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Freeman: Death will someday
come for us all.
[ Thunder crashes ]
But are the dead
really gone forever?
Advances in medicine and
bold leaps in computer science
may soon allow the dead
to walk the earth again
or survive in some
other strange, new form.
Can we resurrect the dead?
Space, time, life itself.
The secrets of the cosmos
lie through the wormhole.
Original Air Date on July 11, 2012
Death is
our ultimate destination,
a place from which
no one ever returns.
But what if
death was not the end?
We each have
a genetic blueprint,
one that science can now read.
Soon, it may be possible to
reproduce my body after I die.
But what about the lifetime
of knowledge and experience
contained in here?
Will we ever have the tools
to raise body and soul
from the dead?
All of us must eventually come
face-to-face with death.
No matter how hard we wish
to hold on to someone we love,
sometimes,
we just have to let go.
I had a dog
I loved to go exploring with.
[ Whines ]
But worms
had eaten away at his heart.
The pain of saying goodbye
forever cuts deep,
but it is unavoidable.
Or is it?
[ Breathes deeply ]
[ Flatline ]
Freeman:
This patient is dead.
He has no heartbeat,
no respiration,
no blood flowing
through his heart.
But today, he will be brought
back to life by this man,
heart surgeon John Elefteriades
of Yale-New Haven hospital.
John regularly kills his
patients, then resurrects them.
Once I got to medical school
and residency,
heart surgery was the only thing
I ever wanted to do.
At that time, it was kind of
like being a fighter pilot
within medicine,
if you know what I mean.
It was exploring the frontiers.
It was high-risk.
Freeman: John still flies at the
edge of the surgical horizon.
Today, he's trying to repair
a severely damaged heart,
a heart that can't be fixed
while blood flows through it.
The heart must be shut down,
but doing so
will cut off the blood supply
to the patient's brain,
starving it of oxygen.
John needs 45 minutes
to operate.
At normal temperatures,
the brain will begin to die
after just five minutes.
John's radical solution
is to freeze the patient into
a state of suspended animation.
[ Flatline ]
The brain doesn't tolerate
more than a momentary
interruption of blood flow.
If the interruption
of blood flow
goes beyond several minutes,
then the brain cells
start to die,
and that's where the protection
of low temperature
gives us the opportunity
to protect
the very vulnerable brain.
Freeman: The patient's warm blood
has been drained from his body,
run through a bypass machine
filled with ice,
then pumped back through
his veins and arteries.
This has gradually cooled him
down to 18 degrees Centigrade --
The activity of his cells
and neurons cannot be measured.
If you had
a general practitioner
or a cardiologist
or somebody come in
and use their regular criteria
for life or death,
all the criteria for death
would be fulfilled.
At this point, the heart-lung
machine and the respirator --
the devices that keep him
alive -- are shut off --
no breathing,
no blood pumping --
a condition virtually identical
to death.
[ Flatline ]
John has 45 minutes to operate
in safety.
After an hour,
brain damage will set in.
Now his decades of experience
come into play.
We're still
in suspended animation.
So we've got 15 minutes to go
for safety.
Freeman: Finally,
John and his team
manage to complete the repairs
with seven minutes to spare.
The patient has been
virtually dead for 38 minutes.
They slowly bring back
life support,
returning him
to the land of the living with
no damage to the brain.
Each and every day, I'm amazed
that this can be done.
The definition of death
has changed, really,
and death is death
when it's permanent.
But those criteria
in this very, very special
high-technology scenario
of suspended animation
or deep hypothermic arrest --
those criteria for death
don't really apply.
Freeman:
But can we bring life back
to those who die
in less controlled situations?
[ Thunder crashes ]
Lance Becker is the director of
the University of Pennsylvania's
Center
for Resuscitation Science.
He believes
the key to resurrection
is buried deep within our cells.
Well, what we've known for just
literally thousands of years
is that, if you keep meat cold,
it keeps longer.
