrey de Grey](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/aubrey-de-grey): British biogerontologist who proposed the SENS damage-repair framework for rejuvenation and popularized the idea of longevity escape velocity. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Autophagy](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/autophagy): The lysosomal pathway by which cells digest their own damaged components, and the process through which most known lifespan-extending interventions appear to act. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Biological age](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/biological-age): An estimate of how far an individual has progressed along the trajectory of age-related decline, expressed in years and compared against their chronological age. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Blue Zones](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/blue-zones): Five regions claimed to have unusually high concentrations of centenarians, and the lifestyle explanations built on that claim. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Brain preservation](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/brain-preservation): Preserving the structural information in a brain well enough that a future technology could reconstruct its memories, rather than revive the tissue itself. (status: experimental; horizon: indefinite; TRL 4)
- [Buck Institute for Research on Aging](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/buck-institute): An independent research institute in Novato, California, opened in 1999 as the first in the world dedicated solely to the biology of aging. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Calico Life Sciences](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/calico): Alphabet's independent biotechnology company, founded in 2013 to study the biology of aging and develop interventions against age-related disease. (status: established; horizon: 2030s)
- [Caloric restriction](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/caloric-restriction): Sustained reduction of energy intake without malnutrition, the oldest and most reproducible lifespan-extending intervention in animals and the least proven in humans. (status: experimental; horizon: present; TRL 6)
- [Cancer](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/cancer): The class of diseases in which a somatic cell lineage escapes the controls on its own division, and the age-related cause of death that constrains most life-extension arguments. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Cellular senescence](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/cellular-senescence): A stable arrest of cell division, triggered by telomere attrition or stress, in which the arrested cell stays metabolically active and secretes inflammatory factors. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Compression of morbidity](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/compression-of-morbidity): The hypothesis that chronic illness can be postponed into a shorter interval before death, so that added years of life are healthy ones. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Consumer blood testing](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/consumer-blood-testing): The sale of clinical laboratory panels directly to asymptomatic consumers as preventive medicine, where accurate assays meet a screening logic that guidelines reject. (status: contested; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [Continuous glucose monitoring](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/continuous-glucose-monitoring): A wearable sensor that reports glucose in the fluid between cells every few minutes, well established in diabetes and of unproven value to people without it. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [Cryonics](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/cryonics): The practice of preserving legally dead people at cryogenic temperatures in the hope that future medicine can repair and revive them. (status: contested; horizon: indefinite; TRL 2)
- [Cynthia Kenyon](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/cynthia-kenyon): American molecular geneticist whose 1993 finding that a single daf-2 mutation doubles the lifespan of C. elegans made aging a tractable genetic problem. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [David Sinclair](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/david-sinclair): Australian-American biologist at Harvard known for sirtuin and NAD+ research, the information theory of aging, and disputes over the strength of his public claims. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Dietary supplements](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/dietary-supplements): Vitamins, minerals, botanicals, and other compounds sold without pre-market approval, whose large randomized trials have repeatedly failed to show benefit in well-nourished adults. (status: contested; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [Epigenetic clocks](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/epigenetic-clock): Statistical predictors that estimate age or mortality risk from DNA methylation patterns at selected sites in the genome. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 6)
- [Epigenetic reprogramming](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/epigenetic-reprogramming): The use of pluripotency factors to reset age-associated marks on DNA and chromatin, restoring youthful gene expression in cells without converting them into stem cells. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 3)
- [Exercise as a geroprotector](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/exercise-and-aging): Structured physical activity, the intervention with the strongest evidence for extending healthy life in humans and the benchmark any geroprotective drug must beat. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [Gene therapy for aging](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/gene-therapy-for-aging): The use of delivered genes to modify aging biology systemically, demonstrated in mice with telomerase and other constructs and untested in any controlled human trial. (status: experimental; horizon: 2040s; TRL 3)
- [Geroscience hypothesis](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/geroscience-hypothesis): The proposition that aging is the shared upstream driver of most chronic disease, so that slowing it would delay many conditions at once rather than one at a time. (status: emerging; horizon: 2030s)
- [GLP-1 receptor agonists](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/glp-1-receptor-agonists): Drugs that mimic the gut hormone GLP-1 to lower blood glucose and food intake, producing large weight loss that persists only while treatment continues. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [Hallmarks of aging](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/hallmarks-of-aging): The consensus taxonomy of cellular and molecular processes held to drive mammalian aging, set out as nine mechanisms in 2013 and expanded to twelve in 2023. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Healthspan](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/healthspan): The portion of life spent in good health and function, as distinct from total lifespan; widely used as a goal but not standardized as a measure. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Heat and cold exposure](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/heat-and-cold-exposure): Deliberate exposure to heat or cold, from sauna bathing to cold-water immersion, as a health practice built on a hormetic mechanism whose effect on human lifespan is unmeasured. (status: contested; horizon: present; TRL 5)
- [Immunosenescence](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/immunosenescence): The age-related remodelling of the immune system, in which responses to unfamiliar antigens weaken while chronic activation against familiar ones persists. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Inflammaging](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/inflammaging): The chronic, low-grade, sterile inflammation that develops with age in the absence of infection, and its disputed role in frailty and age-related disease. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Leonard Hayflick](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/leonard-hayflick): American microbiologist who showed in 1961 that normal human cells divide a finite number of times in culture, and who argued for fifty years afterwards that aging is not a disease. (status: historical; horizon: historical)
- [Limb regeneration](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/limb-regeneration): The regrowth of an amputated limb from the stump, routine in salamanders and absent in mammals, and the biology that separates the two. (status: experimental; horizon: 2050s+)
- [Longevity escape velocity](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/longevity-escape-velocity): The hypothetical threshold at which medicine adds remaining life expectancy faster than time subtracts it, making death by aging recede indefinitely. (status: speculative; horizon: 2050s+)
- [Loyal](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/loyal): A biotechnology company developing drugs to extend healthy lifespan in dogs, working through the veterinary regulator that will consider lifespan itself as an indication. (status: emerging; horizon: late 2020s)
- [Maximum human lifespan](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/maximum-human-lifespan): The longest duration a human being has lived or could live, distinct from average life expectancy and disputed as to whether any fixed ceiling exists. (status: contested; horizon: indefinite)
- [Metformin and the TAME trial](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/metformin): A generic diabetes drug proposed as a geroprotector, and the large randomized trial designed to make aging itself an acceptable regulatory indication. (status: contested; horizon: 2030s; TRL 4)
- [Methuselah Foundation](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/methuselah-foundation): A Virginia nonprofit founded in the early 2000s that used prize competitions to seed research on life extension, regenerative medicine and organ engineering. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Mitochondrial dysfunction in aging](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/mitochondrial-dysfunction): Age-related decline in mitochondrial energy production, quality control and signalling, once explained by free-radical damage and now understood as a more tangled process. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [NAD+ precursors](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/nad-precursors): Supplements such as nicotinamide riboside and NMN that raise cellular NAD+ levels, with strong pharmacokinetic evidence and weak evidence of any functional benefit. (status: contested; horizon: present; TRL 4)
- [Negligible senescence](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/negligible-senescence): The condition of organisms whose mortality rate and physiological function show no measurable decline with age after reaching maturity. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [NewLimit](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/newlimit): A biotechnology company founded in 2021 to screen transcription-factor combinations that restore youthful function to aged cells without changing their identity. (status: emerging; horizon: 2030s)
- [Nir Barzilai](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/nir-barzilai): Israeli-American physician-scientist whose centenarian genetics work and proposed TAME trial aim to make aging itself an acceptable regulatory indication. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Overpopulation and life extension](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/overpopulation-and-longevity): The objection that extending human lifespan would cause unsustainable population growth, and the demographic modelling that finds the effect smaller than assumed. (status: contested; horizon: 2050s+)
- [Parabiosis and young blood](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/parabiosis-and-young-blood): Experiments joining the circulation of young and old animals, and the attempts to translate their rejuvenating effects into plasma-based treatments for humans. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 3)
- [Partial reprogramming](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/partial-reprogramming): Transient expression of pluripotency factors that resets age-associated epigenetic marks in a cell while stopping short of erasing its differentiated identity. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 3)
- [Proteostasis collapse](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/proteostasis): The age-related failure of the chaperone, proteasome and lysosomal systems that keep proteins correctly folded and turned over, and its link to aggregation diseases. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Rapamycin](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/rapamycin): A macrolide immunosuppressant that inhibits the mTOR growth pathway and extends lifespan across several laboratory species, with no confirmed effect on human aging. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 5)
- [Reproductive longevity](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/reproductive-longevity): The functional lifespan of the reproductive system, and efforts to extend it in the ovary, which loses function decades before most other organs. (status: emerging; horizon: 2030s)
- [Retro Biosciences](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/retro-biosciences): A longevity biotechnology company funded by Sam Altman with the stated goal of adding ten years of healthy life, working on autophagy, reprogramming and plasma-inspired therapies. (status: emerging; horizon: 2030s)
- [Right to die and the duty to live](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/right-to-die-and-right-to-live): How the law and ethics of assisted dying interact with radical life extension, and whether an indefinitely extendable life could still be voluntarily ended. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Senolytics](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/senolytics): Drugs that selectively kill senescent cells, an approach that reduces age-related pathology in mice but has so far produced modest or null results in humans. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 5)
- [SENS Research Foundation](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/sens-research-foundation): A California nonprofit founded in 2009 to fund rejuvenation research organized around seven categories of accumulated cellular damage, renamed Lifespan Research Institute in 2024. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Sleep and longevity](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/sleep-and-longevity): Habitual sleep duration and timing, an exposure tied to mortality in large observational cohorts and almost untested as a deliberate intervention to extend life. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [Stem cell exhaustion](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/stem-cell-exhaustion): The age-related decline in the number and regenerative function of adult stem cells across blood, muscle, gut and skin, and the loss of repair capacity that follows. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Steve Horvath](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/steve-horvath): German-American biostatistician who built the first multi-tissue epigenetic clock, giving aging research a quantitative readout it could test and argue about. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Telomeres and telomerase](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/telomeres-and-telomerase): Repetitive DNA caps that shorten with each cell division, and the enzyme that rebuilds them, linking division limits, cancer risk, and a contested marker of aging. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [The longevity dividend](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/longevity-dividend): The argument that slowing biological aging would produce economic gains larger than curing any individual disease, and the disputes over how that value is calculated. (status: contested; horizon: 2030s)
- [Wearable health sensors](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/wearable-health-sensors): Consumer devices worn on the wrist or finger that continuously record pulse waveforms, movement, and skin temperature, and infer heart rhythm, sleep, and activity from them. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [XPRIZE Healthspan](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/xprize-healthspan): A $101 million incentive competition launched in 2023 that rewards a therapy restoring at least a decade of muscle, cognitive and immune function in older adults. (status: emerging; horizon: late 2020s)
- [Yamanaka factors](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/yamanaka-factors): The four transcription factors Oct4, Sox2, Klf4 and c-Myc, which together convert a differentiated cell into an induced pluripotent stem cell. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 7)

