How to Build a Human: Adventures in How We Are Made and Who We Are

Having your skin grown into neurons that assemble themselves into a brain organoid is a pretty convincing way to find out how obsolete that notion is. All the more so when you see it through the microscope and realize that this is not merely some trick of preservation. Life on that scale is multitudinous, and thriving, and it has a plan of sorts.

Life? Whose life?

Not mine, exactly – and yet who else’s can it be? Those cells are autonomous – but why any more so than the cells still in my arm, in my real brain (the need for that specifying adjective still makes me blink), my surging blood and beating heart? And so I come by degrees to accept the inevitable truth: I am a colony of cells, whose cooperation lets me draw breath, whose communication produces my sense of identity and uniqueness.

That is what is fundamentally disconcerting about our own flesh. It grew as a colony from a single cell, and we’re not quite sure where (or when) in this teeming morass to pin the label “me”.

The new cell technologies are making it impossible for us any longer to ignore this fact. I won’t pretend that I know how to normalize it, but I think there is a strange kind of liberation that can come from letting ourselves be unsettled by it.

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