The decay process, which is
actually that death process --
[slowly] All of those things
are slowed down
in the cold setting.
[ Normal voice ]
When the temperature comes down,
the cells don't need
as much oxygen,
they don't metabolize as much,
and they essentially sort of go
into slow-mo, hibernation-style.
Freeman: Your body is made of tens
of trillions of living cells.
Regulatory genes
tell these cells how to behave.
Think of them
as the cells' operating system.
At the end of a cell's life,
the genes produce
destructive enzymes
that tear the cell apart.
Every day, roughly 50 billion
of your cells die.
When something
goes very wrong --
say, you suffer
a cardiac arrest --
the injured cells
sound an alarm,
telling their healthy neighbors
it's time to die.
This sets off
a wave of cellular suicide
that spreads rapidly
across the body.
We don't die by accident.
There's biological programming
that actually controls
the way we die.
And in that programming
is the opportunity
for modifying that program
so that we can alter
the outcome --
bring someone back to life.
Freeman: To find out what
triggers the death program,
Lance took healthy cells
and starved them of oxygen.
He expected
most of the cells to die
and the survivors to flourish
when oxygen was restored.
Dr.
Becker:
So, what I found
was the opposite of what
we thought we would find,
which is the cells
without oxygen
just sort of laid there.
They didn't do anything,
but they didn't die.
But what happened was, when
we reoxygenated those cells,
that's when cell death occurred.
So it is a little bit ironic
that oxygen, the molecule that
we love and that we live with,
becomes the molecule
that drives death.
Freeman: Somehow,
reintroducing oxygen into cells
triggers the death signal
that causes them
to commit mass suicide.
[ Grunting ]
Freezing seems to interrupt
this process.
Lance pressed on,
knowing that, if he found
the death signal's source,
he might be able to stop it
from transmitting
without the need for freezing.
As we began to ask ourselves,
"What could explain
this sort of bizarre behavior?"
We started seeing
cellular pathways.
All of the paths led us to
the organelle inside our cells
that we call the mitochondria.
Freeman: Mitochondria lie deep within
every single cell of your body.
They take the food you eat
and the oxygen you breathe
and convert them
into chemical energy.
Dr.
Becker: In some ways, it's a little bit
like a nuclear power plant.
And you know how,
in a nuclear power plant,
there are rods that come together and
they produce the heat,
and if you don't control
that process,
you end up with Chernobyl.
What happens is, after
one mitochondria goes nuclear,
it starts to trigger
a chain reaction
that amplifies the death signal,
and that death signal can be
spread throughout the body.
[ Gags ]
Freeman:
Lance and his team suspect
we might be able to stop
this chain reaction
by poisoning our mitochondria
with sulfide, cyanide,
and carbon monoxide.
A finely calibrated dose
of these toxins
might disarm the death signal.
It will be quicker
than freezing,
and it could reverse
a cellular meltdown.
So, ideally,
what we'd like to do
is we'd like to get a few
of those molecules on board
as we're beginning to bring
oxygen back to the patient.
We think we can restart
that mitochondria,
have it convert back
to producing energy
instead of producing death.
Freeman: These treatments
are still highly experimental.
But if doctors can silence
the death signal,
it may soon be commonplace
to revive the dying
and the recently dead.
[ Thunder crashes ]
Medical science
has already proven
that the dead can live again
under a very controlled
set of circumstances.
But can it take us further?
What if we could grow the dead
back to life?
Imagine how much richer
humanity might be
if we could raise Einstein
or Mozart from the grave
or how much it would mean
to us personally
if we could bring back
the loved ones we have lost?
It may be possible.
Cloning has opened up
a new road to resurrection
But should we take it?
Bob Lanza was born into
a working-class Boston family.
Today, he owns an island
in Massachusetts
and lives
in a sprawling compound
that's part house,
part natural-history museum.
These are the fruits
of a career in biotechnology.