## Genetic Engineering

Reading, editing, and writing genomes — from base editors and prime editors to synthetic chromosomes and the line at heritable change.

- [AAV vectors](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/aav-vectors): Engineered adeno-associated viruses used to carry therapeutic genes into human cells, the workhorse of in vivo gene therapy and the source of most of its limits. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [AI protein design](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/ai-protein-design): Machine-learning systems that predict what shape a protein sequence folds into and that generate new proteins with no natural counterpart. (status: emerging; horizon: present; TRL 5)
- [Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/asilomar-conference): The 1975 meeting at which molecular biologists lifted their own moratorium on recombinant DNA work by agreeing a system of physical and biological containment. (status: historical; horizon: historical)
- [Base editing](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/base-editing): A genome editing method that chemically converts one DNA base into another at a targeted site without cutting both strands of the double helix. (status: emerging; horizon: late 2020s; TRL 7)
- [Casgevy](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/casgevy): The first approved CRISPR-based medicine, which disrupts a fetal-haemoglobin repressor in a patient's own blood stem cells to treat sickle cell disease and beta thalassaemia. (status: emerging; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [Colossal Biosciences](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/colossal-biosciences): A Texas biotechnology company founded in 2021 to recreate extinct species by editing the genomes of living relatives, and to spin out conservation technology from that work. (status: contested; horizon: late 2020s)
- [CRISPR–Cas9](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/crispr-cas9): A bacterial defence system repurposed as a programmable DNA-cutting tool, in which a short guide RNA directs the Cas9 enzyme to a chosen sequence in almost any genome. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [De-extinction](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/de-extinction): The attempt to recreate extinct organisms, in practice by editing a close living relative to carry some of the extinct animal's traits rather than restoring the species itself. (status: contested; horizon: 2030s; TRL 4)
- [DNA nanotechnology](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/dna-nanotechnology): The use of DNA as a construction material rather than a carrier of genes, folding programmed sequences into nanoscale shapes, devices, and logic-gated containers. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 4)
- [Dual-use research of concern](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/dual-use-research): Life-science research that produces knowledge or tools with legitimate purposes but foreseeable potential for catastrophic misuse, and the oversight regimes built around it. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Embryo selection](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/embryo-selection): Testing embryos created by IVF and choosing which to transfer, a routine clinical practice for single-gene disease whose extension to complex traits remains disputed. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [Emmanuelle Charpentier](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/emmanuelle-charpentier): French microbiologist who identified the second RNA that CRISPR-Cas9 requires, co-authored the 2012 paper that made the system programmable, and shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Engineered pandemics](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/engineered-pandemics): Outbreaks caused by a pathogen deliberately modified, synthesised, or released rather than one that emerged from nature, and the biosecurity programme built around preventing them. (status: speculative; horizon: present)
- [Epigenetic reprogramming](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/epigenetic-reprogramming): The use of pluripotency factors to reset age-associated marks on DNA and chromatin, restoring youthful gene expression in cells without converting them into stem cells. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 3)
- [Epigenome editing](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/epigenome-editing): Targeted modification of the chemical marks that control gene expression, switching a gene off or on without altering the underlying DNA sequence. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 6)
- [Gene doping](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/gene-doping): The non-therapeutic use of gene transfer or gene regulation to improve athletic performance, prohibited in sport since the early 2000s with no publicly confirmed case. (status: experimental; horizon: late 2020s)
- [Gene drives](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/gene-drive): Genetic elements engineered to bias their own inheritance above the Mendelian half, allowing an introduced trait to spread through a wild population. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 5)
- [Gene therapy for aging](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/gene-therapy-for-aging): The use of delivered genes to modify aging biology systemically, demonstrated in mice with telomerase and other constructs and untested in any controlled human trial. (status: experimental; horizon: 2040s; TRL 3)
- [Genetic code expansion and recoding](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/recoded-organisms): Altering how a cell reads DNA so that reassigned codons encode amino acids not found in nature, producing organisms with chemistry and immunity no natural cell has. (status: experimental; horizon: 2040s; TRL 4)
- [Genetic discrimination](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/genetic-discrimination): Differential treatment of people on the basis of genetic information, and the uneven legal regime that restricts it in employment and health cover but rarely elsewhere. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Genetic enhancement of cognition](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/genetic-enhancement-of-intelligence): The proposal to raise human cognitive ability by selecting or editing genetic variants, constrained by the extreme polygenicity of the trait and by pleiotropy. (status: speculative; horizon: 2040s)
- [George Church](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/george-church): American geneticist who helped invent direct genomic sequencing, founded the Personal Genome Project, and co-founded dozens of biotechnology companies. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Governance of human genome editing](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/governance-of-genome-editing): The patchwork of national law, professional norms, funding rules, and international soft law that determines what may be done to a human genome and by whom. (status: emerging; horizon: present)
- [He Jiankui affair](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/he-jiankui-affair): The 2018 announcement that twin girls had been born from CRISPR-edited embryos in Shenzhen, and the scientific condemnation and criminal prosecution that followed. (status: historical; horizon: historical)
- [Human cloning](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/human-cloning): Producing a human genetically identical to an existing person by somatic cell nuclear transfer, demonstrated to the blastocyst stage and never taken to a pregnancy. (status: contested; horizon: indefinite; TRL 4)
- [Human germline editing](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/germline-editing): Modification of human embryos, eggs, or sperm so that the genetic change is inherited by the resulting child and by all of their descendants. (status: contested; horizon: 2040s; TRL 4)
- [In vitro gametogenesis](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/in-vitro-gametogenesis): Making functional eggs or sperm from pluripotent stem cells in culture, achieved end to end in mice and still short of the meiotic stages in humans. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 3)
- [Induced pluripotent stem cells](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/induced-pluripotent-stem-cells): Adult cells reprogrammed back to an embryonic-like state, capable of becoming any cell type in the body and of being derived from a specific patient. (status: emerging; horizon: late 2020s; TRL 7)
- [Jennifer Doudna](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/jennifer-doudna): American biochemist who co-authored the 2012 paper showing CRISPR-Cas9 could be programmed to cut chosen DNA sequences, and shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Lipid nanoparticles](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/lipid-nanoparticles): Four-component lipid vesicles that carry mRNA and other nucleic acids into cells, the delivery system behind mRNA vaccines and the first systemic in vivo CRISPR therapies. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [Mirror life](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/mirror-life): Hypothetical organisms built from mirror-image biological molecules, which a large group of scientists argued in 2024 could evade immunity and predation and should not be created. (status: speculative; horizon: 2050s+)
- [Mitochondrial replacement therapy](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/mitochondrial-replacement-therapy): A set of IVF techniques that place a mother's nuclear DNA in a donor egg to prevent transmission of mitochondrial DNA disease, licensed in a few countries and used rarely. (status: emerging; horizon: present; TRL 8)
- [Off-target effects in genome editing](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/crispr-off-target-effects): Unintended DNA changes caused by genome editors, either at sites resembling the target or at the target itself, and the assays used to find them. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Optogenetics](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/optogenetics): A technique that makes selected neurons light-sensitive by expressing microbial opsin genes in them, allowing their activity to be switched on or off on a millisecond timescale. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 5)
- [Partial reprogramming](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/partial-reprogramming): Transient expression of pluripotency factors that resets age-associated epigenetic marks in a cell while stopping short of erasing its differentiated identity. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 3)
- [Polygenic embryo screening](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/polygenic-embryo-screening): The ranking of IVF embryos by polygenic risk scores computed from their inferred genotypes, sold commercially since 2019 and rejected as unvalidated by professional genetics bodies. (status: contested; horizon: present; TRL 7)
- [Prime editing](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/prime-editing): A genome editing method in which a nicking Cas9 fused to a reverse transcriptase writes a new DNA sequence specified by an extended guide RNA. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 6)
- [Radiation tolerance in humans](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/radiation-hardening-humans): The problem of keeping humans healthy under deep-space radiation, and the shielding, pharmacological, and genetic strategies proposed to raise their tolerance. (status: speculative; horizon: 2040s)
- [Shinya Yamanaka](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/shinya-yamanaka): Japanese physician-scientist who showed that four transcription factors can reprogram adult cells to a pluripotent state, sharing the 2012 Nobel Prize for the discovery. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Somatic gene therapy](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/somatic-gene-therapy): Genetic modification of a living person's body cells to treat disease, producing a change that is not passed on to their children. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [Stem-cell-based embryo models](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/synthetic-embryos): Structures grown by aggregating stem cells that reproduce stages of early embryonic development without fertilisation, and the regulatory categories they fall outside. (status: experimental; horizon: late 2020s; TRL 3)
- [Synthetic genomes](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/synthetic-genomes): Genomes designed on a computer and assembled from chemically synthesized DNA, then installed in a cell to see whether the design lives. (status: experimental; horizon: 2040s; TRL 4)
- [Tardigrade genes and human cells](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/tardigrade-genes): The attempt to transfer stress-tolerance proteins from tardigrades into human cells, and the gap between what those experiments showed and how they were reported. (status: experimental; horizon: 2040s)
- [Xenotransplantation](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/xenotransplantation): The transplantation of organs between species, now pursued with genetically engineered pigs whose antigens and clotting proteins have been altered to survive in a human recipient. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 6)
- [Yamanaka factors](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/yamanaka-factors): The four transcription factors Oct4, Sox2, Klf4 and c-Myc, which together convert a differentiated cell into an induced pluripotent stem cell. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 7)

