Cyborgs

By Jerry Price - Jan 9, 2006 -

Science fiction has long been enamored by the idea of something that is part human and part machine. But that idea is no longer just science fiction, it is science. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Germany have developed a partially living electronic circuit. This was accomplished by taking individual cells from a snail brain and placing them onto silicon chips with a special kind of glue. Each cell was placed over a Field Effect Transistor and a stimulator to prod the cell into activity. The transistor is capable of amplifying tiny voltages. The scientists combined about 20 cells over multiple transistors and stimulators. “It’s very primitive, but it’s the first time that a neural network was directly interfaced with a silicon chip,” said biophysicist Peter Fromertz. He indicated that plans are being developed to build a system with 15,000 neuron-transistor sites. While the work shows great promise for people who are blind to be able to see, people who are paralyzed to be able to move limbs with their thoughts, and amputees to be able to move prosthetic devices, one has to wonder what less than desirable inventions might one day follow.

Shankar Vedantam “Brain Cells, Silicon Chips Are Linked Electronically,” http://www.washingtonpost.com , August 28, 2001 [Access fee required]

Kevin Warwick is professor of cybernetics at Britain’s University of Reading. He also claims to be the world’s first cybernetic organism or “cyborg”—part human and part machine. In March 2002, Dr. Warwick had a small comb-shaped device implanted into the nerves in his forearm by two neurosurgeons. One hundred electrodes in the small device were connected by wires to an external pack. The device was linked by radio signals to a computer. For three months, he worked with a robot which was able to receive signals from the computer, teaching the robot to mimic his arm movements. He even traveled to the United States, plugged his device into a computer in New York, and controlled the robot in Britain.

In a daring move, he had another device implanted into his wife’s arm (for one day only) to which signals from his arm were sent to hers. His wife, Irena, later said that when he moved his finger, she “felt as if a bolt of lightning ran down her palm and into her own finger.”

Warwick, who has written a book entitled I, Cyborg, plans to have an electronic implant placed into his brain within the next ten years. In the book, he imagines that within the next 50 years, most human brains will be linked through a global computer network. He says, “They can tap into it, call on its intellectual power, its memory, merely by thinking to it. In return, the global network calls on its cyborg nodes for information or to carry out a task.” Though the prospects of that are scary, there may well be some positive benefits of his research. He is now working on a “system for paraplegics who have lost nerves in their limbs but still have the brain nerves to control the limbs.”

Simon Collins, “Couples’ Nervous System Linked by Implants in Limbs,” The New Zealand Herald, June 7, 2004

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