Lanza:
Here's a brontosaurus femur.
One of the first things people ask me
when they come into the house
is, "Bob,
are you gonna clone that?"
And I tell them,
"you can't clone from stone.
You need a living cell.
"
Freeman:
Over the last decade,
Bob has successfully cloned
mice, cows, cats, dogs,
pigs, sheep, and horses.
In 2001, he used frozen cells
to successfully resurrect
an extinct southeast Asian ox
called a Gaur,
using an American cow
as a surrogate mother.
Everyone said,
"no, that won't work.
You can't clone one species
using the egg from another one.
"
And I said, "no, no, no.
If
we do it and it's close enough,
we should get it to work.
"
So I actually took skin cells
from the Gaur,
and I actually put the DNA
into an ordinary cow egg.
And then we created these
spectacular little Gaur embryos,
and we shipped them off to Iowa,
where they were implanted
into an ordinary cow.
And it turns out
that, 10 months later,
we had this beautiful
little baby Gaur that was born.
It looked like a little
baby reindeer -- just adorable.
Freeman: But where Bob sees
beauty, others see monstrosity.
Opponents of cloning
say he's playing God.
Bob doesn't see it that way.
Cloning really
isn't all that unusual.
For thousands of years,
people have been cloning plants.
You can actually start by taking
a clipping from a plant --
you get
some of the genetic material --
and then add
a little nutrients
get it to root,
and to basically clone
an entire new organism.
Freeman: Humanity has mastered
the cloning of plants,
and we are now working our way
through the animal kingdom.
Could we someday take
the DNA of dead people
and bring their bodies
back to life?
Can we cultivate a garden
of resurrected humans?
[ Owl hooting ]
Imagine a world
where a woman could bring back
her deceased husband
by giving birth to him
or a man could bring back
his mother
and raise her as his daughter.
If we have a living cell
of a dead person,
certainly, we could, in theory,
clone that individual.
We published a paper
about a year or two ago
where we show we can actually
now create human embryos
that are genetically identical
to a normal embryo.
The only way
you would really know
whether you could clone
a human being
is to actually implant
that embryo
into the uterus
of a surrogate mother.
Of course,
we cannot implant those --
that would be considered
unethical --
so it's unclear
whether or not they would --
would give rise
to a human being.
Freeman: Society has vehemently rejected
reproductive human cloning.
In this climate,
it is extremely difficult
for geneticists to obtain
funding for their research.
There is
also a shortage of material.
Lanza: So, one of the problems
with human cloning
is the supply of eggs.
So, with a mouse or a cow,
we can get literally hundreds,
if not thousands, of eggs.
We can go to the slaughterhouse,
for instance,
and get them for a dollar each
and get thousands
of these cow eggs.
With the humans, it took us over
a year just to get five eggs.
Freeman:
Even if you had the eggs,
it could take hundreds
of pregnancies
to perfect human cloning,
a process that could result
in scores of babies
with horrific genetic damage.
Lanza:
It'd be very much like --
if you wanted to clone
your child,
it'd be like sending him up
in a rocket
with a 50-50 chance
it would blow up.
Freeman: In most of the world,
cloning humans is not illegal.
One day, a rogue scientist
will pull it off.
But cloning a person is not the
same as duplicating a person.
Lanza: A lot of people,
you know, who have their pets --
they want to often clone them,
and they want Fluffy back.
And what I tell them is, "you're
not gonna get Fluffy back.
"
As a matter of fact, we actually
clone entire herds of cows
from a single cell
from the same animal,
and they develop
a whole hierarchy,
just like we do in humans.
So you have timid cows
and aggressive cows,
and they're all clones.
So they develop
their own behavioral patters.
So the environment
has a very profound impact
on your development.
Freeman: Let's say we decide
to take DNA from Einstein's hair
and grow some new Einsteins.
Those clones would not be the
man who wrote "E = MC squared.