## Cybernetics & Neurotech

Machines wired into nervous systems: brain–computer interfaces, implants, prosthetics, and the bandwidth problem that limits all of them.

- [Brain-to-brain interfaces](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/brain-to-brain-interface): Systems that link one nervous system to another by decoding activity from a sender and delivering stimulation to a receiver, so far at rates of a few bits per minute. (status: experimental; horizon: 2050s+; TRL 3)
- [Brain–computer interface](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/brain-computer-interface): A system that measures nervous-system activity, decodes an intention or state from it, and converts that decoded signal into a command for an external device. (status: emerging; horizon: late 2020s; TRL 6)
- [Cochlear implant](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/cochlear-implant): An implanted device that restores a functional sense of hearing by stimulating the auditory nerve with electrical pulses, bypassing the ear's damaged hair cells. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [Continuous glucose monitoring](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/continuous-glucose-monitoring): A wearable sensor that reports glucose in the fluid between cells every few minutes, well established in diabetes and of unproven value to people without it. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [Deep brain stimulation](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/deep-brain-stimulation): A surgical therapy in which implanted electrodes deliver continuous electrical pulses to specific deep brain structures to suppress the symptoms of movement and psychiatric disorders. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [Electrocorticography interfaces](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/ecog-interfaces): Brain–computer interfaces that record from electrode arrays resting on the cortical surface rather than penetrating it, trading single-neuron resolution for stability and coverage. (status: emerging; horizon: late 2020s; TRL 6)
- [Human–AI merger](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/human-ai-merger): The proposal that humans and artificial intelligence will form a single cognitive system rather than remaining separate agents that merely use one another. (status: speculative; horizon: 2040s)
- [Memory prosthesis](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/memory-prosthesis): An implanted device intended to restore or improve memory formation by supplying the pattern of neural activity a damaged or underperforming hippocampus fails to generate. (status: experimental; horizon: 2040s; TRL 3)
- [Mental privacy](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/mental-privacy): The question of what can be inferred about a person's mental states from neural and physiological recordings, and what protection that information should receive. (status: emerging; horizon: late 2020s)
- [Myoelectric prosthetics](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/myoelectric-prosthetics): Externally powered artificial limbs controlled by electrical activity recorded from the wearer's residual muscles, the dominant design for powered upper-limb prostheses. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [Neural decoding](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/neural-decoding): The inference of a stimulus, intention, or mental state from measured neural activity, and the statistical machinery that makes brain–computer interfaces work. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Neural dust and ultrasonic implants](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/neural-dust): A proposed class of millimetre-scale wireless implants powered and read out by ultrasound, intended to replace tethered electrode arrays with distributed untethered sensors. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 4)
- [Neuralink](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/neuralink): American neurotechnology company founded in 2016 developing a wireless implanted brain–computer interface with flexible electrode threads inserted by a surgical robot. (status: emerging; horizon: late 2020s)
- [Neuroprosthetics](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/neuroprosthetics): The engineering field that builds devices interfacing directly with the nervous system to restore lost sensory, motor, cognitive, or autonomic function. (status: emerging; horizon: present; TRL 7)
- [Neurorights](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/neurorights): A proposed set of human rights covering mental privacy, cognitive liberty, and mental integrity, drafted in response to brain-recording and brain-stimulation technology. (status: emerging; horizon: present)
- [Non-invasive neuromodulation](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/non-invasive-neuromodulation): Techniques that alter neural excitability through the intact skull or peripheral nerves — magnetic, electrical, and ultrasonic — without surgery or implanted hardware. (status: emerging; horizon: present; TRL 8)
- [Optogenetics](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/optogenetics): A technique that makes selected neurons light-sensitive by expressing microbial opsin genes in them, allowing their activity to be switched on or off on a millisecond timescale. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 5)
- [Retinal implants and visual prostheses](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/retinal-implant): Implanted devices that restore rudimentary vision to blind people by electrically stimulating surviving retinal neurons or, more invasively, the visual cortex. (status: experimental; horizon: late 2020s; TRL 6)
- [Sensory augmentation](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/sensory-augmentation): Devices and biological modifications that route information the body cannot normally detect into a channel the brain can learn to read. (status: experimental; horizon: late 2020s; TRL 6)
- [Speech neuroprosthesis](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/speech-neuroprosthesis): A brain–computer interface that reconstructs intended speech from motor cortex activity, producing text or synthesized voice for people who cannot speak. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 5)
- [Stentrode](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/stentrode): An endovascular brain–computer interface in which a stent carrying electrodes is delivered through the jugular vein into a vein overlying the motor cortex. (status: experimental; horizon: late 2020s; TRL 6)
- [Synchron](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/synchron): A neurotechnology company developing an endovascular brain–computer interface implanted through a blood vessel rather than by opening the skull. (status: emerging; horizon: late 2020s)
- [Utah array](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/utah-array): A silicon microelectrode array of 100 needles on a 10-by-10 grid, the standard sensor for chronic single-neuron recording in human brain–computer interface research. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 7)
- [Wearable health sensors](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/wearable-health-sensors): Consumer devices worn on the wrist or finger that continuously record pulse waveforms, movement, and skin temperature, and infer heart rhythm, sleep, and activity from them. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 9)

## Minds & Consciousness

Emulation, uploading, and identity — what it would take to run a person on different hardware, and whether the result would be them.

