The Incredible Shrinking Man

One of the most promising consequences of downsizing the human species is the change in space and time it’ll take to grow food. In several research installations at Food Forward (a look into the future of food) The Incredible Shrinking Man investigates new possibilities. Like the potential for a specific type of fish to feed us and supress growth at the same time.

Zebrafish, or Danio rerio, are popular small aquarium fish. To investigate its future possibilities as a nutrient, we’ve set up an indoor hatchery. Danio’s easy breeding qualities and size of 6 cm could make it a perfect small consumption fish for The Incredible Shrinking Man. Especially since zebrafish share with us genetic similarities in many developmental pathways. Our genes are strikingly similar, which makes it a perfect model organism. This opens up the possibility to genetically alter the zebrafish’s endocrinological system so it produces hormones  and antogonists that surpress growth, like somatostatin, Pegvisomant, or GHRHR. Eating these fish would keep us small. Similar experiments with zebrafish as vaccine are already taking place.

Robert Wadlow was the tallest person that ever lived. He suffered from a rare condition known as Acromegaly where the anterior hypophysis produces excess growth hormone after the epiphyseal plates close. At the time of his death at only 22 years of age Wadlow measured 272 cm. His early death is no exception: contrary to the popular believe that tall people are strong people they often do not live to a very old age. The average age of the 10 tallest people that ever lived is only 36 years. The tallest girl that ever lived was Zeng Jinlian who died when she was only 17.

Being tall is hard work and big size carries unsuspected risks. Wadlow, like most people over 8 feet, needed braces to walk, and experienced some numbness in his legs and feet. In the end this relatively small discomfort killed him. He didn’t notice an infected blister on his foot and died from blood poisoning. If anything, his death holds a warning for humanity. If we grow beyond the body’s natural limits we cannot expect it to respond in its natural way if something goes wrong.

Pygmies display a remarkable and inspiring resistance to growth hormone (GH). Even if large quantities of GH are administered to them, they simply ignore it and retain their normal size of less than 150cm. Such genetic resistance represents the kind of evolutionary intelligence we would like to find more of. In every human being growth hormones are transported into the cells by growth hormone receptors (GHR). Studies in Pygmies in Papua-New Guinea have shown that at a certain point the actual part of the receptor that connects and holds on to the growth hormone  (the growth hormone binding protein GHBP) refuses to let more GH enter. The growth hormone is then forced to stay in the space between the cells where it can do no damage. Pygmy GHBP seems to know what’s good for them. What is actually puzzling about this is not so much that pygmies have this check point, but that other people don’t.

We should join the GH resistence.

One of the most promising advantages of shrinking the human species would be the abundance of food. A single chicken could feed up to 100 people. But perhaps it’s not just a matter of abundance. We might encounter some unsuspected differences in the way we relate to food. To understand our future relationship with a common ingredient like poultry, Arne Hendriks and artist/chef  Harold de Bree will host an investigative dinner and roast an entire ostrich as if it were a chicken.

A chicken carcas in the supermarket weighs around 1,2 kilograms. 2/3rds of that (800 grams) is consumable meat. That leaves about 8 grams of meat per person. For The Incredible Shrinking Man (length 50 cm & weight 1,7 kg) that would be a good portion. The carcas of a 13 month old ostrich weighs around 45 kg and contains well over 30 kg of actual meat. That translates into 300 grams of meat for each of the 100 guests.

The process of butchering, cooking and eating the ostrich has been documented and is presented during the Food Forward exhibition.

Location: Stroom

Tall people need more resources than short people. That’s why it’s rather alarming that the human species continues to grow taller. In fact our increasing height puts more pressure on the ecological services than the total population growth. If people become 20% taller this creates over 70% more pressure whereas a 20% population growth would mean 20% more pressure. Yet we have no measurement unit to take this fact into consideration. We need something that makes the pressure of human height on the environment visible. Therefore The Incredible Shrinking Man introduces Hhp (Human Height Pressure).

Creating such a unit is a complex process. To determine what should be in it a public expert meeting is organized on the 4th of Febuari 2012 at Stroom in The Hague. We want to discuss different ways of measuring human impact, create more transparency around footprint thinking, and walk away with a workable definition of Human Height Pressure. As a point of departure we’ll revisit Paul Ehrlich’s famous formula I = P x A x T . Human Impact (I) on the environment equals the product of P= Population, A= Affluence, T= Technology. The formula describes how our population, affluence, and technology contribute toward human’s environmental impact.  Since then (1971) there have been numerous sustainability measurements, of which unfortunately not a single one takes human height into consideration. It’s time to change that.

The Incredible Shrinking Man Expert Meeting: Discussing Human Height Pressure at Stroom The Hague in The Netherlands, Saturday Febuari 4 2012. Participants and times will be forthcoming on this website.

Rescaling something always has effect. It makes us notice things. It changes the way we perceive, and it reinstates a certain autonomy of the object. But what happens if the rescaled object is the human body? How would we perceive reality if everything around us increased in size because we got smaller?

The only people to actually experience such a thing are the characters in works of fiction. And they speak to us through the imagination of their authors. In the Rescale Archive we collect descriptions of the experience of these fictional characters as written down by their creators. We let the characters in timeless classics like Gulliver’s Travels, Alice in Wonderland and The Incredible Shrinking Man be our guides to a possible future.

We would also love to include your favorite descriptive passages to The Rescale Archive. Please send them HERE.

=================================================

Book: The Micronauts by Gordon Williams. Subject: Grass

‘Grass was hard. The short blades had longwise ribbing as tough as ship’s planking. The tall seed-bearing stems were silica-bright and polished smooth as stainless steel, the leaves so electrically lustrous they seemed to be under a vast green spotlight.’