"
Each would have
a unique personality
shaped by his environment.
[ Cellphone rings ]
[ Speaking indistinctly ]
Clones are like identical twins
born years apart --
they may be similar,
but they will not be the same.
Perhaps the key
to life after death
is not to grow
an entirely new body,
but to resurrect
the one you have.
At the moment, our society
does not permit human cloning,
but that could change.
In the meantime,
biotechnologists have another
trick up their sleeves --
resurrecting people
piece by piece.
It's an approach that
could transform medical science
and blur the line
between life and death.
The revolution begins here,
in a laboratory
the University of Minnesota.
This is where Dr.
Doris Taylor
breathes life back
into the dead.
Dr.
Taylor:
I just want to change the world.
I want to change the world
for people with disease.
I also have a brother
who's chronically ill,
and that's probably influenced
everything I've done in my life.
Tipler: Doris is changing the
world by growing new body parts
from the shells of old ones.
She takes organs from cadavers
and reanimates them
using a method drawn from an
unlikely source -- architecture.
Dr.
Taylor:
The bricks in a building
are just like the cells
in an organ --
different kinds,
different shapes.
And they make rooms,
and the rooms are like
the chambers of a heart.
They're connected by doorways,
like the valves.
They have hallways,
like the arteries and veins.
Essentially,
you can think of an organ
just like you think
of a building.
Freeman: Just as buildings
can be rebuilt brick by brick,
Doris believes bodies
can be rebuilt cell by cell.
In building construction,
they use a scaffold that --
like you see here --
to essentially provide access
to otherwise inaccessible areas
and to create a framework
for what they're gonna build.
We essentially do the same thing
in the laboratory with an organ.
We create a framework
on which we can put cells.
Freeman:
Doris reanimates major organs,
including
livers, lungs, and hearts.
Dr.
Taylor:
This is a ghost heart.
This is essentially
the framework, or scaffold,
on which the cells sit.
And by washing out
all the cells,
what we have left is a scaffold
that we can repopulate with
cells to now build a new organ.
So, essentially, this scaffold
is what tells cells
how to join together
and become a heart.
Freeman: What happens
when you put fresh cells
into a decellularized heart?
This -- a modern miracle.
Right now,
if you need a body part,
you face the grim prospect
of organ rejection,
but Doris' replacement organs --
heart, kidneys, and livers --
will be tailor-made
for your body.
We'll take an organ from a pig,
strip all the cells,
take your stem cells,
put them in that organ,
and build something
that matches you.
Freeman:
So, if Doris and her team
can bring hearts and livers back
from the dead,
could they also reanimate
a human brain?
Dr.
Taylor: Now, could we build
a cluster of neurons
and glial cells
and everything that looks like
part of a brain or a brain?
I have no doubt that, one day,
we'll be able to do that.
Can we resurrect you and
who you are -- your personality?
I don't think we know
how to do that yet.
Freeman: It's more likely this technology
will be used
to replace damaged sections
of the brain,
perhaps even extending its life
beyond the rest of the body.
[ Thunder crashing ]
But can we go even further?
As we die, could we have
our brains transplanted
into healthy donor bodies?
[ Thunder crashes ]
I suspect the biggest challenge
to a brain transplant
is keeping it alive
during the time of removing it
from an individual
and all the connections that
would have to be recapitulated
in a transplanted individual,
because unlike the heart,
it's not just about hooking up
the blood supply.
It'd also be about hooking up
the spinal cord,
hooking up all the nerves.
I can't imagine how we could
make all those connections
in a timely way
that maintain function.
Freeman: But do we even need
to have physical brains?
The key to resurrection
is to restore what
fundamentally makes us unique --
the contents of our minds.
As technology advances, the
prospect of copying our brains
becomes more and more likely.
Bringing the dead back to life
may just be a matter
of combining
the right zeroes and ones.
Our lives are continually
monitored by technology.