- [Anders Sandberg](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/anders-sandberg): Swedish computational neuroscientist and futures researcher who co-wrote the whole brain emulation roadmap and works on the physical limits of long-term civilization. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Artificial general intelligence](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/artificial-general-intelligence): A hypothetical artificial system matching or exceeding competent human performance across essentially all cognitive tasks rather than in narrow domains. (status: contested; horizon: indefinite)
- [Brain preservation](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/brain-preservation): Preserving the structural information in a brain well enough that a future technology could reconstruct its memories, rather than revive the tissue itself. (status: experimental; horizon: indefinite; TRL 4)
- [Brain-to-brain interfaces](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/brain-to-brain-interface): Systems that link one nervous system to another by decoding activity from a sender and delivering stimulation to a receiver, so far at rates of a few bits per minute. (status: experimental; horizon: 2050s+; TRL 3)
- [Connectomics](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/connectomics): The mapping of complete wiring diagrams of nervous systems, from macroscale fibre tracts down to every synapse in a volume of tissue. (status: emerging; horizon: 2030s; TRL 5)
- [Digital immortality](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/digital-immortality): The persistence of a person in digital form after death, ranging from chatbot reconstructions built from their data to the hypothetical emulation of their brain. (status: emerging; horizon: present)
- [Human–AI merger](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/human-ai-merger): The proposal that humans and artificial intelligence will form a single cognitive system rather than remaining separate agents that merely use one another. (status: speculative; horizon: 2040s)
- [Intelligence amplification](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/intelligence-amplification): The project of raising human problem-solving capacity by improving the tools, notations and organisations that thinking runs on rather than by altering the brain. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Machine consciousness](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/machine-consciousness): The question of whether an artificial system can have subjective experience, how anyone could tell, and what would follow morally if one did. (status: speculative; horizon: indefinite)
- [Memory prosthesis](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/memory-prosthesis): An implanted device intended to restore or improve memory formation by supplying the pattern of neural activity a damaged or underperforming hippocampus fails to generate. (status: experimental; horizon: 2040s; TRL 3)
- [Mental privacy](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/mental-privacy): The question of what can be inferred about a person's mental states from neural and physiological recordings, and what protection that information should receive. (status: emerging; horizon: late 2020s)
- [Mind uploading](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/mind-uploading): The hypothetical transfer of a person's mind to a computational substrate, such that the resulting process is that person rather than a description of them. (status: speculative; horizon: 2050s+)
- [Neural correlates of consciousness](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/neural-correlates-of-consciousness): The minimal neural activity jointly sufficient for a specific conscious experience, and the experimental programme that tries to identify it. (status: emerging; horizon: present)
- [Neural decoding](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/neural-decoding): The inference of a stimulus, intention, or mental state from measured neural activity, and the statistical machinery that makes brain–computer interfaces work. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Personal identity and continuity](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/personal-identity-and-continuity): The question of what makes a person at one time the same person as at another, and what — if anything — must be preserved for that person to survive. (status: contested; horizon: indefinite)
- [Psychedelic therapy](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/psychedelic-therapy): The administration of serotonergic psychedelics or MDMA alongside psychological support for psychiatric conditions, in trials that cannot be reliably blinded. (status: contested; horizon: late 2020s; TRL 7)
- [Ray Kurzweil](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/ray-kurzweil): American inventor and futurist who formulated the law of accelerating returns and forecasts human-level machine intelligence by 2029 and a technological singularity by 2045. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Singularitarianism](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/singularitarianism): The belief that a technological singularity is likely and that it should be actively prepared for, together with the movements organized around that belief. (status: contested; horizon: indefinite)
- [Substrate independence](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/substrate-independence): The claim that mental states depend on a system's functional organization rather than on the material implementing it, so that a mind could run on non-biological hardware. (status: contested; horizon: indefinite)
- [Technological singularity](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/technological-singularity): The hypothesized point at which machine intelligence begins improving itself fast enough that technological change outruns human ability to predict or steer it. (status: speculative; horizon: indefinite)
- [The teleportation problem](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/teleportation-problem): A thought experiment in which a person is scanned, destroyed, and rebuilt elsewhere, used to test whether survival requires physical continuity or only psychological continuity. (status: speculative; horizon: indefinite)
- [Whole brain emulation](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/whole-brain-emulation): A proposed procedure for reproducing a particular mind by scanning one brain's structure in detail, building a computational model from the scan, and running it. (status: speculative; horizon: 2050s+)

## Human Enhancement

Deliberately exceeding typical human capacity — cognitive, physical, sensory — and the therapy line that keeps refusing to stay put.

- [Bioethics of enhancement](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/bioethics-of-enhancement): The philosophical and policy debate over whether biomedical means may legitimately be used to push human capacities beyond species-typical function. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Biohacking and grinders](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/biohacking): The practice of modifying one's own biology outside institutional medicine, ranging from subdermal implants to do-it-yourself gene transfer and open-source medical devices. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Disability rights and enhancement](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/disability-rights-and-enhancement): The disability-rights critique of selection and enhancement, centred on the expressivist objection, the social model, and the difference between curing and accommodating. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Engineered sleep reduction](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/sleep-reduction): The proposal to shorten the amount of sleep a person needs without incurring the costs of sleep deprivation, based on rare short-sleep gene variants and wake-promoting drugs. (status: speculative; horizon: 2040s)
- [Enhancement arms race](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/enhancement-arms-race): The argument that competitive pressure makes enhancement effectively compulsory, so that individually rational adoption leaves everyone worse off. (status: contested; horizon: 2030s)
- [Enhancement in sport](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/enhancement-in-sport): The regulation of performance enhancement in competition, the only domain that draws an operational line between therapy and enhancement and litigates it case by case. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Gene doping](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/gene-doping): The non-therapeutic use of gene transfer or gene regulation to improve athletic performance, prohibited in sport since the early 2000s with no publicly confirmed case. (status: experimental; horizon: late 2020s)
- [Genetic enhancement of cognition](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/genetic-enhancement-of-intelligence): The proposal to raise human cognitive ability by selecting or editing genetic variants, constrained by the extreme polygenicity of the trait and by pleiotropy. (status: speculative; horizon: 2040s)
- [Heat and cold exposure](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/heat-and-cold-exposure): Deliberate exposure to heat or cold, from sauna bathing to cold-water immersion, as a health practice built on a hormetic mechanism whose effect on human lifespan is unmeasured. (status: contested; horizon: present; TRL 5)
- [Human enhancement](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/human-enhancement): The deliberate use of biomedical or technical means to extend human capacities beyond what is needed to restore or maintain ordinary health. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Intelligence amplification](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/intelligence-amplification): The project of raising human problem-solving capacity by improving the tools, notations and organisations that thinking runs on rather than by altering the brain. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Moral enhancement](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/moral-enhancement): The proposal to improve human moral motivation by biomedical means, argued for as a response to technologies that outpace evolved moral psychology. (status: speculative; horizon: indefinite)
- [Morphological freedom](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/morphological-freedom): The claimed right to modify one's own body and mind as one chooses, and the correlative right to refuse modification imposed by others. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Myostatin inhibition](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/myostatin-inhibition): Blockade of the growth factor myostatin to increase skeletal muscle mass, an effect reproduced across species that has repeatedly failed to translate into functional benefit in humans. (status: experimental; horizon: late 2020s; TRL 7)
- [Non-invasive neuromodulation](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/non-invasive-neuromodulation): Techniques that alter neural excitability through the intact skull or peripheral nerves — magnetic, electrical, and ultrasonic — without surgery or implanted hardware. (status: emerging; horizon: present; TRL 8)
- [Nootropics](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/nootropics): Substances taken to improve cognition in healthy people, a category whose best-evidenced members produce small effects and whose best-selling members produce none. (status: contested; horizon: present; TRL 5)
- [Pantropy](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/pantropy): The proposal to engineer humans to suit other worlds rather than engineering those worlds to suit humans, and the ethical problems of designing offspring for an environment. (status: speculative; horizon: 2050s+)
- [Powered exoskeletons](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/exoskeleton): Wearable powered frames that apply force in parallel with the wearer's own limbs, used for gait rehabilitation, industrial load support, and proposed strength augmentation. (status: emerging; horizon: present; TRL 8)
- [Psychedelic therapy](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/psychedelic-therapy): The administration of serotonergic psychedelics or MDMA alongside psychological support for psychiatric conditions, in trials that cannot be reliably blinded. (status: contested; horizon: late 2020s; TRL 7)
- [Quantified self](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/quantified-self): A movement and a method for learning about oneself through personal measurement, built on n-of-1 self-experiment and named by two Wired editors in 2007. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Sensory augmentation](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/sensory-augmentation): Devices and biological modifications that route information the body cannot normally detect into a channel the brain can learn to read. (status: experimental; horizon: late 2020s; TRL 6)

## Reproduction & Development

Gametes, embryos, and gestation: artificial wombs, in vitro gametogenesis, embryo selection, and inheritance made editable.

- [Artificial womb](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/artificial-womb): A device that sustains fetal development outside a body by perfusing the umbilical circulation while the fetus remains immersed in fluid, tested so far only in animals. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 5)
- [Designer babies](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/designer-babies): A popular term for children whose traits are chosen before birth, covering a real but narrow practice of embryo selection and a largely hypothetical practice of embryo editing. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Ectogenesis](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/ectogenesis): The development of a mammalian embryo or fetus outside a body, either for part of gestation or for all of it, and the ethical arguments the prospect generates. (status: speculative; horizon: 2040s)
- [Embryo selection](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/embryo-selection): Testing embryos created by IVF and choosing which to transfer, a routine clinical practice for single-gene disease whose extension to complex traits remains disputed. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [Generation ship biology](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/generation-ship-biology): The biological requirements of a crewed voyage lasting generations: population genetics, reproduction and development off Earth, and consent for people born in transit. (status: speculative; horizon: indefinite)
- [Human cloning](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/human-cloning): Producing a human genetically identical to an existing person by somatic cell nuclear transfer, demonstrated to the blastocyst stage and never taken to a pregnancy. (status: contested; horizon: indefinite; TRL 4)
- [Human germline editing](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/germline-editing): Modification of human embryos, eggs, or sperm so that the genetic change is inherited by the resulting child and by all of their descendants. (status: contested; horizon: 2040s; TRL 4)
- [In vitro fertilisation](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/in-vitro-fertilisation): The routine clinical procedure in which eggs are fertilised outside the body and an embryo is transferred to a uterus, and the platform every other embryo technology is built on. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [In vitro gametogenesis](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/in-vitro-gametogenesis): Making functional eggs or sperm from pluripotent stem cells in culture, achieved end to end in mice and still short of the meiotic stages in humans. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 3)
- [Mitochondrial replacement therapy](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/mitochondrial-replacement-therapy): A set of IVF techniques that place a mother's nuclear DNA in a donor egg to prevent transmission of mitochondrial DNA disease, licensed in a few countries and used rarely. (status: emerging; horizon: present; TRL 8)
- [Polygenic embryo screening](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/polygenic-embryo-screening): The ranking of IVF embryos by polygenic risk scores computed from their inferred genotypes, sold commercially since 2019 and rejected as unvalidated by professional genetics bodies. (status: contested; horizon: present; TRL 7)
- [Procreative beneficence](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/procreative-beneficence): Julian Savulescu's principle that prospective parents have moral reason to select, among the children they could have, the one expected to live the best life. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Reproductive longevity](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/reproductive-longevity): The functional lifespan of the reproductive system, and efforts to extend it in the ovary, which loses function decades before most other organs. (status: emerging; horizon: 2030s)
- [Stem-cell-based embryo models](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/synthetic-embryos): Structures grown by aggregating stem cells that reproduce stages of early embryonic development without fertilisation, and the regulatory categories they fall outside. (status: experimental; horizon: late 2020s; TRL 3)
- [Uterus transplantation](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/uterus-transplantation): A temporary transplant of a donated uterus that lets a woman without a working one carry a pregnancy, then is removed so that immunosuppression can stop. (status: emerging; horizon: present; TRL 8)