=================================================

Book: Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. Subject: A Nurses Breast (Brobignac)

‘I must confess no object ever disgusted me so much as the sight of her monstrous breast, which I cannot tell what to compare with, so as to give the curious reader an idea of its bulk, shape, and colour.  It stood prominent six feet, and could not be less than sixteen in circumference.  The nipple was about half the bigness of my head, and the hue both of that and the dug, so varied with spots, pimples, and freckles, that nothing could appear more nauseous.’

=================================================

Book: The Micronauts by Gordon Williams. Subject: A Snail

‘Its shell was as big as a bubble car, the dark brown shadings concentrically spiralled in the pattern of an embossed Roman shield. Its two uppermost antennae, like fingers with eyes, seemed to decide they were of no interest. With the beautiful spiral shell rolling like a howdah on the back of an elephant, the crocodile-skin body slid through the grass, leaving a silken trail of mucus which felt like damp rubber.’

=================================================

Book: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. Subject: Tears

‘I wish I hadn’t cried so much!’ said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out. ‘I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears! That WILL be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything is queer to-day.’

=================================================

Book: The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson Subject: Time

‘But, somehow, days seemed longer now. It was as if hours were designed for normal people. For anyone smaller, the hours were proportionally magnified.”

=================================================

Book: The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson Subject: Sleep

‘He lay under the cardboard box top listening to the silence, exhausted but unable to rest. An animal life without an animal mind did not induce the heavy, effortless sleep of an animal.”

To be continued…

The US market for growth hormone is estimated at 22 billion dollars. But it wasn’t always such an enormous market. Two growth hormone producers, Eli Lilly and Genentech, have worked hard to medicalize short stature and convince children and their parents that being short is a disease rather than a natural variation in human height.

At first the administration of growth hormones was exclusively for children with growth hormone deficiency but this restriction obviously limited the sales market. By expanding it to all children whose height was below the third percentile 90,000 potential new customers were created. In the early 1990s Eli Lilly and Genentech covertly paid two US charities, the Human Growth Foundation and the MAGIC Foundation, to measure the height of thousands of children in schools and public places, and to urge medical consultations for children whose height was deemed low. They paired this research with a campaign to advertise the hormone to physicians.  The campaign was a ’success’, and tens of thousands of children, half of which don’t even have growth hormone deficiency, began receiving growth hormones.

People living in remote villages in Ecuador have a genetic mutation that may just hold the key to shrinking mankind. The villagers have a rare condition known as Laron syndrome. They are generally less than three and a half feet tall, they are proportional, and interestingly, they are also almost free of cancer and diabetes.

The Laron People (we prefer not to think of their condition as a syndrome) have a mutation in the gene that makes the receptor for growth hormone. The receptor is a protein embedded in the membrane of cells. Its outside region is recognized by growth hormone circulating through the body; the inside region sends signals through the cell when growth hormone triggers the receptor. The Larons’ mutation means that their growth hormone receptor lacks the last eight units of its exterior region, so it cannot react to growth hormone. In normal height children, growth hormone stimulates the cells of the liver to make another hormone, called insulinlike growth factor, or IGF-1, which makes children grow.

If the Laron People are given doses of IGF-1 before puberty, they grow to almost ‘normal’ height. But this also means the risk to obtain cancer and diabetes is reintroduced into their lives. Which is why it is difficult to understand why their ‘discoverer’ Dr. Guevara-Aguirre is trying so hard to do just that. He doesn’t seem to realize the most exciting aspect of what he is investigating. Perhaps one day the Larons will be recognized as the people that helped make the first steps towards genetically downsizing the human body.

Humans are an extremely hypervariable species. There is a large intraspecial difference between its largest and smallest members. The smallest adult person that ever lived, Gul Mohammed, was 57 centimeters tall, while the tallest person, Robert Wadlow, reached a height of 272 centimeters. That makes Wadlow 477% taller than Mohammed. But even if we disregard these exceptional pathological cases the variability in what is considered to be normal height (lets conservatively set this between 150 cm and 200 cm) indicates the enormous size-changing potential of the human body. And that’s without manipulation.

Homo Floresiensis, with an average size of 103 cm, illustrates that if presented with the right conditions the human species can probably shrink considerably more. But Homo Floresiensis lived up until around 12.000 years ago and although the Dwarfs of Sindh, and African tribes like the Twa present us with strong evidence of our ability to live healthy lives with much smaller sized bodies we are left with that one big question: How short can we actually get before it starts affecting our health, our intelligence, or perhaps even the definition of what it means to be human? And what do we do when we reach that stage?

Mankind seems so indoctrinated to think bigger that sometimes the mere suggestion that we should become smaller is thoughtlessly rejected as mad science. Ever since the 20th century our relationship with science, vacillating between science as the salvation of society or its doom, has been personified by the fictional (Hollywood) character of the mad scientist. Following the role of scientists in wartime affairs the general “enlightened” optimism of the 18th and 19th century gave way to anxiety about disturbing “the secrets of nature”. Fictional scientists were increasingly depicted as frustrated power hungry mad men trying to attain world domination. The strategy of quite a few of these mad scientists ‘involved’ some sort of shrinking of people, like with Dr. Cyclops and Mr. Franz, to name just two. Unfortunately this collective ‘memory’ of fictional shrink science gone bad now makes it more difficult to convince mankind we should become shorter.

It’s a challenge we must face if we are to overcome the even crazier idea that mankind should continue to grow taller.