Whatever, I was present at the meeting when Knowall announced that, far from being a simple artist’s vision, Vincent’s drawings prefigured the man of the future. For a long time animal nutrition had seemed to him to be a primitive system, of mediocre energy efficiency, producing a clearly excessive quantity of waste, waste that not only had to be evacuated, but which in the process provoked a far from negligible wear and tear of the organism. For a long time he had been thinking of equipping the new human animal with that photosynthetic system that, by some curiosity of evolution, was the property of vegetables. The direct use of solar energy was obviously a more robust, efficient, and reliable system—as shown by the practically limitless life span of plants. What’s more, the addition of autotrophic functions to the human cell was far from being as complex an operation as some might imagine; his teams had already been working on the question for some time, and the number of genes involved proved to be astonishingly low. The human being thus transformed would subsist, solar energy aside, on water and a small quantity of mineral salts; the digestive system, just like the excretory system, could disappear—any excess minerals would be easily eliminated, with water, by means of sweat.