## Regenerative Bodies

Growing, printing, and replacing the parts that wear out — organs, tissue, limbs, blood — and why vascularization is still the wall.

- [AAV vectors](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/aav-vectors): Engineered adeno-associated viruses used to carry therapeutic genes into human cells, the workhorse of in vivo gene therapy and the source of most of its limits. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [Artificial blood](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/artificial-blood): Engineered substitutes for the oxygen-carrying function of blood, including haemoglobin carriers, perfluorocarbon emulsions and cultured red cells, none in general clinical use. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 5)
- [Artificial heart](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/artificial-heart): Mechanical devices that take over some or all of the heart's pumping function, from routine ventricular assist pumps to total replacements used mainly as a bridge to transplant. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 8)
- [Artificial womb](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/artificial-womb): A device that sustains fetal development outside a body by perfusing the umbilical circulation while the fetus remains immersed in fluid, tested so far only in animals. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 5)
- [Cochlear implant](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/cochlear-implant): An implanted device that restores a functional sense of hearing by stimulating the auditory nerve with electrical pulses, bypassing the ear's damaged hair cells. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [Cryonics](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/cryonics): The practice of preserving legally dead people at cryogenic temperatures in the hope that future medicine can repair and revive them. (status: contested; horizon: indefinite; TRL 2)
- [Decellularized scaffolds](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/decellularized-scaffolds): Donor tissues stripped of their cells to leave an extracellular matrix scaffold, used as surgical implants and as a route to rebuilding whole organs from a preserved vascular tree. (status: emerging; horizon: 2030s; TRL 6)
- [Head transplantation](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/head-transplant): The proposed transfer of a living human head onto a donor body, blocked chiefly by the inability to reconnect a severed spinal cord and rejected by mainstream neurosurgery. (status: contested; horizon: indefinite)
- [Human digital twins](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/human-digital-twins): Computational models of an individual person's physiology, built from that person's own data and run to predict what an intervention would do before it is attempted. (status: experimental; horizon: 2040s; TRL 4)
- [Human hibernation and torpor](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/human-hibernation): The proposal to induce a hibernation-like state of suppressed metabolism in people, and the distance between rodent torpor circuits and any clinical human application. (status: experimental; horizon: 2040s)
- [Immunosenescence](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/immunosenescence): The age-related remodelling of the immune system, in which responses to unfamiliar antigens weaken while chronic activation against familiar ones persists. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Induced pluripotent stem cells](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/induced-pluripotent-stem-cells): Adult cells reprogrammed back to an embryonic-like state, capable of becoming any cell type in the body and of being derived from a specific patient. (status: emerging; horizon: late 2020s; TRL 7)
- [Lab-grown organs](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/lab-grown-organs): The attempt to produce whole transplantable organs from cells rather than donors, currently limited to simple tissues, islet clusters and organs grown inside host animals. (status: experimental; horizon: 2040s; TRL 4)
- [Limb regeneration](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/limb-regeneration): The regrowth of an amputated limb from the stump, routine in salamanders and absent in mammals, and the biology that separates the two. (status: experimental; horizon: 2050s+)
- [Medical microrobots](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/microrobots-in-medicine): Micrometre- to millimetre-scale devices steered through the body by external magnetic, acoustic, or biological means, demonstrated in animals and used clinically only as capsule endoscopes. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 4)
- [Microgravity adaptation](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/microgravity-adaptation): The set of physiological and neural changes by which the human body reorganises itself for weightlessness, and the countermeasures that limit the cost of returning. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Myoelectric prosthetics](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/myoelectric-prosthetics): Externally powered artificial limbs controlled by electrical activity recorded from the wearer's residual muscles, the dominant design for powered upper-limb prostheses. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [Myostatin inhibition](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/myostatin-inhibition): Blockade of the growth factor myostatin to increase skeletal muscle mass, an effect reproduced across species that has repeatedly failed to translate into functional benefit in humans. (status: experimental; horizon: late 2020s; TRL 7)
- [Neuroprosthetics](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/neuroprosthetics): The engineering field that builds devices interfacing directly with the nervous system to restore lost sensory, motor, cognitive, or autonomic function. (status: emerging; horizon: present; TRL 7)
- [Organ bioprinting](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/organ-bioprinting): The additive manufacture of living tissue by depositing cells and biomaterials in a programmed pattern, pursued as a route to transplantable organs but limited so far to simple structures. (status: experimental; horizon: 2040s; TRL 4)
- [Organ shortage](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/organ-shortage): The persistent gap between the number of people who need a transplant and the number of usable donated organs, which drives most work on engineered and animal-derived replacements. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Organoids](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/organoids): Self-organizing tissue cultures grown from stem cells that reproduce some of the architecture and function of an organ, used mainly for disease modelling rather than transplantation. (status: emerging; horizon: present; TRL 5)
- [Osseointegration](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/osseointegration): The direct structural fusion of living bone to a titanium implant, the biological principle underlying dental implants and skeletally anchored limb prostheses. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 8)
- [Powered exoskeletons](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/exoskeleton): Wearable powered frames that apply force in parallel with the wearer's own limbs, used for gait rehabilitation, industrial load support, and proposed strength augmentation. (status: emerging; horizon: present; TRL 8)
- [Somatic gene therapy](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/somatic-gene-therapy): Genetic modification of a living person's body cells to treat disease, producing a change that is not passed on to their children. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [Space medicine](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/space-medicine): The medical discipline concerned with how spaceflight alters human physiology and with keeping crews functional in an environment the body did not evolve for. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Stem cell exhaustion](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/stem-cell-exhaustion): The age-related decline in the number and regenerative function of adult stem cells across blood, muscle, gut and skin, and the loss of repair capacity that follows. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Tissue engineering](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/tissue-engineering): The construction of living tissue from cells, scaffolds and signalling molecules, a field with approved products for skin and cartilage but no solid organ after three decades. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 7)
- [Uterus transplantation](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/uterus-transplantation): A temporary transplant of a donated uterus that lets a woman without a working one carry a pregnancy, then is removed so that immunosuppression can stop. (status: emerging; horizon: present; TRL 8)
- [Xenobots](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/xenobots): Sub-millimetre motile constructs assembled from frog embryonic cells and shaped by an evolutionary algorithm, classed as neither robots nor organisms in any settled sense. (status: experimental; horizon: 2040s; TRL 3)
- [Xenotransplantation](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/xenotransplantation): The transplantation of organs between species, now pursued with genetically engineered pigs whose antigens and clotting proteins have been altered to survive in a human recipient. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 6)

## Nanomedicine

Intervention at molecular scale: DNA origami devices, steered microrobots, and the long distance between design studies and machines.