Almost everything we do
leaves a digital trail.
This immense library
of information
may still exist
long after we die.
If we gathered up a lifetime
of these digital footprints,
could we use them to bring
someone back from the dead?
These students
could be the first humans
to rise from the dead.
They call themselves
extreme lifeloggers.
And they are digitally archiving
their existence.
Everything they see and hear,
wherever they go,
whomever they are with,
how fast their hearts beat,
even how much they sweat --
it's all recorded
onto hard drives
at Dublin City University.
This is the brainchild
of search-engine specialist
Cathal Gurrin.
Hey, how did it go?
Pretty well.
Woman: It was fun.
How about the weather -- was it cold?
Bit cold.
You got the devices.
We can have a look?
Yes.
Accelerometer.
Yes, accelerometer.
Here is mine.
Oh, thank you.
And the camera.
Camera.
Great.
Thanks.
Let's have a look.
Freeman: Cathal has recorded
his own life for 5 1/2 years.
So far, he has gathered
over 8 1/2 million images
and sensor readings.
So here's, for example,
a typical day in my life --
on the 10th of November.
Here you can see
what I did on that day.
I got up in the morning.
I made breakfast.
I went to my office.
I worked pretty much all
of the day, with a coffee break,
and then, driving home at night,
going by a restaurant
on the way.
The software we have
has managed to take about 3,000
pictures on that day
and summarized them down
into this collection
of about 30 pictures.
Freeman: Cathal is creating
an auxiliary memory --
something that can be searched
when his biological memory
fails him,
preserved in a medium far more
accurate than the human brain.
When you're faced
with this kind of data
about your life --
your life in the past --
then you start to identify times you
make mistakes in your memory.
It becomes very apparent
when you remember an event
in the past
and you go back to look at it --
the differences in the reality
versus what
you actually see itself.
And that's where a life log
can really help you
to identify the truth about
what's happened in the past,
not just your memory's version
of it,
which we know, from research,
that we'll have inaccuracies --
we'll have flaws in that memory.
Freeman: Anyone who's spent time
on social-networking sites
knows that a basic form
of lifelogging
is already practiced
by millions of people,
anxious to share
their every passing thought,
no matter how trivial.
It's estimated
that humanity today
generates more data in two days
than it produced in all
of history up to the year 2003.
And this data stream is expected
to increase exponentially
in the future.
Extreme lifelogging will add
an enormous amount
of new imagery and data
to the vast amount that
already floods the Internet.
Gurrin:
We will typically capture
at least a million photographs
a year for an individual person.
So that's
an incredibly huge data set
to be handled
by a search engine.
And that's one of the issues
about lifelogging
that we are trying to solve
in this research --
how to handle a million
photographs a year for people,
how to handle many hundreds
of millions of sensor values,
make sense of this,
organize this,
and take this enormous quantity
of big, big data about people
and make it useable
and easy for the people
to access their content
from within that archive.
Freeman:
Cathal and his students
are creating backup drives
for their entire life's
experience --
black boxes of the mind.
Someday, we might all have
these personal life recorders --
initially,
to enhance our memories,
but after death, our survivors
could take our black boxes
and hand them over
for uploading.
Gurrin:
Essentially, memory defines us.
A person's personality
is based
on their memories
and their experiences over time.
By gathering
all this type of data,
we're able to hopefully,
in the future, re-create
that person's personality
in the digital memory.
We're able to re-create
how that person reacts
to a certain stimulus
in the environment,
how that person reacts to
interactions with other people.
We'd be able to take
the digital memory data
and by enhancing
our artificial-intelligence
algorithms and search engines
right now,
be able to re-create
a fairly good representation
of that person's personality
from the digital memory.
Freeman: This would not create
a perfect mirror of the mind,
but it would reflect the stuff
our minds are attracted to.
A computer algorithm would sort
through your likes and dislikes
and extrapolate a personality
based on your experiences.
