Research
At the Freedom of Form Foundation, we embrace the broad diversity of identities that people hold. We are especially passionate about research into making morphological freedom possible for those with anthropomorphic, non-human forms.
We have been primarily directing our research to the areas most likely to be challenging: the head, the tail, the integument (skin/fur/scales/feathers), and the eyes. Our active research projects include the Anatomy Re-engineering Framework (ARF), Enhanced Tail project, Integument Review project, Wnt Peptide project (wet-lab experiments!), and eye modification review project.
Importantly, after carefully analyzing key areas of risk, such as multiple contraints on craniofacial shape, we are confident such forms are achievable within 30 years. Details are available in our technical roadmap, later on this page.
Results and projects
Below are some of our ongoing projects and publications that have resulted from research we supported or conducted.
Please note, the materials on this website are not comprehensive, and recently started projects may not be represented. Project teams have to lay a great deal of groundwork before it’s possible to concisely and accurately represent their work in the public eye. We are committed to giving our researchers the space they need in order to work effectively and prioritize obtaining results they’re confident in.
Technical roadmap
We aim to enable identity affirmation procedures, primarily by our continued work on in-house, applied biomedical research. To be explicit, after carefully considering feasibility, our main long-term target is to make full-body, anthropomorphic procedures available to patients in no more than 30 years from now.
We are focusing on the areas we understand as being most challenging and important to a successful procedure: namely, the head, integument (skin/fur/feathers/scales), tail, and eyes. We explain why those regions present unique difficulties, and why other regions are potentially less difficult. Candidate technologies, including cellular and gene therapies, surgical approaches, and neuroprosthetics, are discussed alongside the respective anatomical regions.
Our technical roadmap is opinionated, is not intended to be air-tight, and will change as our research progresses. We hope that it helps you understand why we are prioritizing the projects we’re working on, and how they will come together over time. If you think we have missed something, or have new information that could affect our decisions, please let us know!
Note: If you have been following us before mid-2023, please note that our 2018 whitepapers on anatomy and research areas should be considered out of date. While much of the underlying information is still correct, some details are incorrect. More importantly, the 2018 whitepapers are closer to feasibility studies than an actionable roadmap.
We offer grants for external projects, especially ones with clear line-of-sight to completion. For example, if you are writing an academic article with a clear path to publishing, or need to get a few more components for a DIY project with relevance to our mission, we would be happy to help you get over the threshold and help you succeed.
So far, we have given two $4,000 awards to date. We’ve helped make an academic article about legal considerations around body autonomy get published through our first grant. We’ve helped Hugh Herr accelerate his lab’s research as well through a second award. Do you think your project could win our third award?
The Freedom of Form Foundation is, first and foremost, interested in advancing rights, ethics, and respect for individual choice. That includes a responsibility for rights and ethics during the research process itself. We are proactive in protecting the rights of research subjects, and will not fund primate studies. We also encourage researchers to open and share their data as much as possible. Please take a look at our integrated policies for responsible research.