- [Artificial blood](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/artificial-blood): Engineered substitutes for the oxygen-carrying function of blood, including haemoglobin carriers, perfluorocarbon emulsions and cultured red cells, none in general clinical use. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 5)
- [DNA nanotechnology](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/dna-nanotechnology): The use of DNA as a construction material rather than a carrier of genes, folding programmed sequences into nanoscale shapes, devices, and logic-gated containers. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 4)
- [Eric Drexler](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/eric-drexler): American engineer who proposed molecular nanotechnology, wrote Engines of Creation and Nanosystems, and later worked on AI strategy at Oxford. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Grey goo](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/grey-goo): The scenario in which self-replicating nanomachines consume the biosphere, an idea introduced by Eric Drexler in 1986 and later disowned by him. (status: speculative; horizon: indefinite)
- [Lipid nanoparticles](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/lipid-nanoparticles): Four-component lipid vesicles that carry mRNA and other nucleic acids into cells, the delivery system behind mRNA vaccines and the first systemic in vivo CRISPR therapies. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [Medical microrobots](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/microrobots-in-medicine): Micrometre- to millimetre-scale devices steered through the body by external magnetic, acoustic, or biological means, demonstrated in animals and used clinically only as capsule endoscopes. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 4)
- [Medical nanorobots](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/medical-nanorobots): Proposed micron-scale machines that would circulate in the body and perform mechanical repair, a design tradition with no working device and several unsolved physical constraints. (status: speculative; horizon: 2050s+; TRL 2)
- [Molecular assembler](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/molecular-assembler): A proposed machine that would build objects by positioning individual atoms, central to Drexler's nanotechnology programme and disputed by chemists since the 1990s. (status: contested; horizon: indefinite)
- [Nanoscale diagnostics](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/nanoparticle-diagnostics): Detection methods that read single molecules or use nanoscale labels, including liquid biopsy, multi-cancer blood tests, and nanopore sensing, together with their overdiagnosis costs. (status: emerging; horizon: present; TRL 8)
- [Neural dust and ultrasonic implants](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/neural-dust): A proposed class of millimetre-scale wireless implants powered and read out by ultrasound, intended to replace tethered electrode arrays with distributed untethered sensors. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 4)
- [Respirocytes](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/respirocytes): Robert Freitas's 1998 design study for an artificial red blood cell built as a pressurised micron-scale gas tank, widely cited and never built. (status: speculative; horizon: indefinite)
- [Robert Freitas](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/robert-freitas): American researcher whose Nanomedicine volumes set out detailed numerical designs for medical nanorobots, among them the respirocyte, none of which has been fabricated. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Targeted drug delivery](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/targeted-drug-delivery): The engineering of carriers and conjugates that concentrate a drug where it is needed, a field whose clinical successes have come from chemistry rather than from nanoparticle targeting. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 9)

## Space & Extreme Environments

Bodies off Earth: radiation, microgravity, torpor, and the choice between terraforming the world and re-engineering the traveller.

- [Closed-loop life support](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/closed-loop-life-support): Engineering that regenerates a crew's air, water, and food from their own waste, reducing the resupply mass that otherwise makes long-duration spaceflight impossible. (status: emerging; horizon: 2030s; TRL 5)
- [Generation ship biology](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/generation-ship-biology): The biological requirements of a crewed voyage lasting generations: population genetics, reproduction and development off Earth, and consent for people born in transit. (status: speculative; horizon: indefinite)
- [Human hibernation and torpor](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/human-hibernation): The proposal to induce a hibernation-like state of suppressed metabolism in people, and the distance between rodent torpor circuits and any clinical human application. (status: experimental; horizon: 2040s)
- [Microgravity adaptation](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/microgravity-adaptation): The set of physiological and neural changes by which the human body reorganises itself for weightlessness, and the countermeasures that limit the cost of returning. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Pantropy](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/pantropy): The proposal to engineer humans to suit other worlds rather than engineering those worlds to suit humans, and the ethical problems of designing offspring for an environment. (status: speculative; horizon: 2050s+)
- [Radiation tolerance in humans](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/radiation-hardening-humans): The problem of keeping humans healthy under deep-space radiation, and the shielding, pharmacological, and genetic strategies proposed to raise their tolerance. (status: speculative; horizon: 2040s)
- [Space medicine](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/space-medicine): The medical discipline concerned with how spaceflight alters human physiology and with keeping crews functional in an environment the body did not evolve for. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Tardigrade genes and human cells](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/tardigrade-genes): The attempt to transfer stress-tolerance proteins from tardigrades into human cells, and the gap between what those experiments showed and how they were reported. (status: experimental; horizon: 2040s)

## Ethics, Society & Governance

Who gets access, who decides, and what happens to institutions built on the assumption that people age and die on schedule.

- [Access and inequality](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/access-and-inequality): The problem of who can obtain expensive biomedical interventions, and whether biotechnology will convert economic inequality into biological inequality. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/asilomar-conference): The 1975 meeting at which molecular biologists lifted their own moratorium on recombinant DNA work by agreeing a system of physical and biological containment. (status: historical; horizon: historical)
- [Bioconservatism](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/bioconservatism): The position that biotechnological modification of human beings should face a strong presumption against it, grounded in dignity, precaution, or the value of the given. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Bioethics of enhancement](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/bioethics-of-enhancement): The philosophical and policy debate over whether biomedical means may legitimately be used to push human capacities beyond species-typical function. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Blue Zones](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/blue-zones): Five regions claimed to have unusually high concentrations of centenarians, and the lifestyle explanations built on that claim. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Compression of morbidity](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/compression-of-morbidity): The hypothesis that chronic illness can be postponed into a shorter interval before death, so that added years of life are healthy ones. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Consumer blood testing](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/consumer-blood-testing): The sale of clinical laboratory panels directly to asymptomatic consumers as preventive medicine, where accurate assays meet a screening logic that guidelines reject. (status: contested; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [Designer babies](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/designer-babies): A popular term for children whose traits are chosen before birth, covering a real but narrow practice of embryo selection and a largely hypothetical practice of embryo editing. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Dietary supplements](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/dietary-supplements): Vitamins, minerals, botanicals, and other compounds sold without pre-market approval, whose large randomized trials have repeatedly failed to show benefit in well-nourished adults. (status: contested; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [Differential technological development](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/differential-technological-development): Nick Bostrom's proposal to influence the order in which technologies arrive, hastening protective ones and delaying dangerous ones, rather than trying to halt progress. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Digital immortality](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/digital-immortality): The persistence of a person in digital form after death, ranging from chatbot reconstructions built from their data to the hypothetical emulation of their brain. (status: emerging; horizon: present)
- [Disability rights and enhancement](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/disability-rights-and-enhancement): The disability-rights critique of selection and enhancement, centred on the expressivist objection, the social model, and the difference between curing and accommodating. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Dual-use research of concern](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/dual-use-research): Life-science research that produces knowledge or tools with legitimate purposes but foreseeable potential for catastrophic misuse, and the oversight regimes built around it. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Ectogenesis](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/ectogenesis): The development of a mammalian embryo or fetus outside a body, either for part of gestation or for all of it, and the ethical arguments the prospect generates. (status: speculative; horizon: 2040s)
- [Effective accelerationism](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/effective-accelerationism): An online techno-optimist movement holding that technological acceleration is a moral imperative and that precautionary restraint on AI causes more harm than it prevents. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Engineered pandemics](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/engineered-pandemics): Outbreaks caused by a pathogen deliberately modified, synthesised, or released rather than one that emerged from nature, and the biosecurity programme built around preventing them. (status: speculative; horizon: present)
- [Enhancement arms race](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/enhancement-arms-race): The argument that competitive pressure makes enhancement effectively compulsory, so that individually rational adoption leaves everyone worse off. (status: contested; horizon: 2030s)
- [Enhancement in sport](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/enhancement-in-sport): The regulation of performance enhancement in competition, the only domain that draws an operational line between therapy and enhancement and litigates it case by case. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Existential risk](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/existential-risk): The category of risks that would end humanity or permanently destroy its potential, and the research programme built around identifying and reducing them. (status: contested; horizon: indefinite)
- [Future of humanity](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/future-of-humanity): The study of humanity's possible long-run trajectories, conventionally grouped into extinction, recurrent collapse, plateau, and posthuman transformation. (status: speculative; horizon: indefinite)
- [Gene drives](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/gene-drive): Genetic elements engineered to bias their own inheritance above the Mendelian half, allowing an introduced trait to spread through a wild population. (status: experimental; horizon: 2030s; TRL 5)
- [Genetic discrimination](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/genetic-discrimination): Differential treatment of people on the basis of genetic information, and the uneven legal regime that restricts it in employment and health cover but rarely elsewhere. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [GLP-1 receptor agonists](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/glp-1-receptor-agonists): Drugs that mimic the gut hormone GLP-1 to lower blood glucose and food intake, producing large weight loss that persists only while treatment continues. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [Governance of human genome editing](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/governance-of-genome-editing): The patchwork of national law, professional norms, funding rules, and international soft law that determines what may be done to a human genome and by whom. (status: emerging; horizon: present)
- [Grey goo](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/grey-goo): The scenario in which self-replicating nanomachines consume the biosphere, an idea introduced by Eric Drexler in 1986 and later disowned by him. (status: speculative; horizon: indefinite)
- [He Jiankui affair](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/he-jiankui-affair): The 2018 announcement that twin girls had been born from CRISPR-edited embryos in Shenzhen, and the scientific condemnation and criminal prosecution that followed. (status: historical; horizon: historical)
- [Human germline editing](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/germline-editing): Modification of human embryos, eggs, or sperm so that the genetic change is inherited by the resulting child and by all of their descendants. (status: contested; horizon: 2040s; TRL 4)
- [In vitro fertilisation](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/in-vitro-fertilisation): The routine clinical procedure in which eggs are fertilised outside the body and an embryo is transferred to a uterus, and the platform every other embryo technology is built on. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [Julian Savulescu](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/julian-savulescu): Australian bioethicist who formulated procreative beneficence and, with Ingmar Persson, the argument for moral bioenhancement; the leading academic advocate of human enhancement. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Leon Kass](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/leon-kass): American physician and bioethicist who chaired the President's Council on Bioethics and made the strongest philosophical case that mortality gives human life its meaning. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Mental privacy](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/mental-privacy): The question of what can be inferred about a person's mental states from neural and physiological recordings, and what protection that information should receive. (status: emerging; horizon: late 2020s)
- [Mirror life](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/mirror-life): Hypothetical organisms built from mirror-image biological molecules, which a large group of scientists argued in 2024 could evade immunity and predation and should not be created. (status: speculative; horizon: 2050s+)
- [Moral enhancement](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/moral-enhancement): The proposal to improve human moral motivation by biomedical means, argued for as a response to technologies that outpace evolved moral psychology. (status: speculative; horizon: indefinite)
- [Morphological freedom](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/morphological-freedom): The claimed right to modify one's own body and mind as one chooses, and the correlative right to refuse modification imposed by others. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Neurorights](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/neurorights): A proposed set of human rights covering mental privacy, cognitive liberty, and mental integrity, drafted in response to brain-recording and brain-stimulation technology. (status: emerging; horizon: present)
- [Nick Bostrom](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/nick-bostrom): Swedish philosopher who defined existential risk as a field, wrote Superintelligence, and formulated the simulation argument and the vulnerable world hypothesis. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Off-target effects in genome editing](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/crispr-off-target-effects): Unintended DNA changes caused by genome editors, either at sites resembling the target or at the target itself, and the assays used to find them. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Organ shortage](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/organ-shortage): The persistent gap between the number of people who need a transplant and the number of usable donated organs, which drives most work on engineered and animal-derived replacements. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Overpopulation and life extension](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/overpopulation-and-longevity): The objection that extending human lifespan would cause unsustainable population growth, and the demographic modelling that finds the effect smaller than assumed. (status: contested; horizon: 2050s+)
- [Personal identity and continuity](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/personal-identity-and-continuity): The question of what makes a person at one time the same person as at another, and what — if anything — must be preserved for that person to survive. (status: contested; horizon: indefinite)
- [Polygenic embryo screening](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/polygenic-embryo-screening): The ranking of IVF embryos by polygenic risk scores computed from their inferred genotypes, sold commercially since 2019 and rejected as unvalidated by professional genetics bodies. (status: contested; horizon: present; TRL 7)
- [Posthuman](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/posthuman): A hypothetical being whose central capacities exceed the human maximum, and, in a separate scholarly tradition, a critique of the humanist subject itself. (status: speculative; horizon: indefinite)
- [Precautionary principle](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/precautionary-principle): The regulatory doctrine that scientific uncertainty about a serious or irreversible harm is not by itself a reason to permit the activity that might cause it. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Procreative beneficence](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/procreative-beneficence): Julian Savulescu's principle that prospective parents have moral reason to select, among the children they could have, the one expected to live the best life. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Quantified self](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/quantified-self): A movement and a method for learning about oneself through personal measurement, built on n-of-1 self-experiment and named by two Wired editors in 2007. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Right to die and the duty to live](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/right-to-die-and-right-to-live): How the law and ethics of assisted dying interact with radical life extension, and whether an indefinitely extendable life could still be voluntarily ended. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [The longevity dividend](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/longevity-dividend): The argument that slowing biological aging would produce economic gains larger than curing any individual disease, and the disputes over how that value is calculated. (status: contested; horizon: 2030s)