Cathal's route to resurrection
might bring something similar
to you back to life.
But is there a way to exactly
re-create your inner self?
This man says yes.
We just need the right tools
for the job.
Your mind is the product
of 100 trillion neural
connections in your brain.
This dense pattern is you.
And when the brain dies,
you die.
What if we could separate
the contents of our minds
from our brains?
If we could pull the essence
of who you are
out of the fragile biology
of your brain
and put it
into another container,
you could live again.
[ Train whistle blows ]
By day, Ken Hayworth
is a neuroscientist
at a prestigious
Massachusetts University.
In his off hours, he runs the
Brain Preservation Foundation,
which looks for ways to
resurrect our minds after death.
I want to see the future,
and death is preventing that.
But if we can preserve and map
our brains, we can get there.
[ Train whistle blows ]
The wiring of your brain
is like this train track,
only the total length of wires
in your brain
is actually billions of times
longer
than the length
of this toy track.
And the number of switching
points in your brain
numbers in the hundreds
of trillions.
We call this set of wires
and switches in a human brain
the connectome.
The connectome is
the seat of all of our memory,
and it is the generator of our
thought and our consciousness.
If we could copy this set
of trillions of connections,
we could re-create you,
even after your body has died.
Freeman:
The way to rescue
all the information held
in the connectome, Ken says,
is to treat the brain
like a computer.
So, this is a dead computer.
It's way out of date.
It has a burned-out motherboard,
and there's really
essentially nothing I can do
to repair this computer.
And I'm really sad about that,
because this particular computer
has all my wedding photographs,
my PhD thesis,
and I'm going to just toss it
into the trash
and lose it forever.
But, of course, that's not true.
Those pieces of information
are stored digitally
on this hard drive,
and I can copy that information
onto another hard drive.
Now, what I'm saying
is that neuroscience has told us
that we, in essence,
are digital information
stored in the synaptic
connections within our brain.
If we preserve that brain
at our death,
then that information
that makes us unique --
all of those memories --
they're not lost,
and they can be
potentially brought back
just the same way digital
information can be brought back
by putting it
in a new computer.
Freeman: Software is physically
written onto a hard drive.
Make an exact copy of a drive,
and you have an exact copy
of the information it contains.
Ken believes all the information
in your brain
can also be copied and stored.
All you have to do to preserve
the connectome's trillions
of neural connections
is to copy
the brain's hardware
one slice at a time.
Ken's brain-scanning assembly
line would work like this.
At the moment of death,
the brain is extracted
and preserved in plastic.
The brain is then chopped
by a heated diamond knife
into 20-micron cubes 40,000
times thinner than a human hair.
These tiny slices are sliced
again, 1,000 times thinner,
then scanned by ion beams.
The process is repeated
millions of times
until the entire brain
is digitized.
Hmm? Hmm?
It is technology
that exists today.
We mapped small bits
of neural tissue
at this ultimate resolution
already.
Freeman:
The resolution is so high
that we cannot only see the
connections between neurons --
we can also determine
their strength and type.
Once we have the ability
to map a human brain
and once we have the knowledge
of how that generates
a human mind,
we will be able to simulate that
brain in a computer substrate
and bring that individual
back to life
inside of a computer simulation.
Freeman:
Mapping the human mind today
would require an enormously
expensive Apollo-sized project.
But as technology gets cheaper,
that could change.
So, whereas it's tens
of billions of dollars today
to map a whole human mind,
it will be thousands of dollars
Anybody that wants to get
to that future technology
just 100 years from now
can get their brain preserved.
Freeman: Imagine the future in
which every hospital is equipped
to preserve your brain
if you dip near death.
Thousands of brains,
sliced and scanned,
will be ready to form a new
population of the formerly dead.
Hayworth:
That person's brain
that's sitting there on
the shelf for the last 100 years
can be taken off, sliced,
imaged,
and downloaded
into a computer simulation.
