Part Man, Part Computer: Researcher Tests the Limits
Gretchen Vogel
Science 2002 February 8; 295: 1020 (in News)
(Does anyone know how much of a copyrighted material one is allowed to quote at a public message board? Grrr - IMO all scientific information should be freeBy the end of this month, Kevin Warwick hopes to be a cyborg . If all goes as planned, in late February the University of Reading, U.K., professor of cybernetics will have surgery to connect nerves in his arm with wires leading to a "smart card"-sized collection of microprocessors. The wires will pick up signals from his central nervous system and relay them via a radio transmitter to an external computer that will record the patterns. Warwick hopes the device will pick up discrete signals from the nerves depending on his movements, his sense of touch, and even his mood, and then send those signals back to his nerves to see if they can mimic the movement or the sensation. Warwick's wife plans to have a similar implant so the two can try to communicate through computer-mediated signals.
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Warwick and others in the cybernetics community envision a world in which humans are able to expand their senses to hear ultrasonic sounds or see infrared wavelengths. "It's tremendously exciting. Can we in the future link extra memory into our brains? Why shouldn't we do something like that?" he asks.
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Such questions are premature, says Peter Fromherz of the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany. "Warwick is a very interesting person. But what he's doing is scientifically crazy," he says.
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Others think Warwick's experiment should not be allowed to proceed. (It does not require permission from a formal ethics board, as Warwick is experimenting on himself.) Political scientist Langdon Winner of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, for one, calls the experiment "profoundly amoral. Enhancing one's information-processing ability by connecting chips to the nervous system marks a very fundamental change in what human beings are." Should it become possible, he says, "then it is a matter for theologians, politicians, and citizens to address."