## People & Movements

The researchers, philosophers, and subcultures who built these ideas — and the arguments they have with each other.

- [Anders Sandberg](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/anders-sandberg): Swedish computational neuroscientist and futures researcher who co-wrote the whole brain emulation roadmap and works on the physical limits of long-term civilization. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Aubrey de Grey](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/aubrey-de-grey): British biogerontologist who proposed the SENS damage-repair framework for rejuvenation and popularized the idea of longevity escape velocity. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Biohacking and grinders](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/biohacking): The practice of modifying one's own biology outside institutional medicine, ranging from subdermal implants to do-it-yourself gene transfer and open-source medical devices. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Cynthia Kenyon](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/cynthia-kenyon): American molecular geneticist whose 1993 finding that a single daf-2 mutation doubles the lifespan of C. elegans made aging a tractable genetic problem. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [David Sinclair](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/david-sinclair): Australian-American biologist at Harvard known for sirtuin and NAD+ research, the information theory of aging, and disputes over the strength of his public claims. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Effective accelerationism](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/effective-accelerationism): An online techno-optimist movement holding that technological acceleration is a moral imperative and that precautionary restraint on AI causes more harm than it prevents. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Emmanuelle Charpentier](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/emmanuelle-charpentier): French microbiologist who identified the second RNA that CRISPR-Cas9 requires, co-authored the 2012 paper that made the system programmable, and shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Eric Drexler](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/eric-drexler): American engineer who proposed molecular nanotechnology, wrote Engines of Creation and Nanosystems, and later worked on AI strategy at Oxford. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Extropianism](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/extropianism): The first organized transhumanist movement, built around a set of optimistic principles for self-directed human transformation and dissolved as an institution in 2006. (status: historical; horizon: historical)
- [FM-2030](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/fm-2030): Iranian-American futurist, born Fereidoun M. Esfandiary, who defined the transhuman as a transitional being and was cryopreserved on his death in 2000. (status: historical; horizon: historical)
- [George Church](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/george-church): American geneticist who helped invent direct genomic sequencing, founded the Personal Genome Project, and co-founded dozens of biotechnology companies. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Humanity+](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/humanity-plus): The main international transhumanist membership organization, founded in 1998 as the World Transhumanist Association and now largely dormant as an institution. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Jennifer Doudna](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/jennifer-doudna): American biochemist who co-authored the 2012 paper showing CRISPR-Cas9 could be programmed to cut chosen DNA sequences, and shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Julian Savulescu](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/julian-savulescu): Australian bioethicist who formulated procreative beneficence and, with Ingmar Persson, the argument for moral bioenhancement; the leading academic advocate of human enhancement. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Leon Kass](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/leon-kass): American physician and bioethicist who chaired the President's Council on Bioethics and made the strongest philosophical case that mortality gives human life its meaning. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Leonard Hayflick](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/leonard-hayflick): American microbiologist who showed in 1961 that normal human cells divide a finite number of times in culture, and who argued for fifty years afterwards that aging is not a disease. (status: historical; horizon: historical)
- [Max More](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/max-more): British-American philosopher who founded extropianism, wrote the principles that gave transhumanism its first organized programme, and led Alcor from 2011 to 2020. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Natasha Vita-More](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/natasha-vita-more): American designer and theorist who wrote the Transhumanist Arts Statement, designed the Primo Posthuman body concept, and led Humanity+ for much of the 2010s. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Nick Bostrom](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/nick-bostrom): Swedish philosopher who defined existential risk as a field, wrote Superintelligence, and formulated the simulation argument and the vulnerable world hypothesis. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Nir Barzilai](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/nir-barzilai): Israeli-American physician-scientist whose centenarian genetics work and proposed TAME trial aim to make aging itself an acceptable regulatory indication. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Ray Kurzweil](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/ray-kurzweil): American inventor and futurist who formulated the law of accelerating returns and forecasts human-level machine intelligence by 2029 and a technological singularity by 2045. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Robert Freitas](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/robert-freitas): American researcher whose Nanomedicine volumes set out detailed numerical designs for medical nanorobots, among them the respirocyte, none of which has been fabricated. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Shinya Yamanaka](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/shinya-yamanaka): Japanese physician-scientist who showed that four transcription factors can reprogram adult cells to a pluripotent state, sharing the 2012 Nobel Prize for the discovery. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Singularitarianism](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/singularitarianism): The belief that a technological singularity is likely and that it should be actively prepared for, together with the movements organized around that belief. (status: contested; horizon: indefinite)
- [Steve Horvath](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/steve-horvath): German-American biostatistician who built the first multi-tissue epigenetic clock, giving aging research a quantitative readout it could test and argue about. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Transhumanism](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/transhumanism): The intellectual and cultural movement holding that human beings can and should use technology to overcome the biological limits of the human condition. (status: established; horizon: present)

## Organizations

The labs, companies, foundations, and prizes putting capital behind the field — and what they have shipped so far.