And that person wakes up
like they were in a long sleep.
Freeman: And if we live on as digital
copies of ourselves, what then?
What would life be like
as a computer program?
How would we relate
to each other?
Could we bear to live
without physical sensation?
To bring back a brain
and just leave it
in some computer
without legs, without arms,
without eyes --
of course, that would be
an experience worse than death.
Freeman: Resurrecting the mind
may not be enough.
To truly live again, we will
want to see the world around us
and touch the ones we love.
The challenges of restoring
a mind to a biological body
seem insurmountable.
But there is another option.
Perhaps we could build
new bodies
to carry
our resurrected minds --
robot bodies, like these.
Someday, we may be able
to preserve our minds,
but our resurrection
will be incomplete
if we don't have bodies --
not these fragile bags
of chemicals,
but perfect replicas
of ourselves that never age
and can be
constantly upgraded --
robot vessels
to carry our digitized minds.
Think of it.
In Japan,
robots are a part of daily life.
Most of them work in factories
and don't look too different
from the machines they build.
But Japan also leads the world
in building androids
that straddle the line
between humans and machines.
If Hiroshi Ishiguro has his way,
the world of the future
will be filled
with replicants so realistic,
you can't tell them apart
from flesh-and-blood people.
Hiroshi's lab tests
how much or how little humanity
androids need
to be accepted by humans.
They have produced
a line of robots
ranging from near human
to these almost
impressionistic creatures.
The Elfoid robots
have a bare minimum
of human characteristics,
yet people
are able to relate to them.
In the future, this might be
the low-budget option
for your robot body.
It's simple,
but it does the job.
[ Speaking Japanese ]
Freeman: For now, the Elfoid
is remote-controlled,
like all of Hiroshi's robots.
Software reads the facial
expressions of the operator
and transmits them
to tiny actuators
under the android's
synthetic skin.
These mimic
human facial muscles.
[ Speaking Japanese ]
At the other end of the ladder
are the Geminoids,
meant to mirror humans
as closely as possible.
The Geminoids
are replicas of real people.
Imagine a body like this
loaded with the contents
of your digitized mind,
or perhaps
your disembodied consciousness
would operate the android
from a mainframe,
just as these robots
are controlled from a distance.
Hiroshi is already working
on the technology
to connect our minds
to the androids.
Ishiguro:
If possible
Freeman: If Hiroshi does perfect
a brain/machine interface,
he will probably first test it
on himself --
or, more precisely,
his replicant.
Yeah, yeah.
He's restarting -- restarting.
Okay.
Yeah, we have come --
we have come back now.
[ Laughs ]
Okay.
Now it's okay.
Can you look at me?
Mm-hmm.
All right.
Hiroshi often sends his
doppelganger to other countries
to represent him
or to teach classes that he's
too busy to attend in the flesh.
How do people respond
to this and me?
Well --
well, maybe they were --
in the first contact,
they were a little bit nervous,
but, you know, once --
as you know that,
once you start to talk,
they can concentrate on the --
in a conversation.
Hiroshi has essentially created
a robot version of himself,
and the better
his hardware gets,
the more his androids pass
for real people.
The Geminoid "F"
is an android so lifelike,
it has performed onstage
in plays,
but its inventor
is never satisfied.
Thank you for answering
my questions, Professor.
You're welcome.
Freeman: This could be the future face
of the living dead --
not decaying corpses,
but smooth silicon flesh --
robots carrying the minds
of our long-lost loved ones.
[ Breathes deeply ]
The day when we never have to
say goodbye may soon be at hand.
But what would it be like to see
your dead grandmother again,
living inside a synthetic body?
Would she still be
the woman you knew?
We won't know until it happens.
The human race
may one day be filled
with new and unfamiliar
ethnic groups.
The people next door
might be the robotic undead,
and the great divide in society
would be between those
who have lived only once
and those who are
on their second or fifth body.