It's not the first time scientists have tried to improve the human body with the goal of adding special features or correcting evolutionary weaknesses. In mid-2016 we met Graham, a 'human' designed to survive car accidents, and now it's the turn of Alice 2.0, a creation of anatomist Alice Roberts. What does she look like? It's hard to be precise at first glance, but I was reminded of a hybrid between the Na'vi of Avatar and Quato from Total Recall...
Open your mind, reader, because you're about to see something definitely strange. We know the human body isn't perfect, especially compared to other living beings. We aren't the fastest or the strongest, and we need very specific parameters for water, food, and climate, though we haven't lost our ability to adapt and improvise. Still, scientists believe evolution could have dealt us a better hand, and that leads them to imagine. What would an optimized human body be like? What successful features could it have borrowed from other animals? Anatomist Alice Roberts tried to answer both questions with her design Alice 2.0, and the result, well...
... we won't deny it, it's horrible. The project is part of a special BBC program called "Can Science Make Me Perfect?", but honestly, this isn't the perfection we imagined. Roberts says her upgrade has larger eyes, movable ears, a reinforced lower back from a chimpanzee, legs of an emu (Dromaius) that absorb impact, two auxiliary 'hearts' in the hips to improve circulation, the heart of a dog, the lungs of a swan, a chest without breasts, and, with the idea of eliminating pain during childbirth, a pouch similar to marsupials.
Alice 2.0 was created with the collaboration of sculptor Scott Eaton and special effects artist Sangeet Prabhaker. Roberts consulted various experts in medicine and animal evolution to identify the most serious problems of the human body and solve them with her model. If someone decided to extend this exercise, it would be interesting to try to determine the new limitations Alice 2.0 would suffer... but I think that's enough.