- [Alcor Life Extension Foundation](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/alcor): A United States cryonics organization, founded in 1972, that preserves legally dead members at cryogenic temperatures under a trust structure meant to fund storage indefinitely. (status: established; horizon: indefinite)
- [Altos Labs](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/altos-labs): A biotechnology company launched in 2022 with about three billion dollars in committed funding to develop cellular rejuvenation programming as a medicine. (status: emerging; horizon: 2030s)
- [Buck Institute for Research on Aging](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/buck-institute): An independent research institute in Novato, California, opened in 1999 as the first in the world dedicated solely to the biology of aging. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Calico Life Sciences](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/calico): Alphabet's independent biotechnology company, founded in 2013 to study the biology of aging and develop interventions against age-related disease. (status: established; horizon: 2030s)
- [Colossal Biosciences](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/colossal-biosciences): A Texas biotechnology company founded in 2021 to recreate extinct species by editing the genomes of living relatives, and to spin out conservation technology from that work. (status: contested; horizon: late 2020s)
- [Humanity+](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/humanity-plus): The main international transhumanist membership organization, founded in 1998 as the World Transhumanist Association and now largely dormant as an institution. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Loyal](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/loyal): A biotechnology company developing drugs to extend healthy lifespan in dogs, working through the veterinary regulator that will consider lifespan itself as an indication. (status: emerging; horizon: late 2020s)
- [Methuselah Foundation](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/methuselah-foundation): A Virginia nonprofit founded in the early 2000s that used prize competitions to seed research on life extension, regenerative medicine and organ engineering. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Neuralink](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/neuralink): American neurotechnology company founded in 2016 developing a wireless implanted brain–computer interface with flexible electrode threads inserted by a surgical robot. (status: emerging; horizon: late 2020s)
- [NewLimit](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/newlimit): A biotechnology company founded in 2021 to screen transcription-factor combinations that restore youthful function to aged cells without changing their identity. (status: emerging; horizon: 2030s)
- [Retro Biosciences](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/retro-biosciences): A longevity biotechnology company funded by Sam Altman with the stated goal of adding ten years of healthy life, working on autophagy, reprogramming and plasma-inspired therapies. (status: emerging; horizon: 2030s)
- [SENS Research Foundation](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/sens-research-foundation): A California nonprofit founded in 2009 to fund rejuvenation research organized around seven categories of accumulated cellular damage, renamed Lifespan Research Institute in 2024. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Synchron](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/synchron): A neurotechnology company developing an endovascular brain–computer interface implanted through a blood vessel rather than by opening the skull. (status: emerging; horizon: late 2020s)
- [XPRIZE Healthspan](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/xprize-healthspan): A $101 million incentive competition launched in 2023 that rewards a therapy restoring at least a decade of muscle, cognitive and immune function in older adults. (status: emerging; horizon: late 2020s)

## Foundational Concepts

The cross-cutting ideas — singularity, posthuman, readiness, precaution — that every other article eventually leans on.

- [Accelerating change](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/accelerating-change): The claim that technological capability grows exponentially or faster, so that the rate of change itself increases over historical time. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [AI drug discovery](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/ai-drug-discovery): The use of machine learning to select drug targets, generate candidate molecules and predict failure, so far demonstrably faster at making compounds than at making medicines. (status: emerging; horizon: late 2020s; TRL 5)
- [AI protein design](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/ai-protein-design): Machine-learning systems that predict what shape a protein sequence folds into and that generate new proteins with no natural counterpart. (status: emerging; horizon: present; TRL 5)
- [Artificial general intelligence](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/artificial-general-intelligence): A hypothetical artificial system matching or exceeding competent human performance across essentially all cognitive tasks rather than in narrow domains. (status: contested; horizon: indefinite)
- [Brain–computer interface](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/brain-computer-interface): A system that measures nervous-system activity, decodes an intention or state from it, and converts that decoded signal into a command for an external device. (status: emerging; horizon: late 2020s; TRL 6)
- [Cancer](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/cancer): The class of diseases in which a somatic cell lineage escapes the controls on its own division, and the age-related cause of death that constrains most life-extension arguments. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [CRISPR–Cas9](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/crispr-cas9): A bacterial defence system repurposed as a programmable DNA-cutting tool, in which a short guide RNA directs the Cas9 enzyme to a chosen sequence in almost any genome. (status: established; horizon: present; TRL 9)
- [Differential technological development](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/differential-technological-development): Nick Bostrom's proposal to influence the order in which technologies arrive, hastening protective ones and delaying dangerous ones, rather than trying to halt progress. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Existential risk](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/existential-risk): The category of risks that would end humanity or permanently destroy its potential, and the research programme built around identifying and reducing them. (status: contested; horizon: indefinite)
- [Future of humanity](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/future-of-humanity): The study of humanity's possible long-run trajectories, conventionally grouped into extinction, recurrent collapse, plateau, and posthuman transformation. (status: speculative; horizon: indefinite)
- [Geroscience hypothesis](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/geroscience-hypothesis): The proposition that aging is the shared upstream driver of most chronic disease, so that slowing it would delay many conditions at once rather than one at a time. (status: emerging; horizon: 2030s)
- [Hallmarks of aging](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/hallmarks-of-aging): The consensus taxonomy of cellular and molecular processes held to drive mammalian aging, set out as nine mechanisms in 2013 and expanded to twelve in 2023. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Healthspan](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/healthspan): The portion of life spent in good health and function, as distinct from total lifespan; widely used as a goal but not standardized as a measure. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Human digital twins](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/human-digital-twins): Computational models of an individual person's physiology, built from that person's own data and run to predict what an intervention would do before it is attempted. (status: experimental; horizon: 2040s; TRL 4)
- [Human enhancement](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/human-enhancement): The deliberate use of biomedical or technical means to extend human capacities beyond what is needed to restore or maintain ordinary health. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Human–AI merger](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/human-ai-merger): The proposal that humans and artificial intelligence will form a single cognitive system rather than remaining separate agents that merely use one another. (status: speculative; horizon: 2040s)
- [Longevity escape velocity](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/longevity-escape-velocity): The hypothetical threshold at which medicine adds remaining life expectancy faster than time subtracts it, making death by aging recede indefinitely. (status: speculative; horizon: 2050s+)
- [Posthuman](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/posthuman): A hypothetical being whose central capacities exceed the human maximum, and, in a separate scholarly tradition, a critique of the humanist subject itself. (status: speculative; horizon: indefinite)
- [Precautionary principle](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/precautionary-principle): The regulatory doctrine that scientific uncertainty about a serious or irreversible harm is not by itself a reason to permit the activity that might cause it. (status: contested; horizon: present)
- [Substrate independence](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/substrate-independence): The claim that mental states depend on a system's functional organization rather than on the material implementing it, so that a mind could run on non-biological hardware. (status: contested; horizon: indefinite)
- [Technological singularity](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/technological-singularity): The hypothesized point at which machine intelligence begins improving itself fast enough that technological change outruns human ability to predict or steer it. (status: speculative; horizon: indefinite)
- [Technology readiness level](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/technology-readiness-level): A nine-point scale, originating at NASA, that rates how far a technology has moved from observed basic principles to proven operational use. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Transhumanism](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/transhumanism): The intellectual and cultural movement holding that human beings can and should use technology to overcome the biological limits of the human condition. (status: established; horizon: present)
- [Whole brain emulation](https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/whole-brain-emulation): A proposed procedure for reproducing a particular mind by scanning one brain's structure in detail, building a computational model from the scan, and running it. (status: speculative; horizon: 2050s+)

## Site structure

- [Portals](https://futurehumanwiki.com/portals): the thirteen subject areas
- [A-Z index](https://futurehumanwiki.com/all): every article
- [Horizon timeline](https://futurehumanwiki.com/timeline): the corpus arranged by when each topic lands
- [Readiness matrix](https://futurehumanwiki.com/readiness): every technology by TRL and evidence grade
- [In humans](https://futurehumanwiki.com/in-humans): what each subject has been shown to do in people, in the editor's own words
- [Knowledge graph](https://futurehumanwiki.com/graph): the link structure
- [Open questions](https://futurehumanwiki.com/open-questions): every stated limit on the corpus's own claims
- [Sources](https://futurehumanwiki.com/sources): every citation in the corpus, grouped, with the papers shared between articles
- [Recent changes](https://futurehumanwiki.com/changes): every revision saved to the wiki, newest first, with diffs
- [Updated dates](https://futurehumanwiki.com/recent): articles grouped by the updated date their editors set, and how that field reconciles with the log
- [Glossary](https://futurehumanwiki.com/glossary): terms of art
- [Tools](https://futurehumanwiki.com/tools): interactive models
- [Editorial policy](https://futurehumanwiki.com/editorial-policy): how articles are written and graded

## Machine-readable

- [Data documentation](https://futurehumanwiki.com/data): what each endpoint below contains, and how to cite it
- [Corpus](https://futurehumanwiki.com/corpus.json): JSON, all 205 articles with every classification field, the link graph in both directions, and per-article revision counts and timestamps
- [Taxonomy](https://futurehumanwiki.com/taxonomy.json): JSON, the controlled vocabularies with their definitions — read this to interpret the corpus
- [Article source](https://futurehumanwiki.com/raw/aav-vectors): markdown, one article exactly as written — the pattern is https://futurehumanwiki.com/raw/<slug>. Footnote source types, citation notes, data blocks and [[wikilinks]] survive here and do not survive the HTML
- [Full corpus](https://futurehumanwiki.com/llms-full.txt): plain text, every article's markdown source in one document. Large — its own header says how large
- [Search index](https://futurehumanwiki.com/search-index.json): JSON, the site's own search cache. Abbreviated keys, truncated bodies, no link graph — use /corpus.json instead
- [Full-text search index](https://futurehumanwiki.com/search-index-full.json): JSON, an inverted index over the corpus text, built for this site's search box
- Revision history: HTML only. One article's log is at https://futurehumanwiki.com/wiki/<slug>/history, a single version at /history/<number>, a diff at /diff/<older>/<newer>. There is no JSON endpoint for the log; /corpus.json carries the per-article counts and timestamps
- [Sitemap](https://futurehumanwiki.com/sitemap.xml) · [RSS](https://futurehumanwiki.com/feed.xml)