Different existing, emerging, and potential technologies and techniques tend to have different motivations behind them, as well as different affected populations. And yet, frequently it seems as if these technologies, their agents, and their implications end up quite muddled whenever people start discussing bioethics.
Cultured neurons seem like ants away from their colony: removed from their parent organ, dissociated from their fellow workers and placed into an unnatural environment. But neurons plated onto a culture dish connect to each other, forming simple neural networks that give rise to spontaneous electrical activity.
Not in a flying car, but in biomedical implants, the future is racing toward us. It looks less like The Jetsons and more like Holy Fire—but it’s a near-future that could only be viewed as science fiction just a few years ago.
Congrats to George for (yet again) getting the IEET noticed by the big media and blogosphere. This time he was quoted in the May 15, 2007 story in the New York Times (sub reqd) titled “An Amputee Sprinter: Is He Disabled or Too-Abled?”
In an advance online publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from Harvard Medical School’s Department of Neurobiology show that the perception of single spots of light can be elicited in monkeys by electrical stimulation of a part of the brain called the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN).
This article was adapted from a lecture given by Marshall Brain at the 2nd Annual Workshop on Geoethical Nanotechnology on July 20, 2006 in Lincoln, VT. Marshall an author, public speaker and founder of HowStuffWorks, offers an understanding and explanation of the pace of technology change how he believes in two to three decades, ‘mind uploading’ will work. [Video: Streaming Windows Media DSL/Cable or Dialup] [Video: Google version (Mac compatible)] [PowerPoint slides] [Audio (mp3)]
Last week, I wrote about the work of Ed Boyden and his colleagues at MIT’s Media Lab. Boyden’s research group has developed a method by which light is used to control neuronal activity. The method involves the use of a light-activated protein called channelrhodopsin (ChR2), which was recently isolated from the extremophile archaebacterium Natronomonas pharaonis.
OK, OK. No support for libertopian organ trading here. Poll participation hit a high of 179 voters, of whom two thirds hated the idea and 20% thought it pointless given the alternatives.
New poll: Will the ability to change skin, hair and body at will help make racism irrelevant?
IEET advisor Peter Houghton and IEET Executive Director James Hughes are writing a book, tentatively titled Cyborg Life: The Reality of Living With Artificial Parts. Peter is an artificial heart device recipient (LVAD) and the founder of several charities in the UK working on the technologies and needs of people with artificial organs. He has been collecting narratives of people with heart assist devices, insulin pumps and similar devices, and in this book we intend to describe the current experiences of people with implanted medical devices, and the public policy agenda to ensure universal access to safe, life enhancing devices in the future. The website - with resources and a blog - is here.
Last year, ex-marine Claudia Mitchell, who lost her left arm in a motorcycle accident when she was 24 years old, became the world’s second recipient of a “bionic arm” after she had a pioneering surgical procedure performed on her by surgeons at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.
IEET Executive Director James Hugheswas among the experts quoted on Michael Kruse’s article for the St. Petersburg Times In-your-face interface:
“We’re moving inside” the body with cell phones, said James Hughes, a bioethicist and sociologist at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and author of Citizen Cyborg. “My opinion is it is realistic. But for at least a couple of decades, I don’t think it’s going to be terribly attractive to open up our heads.”
Longtime mobile industry analyst Bob Egan agrees. “I don’t think the mainstream population is ready to make that leap,” said Egan, with Emerging Technologies in Needham, Mass.
Other well-known experts were quoted, from the Washington Post’s Joel Garreau to Kevin Warwick, but perhaps the most representative voice came from the youngest person interviewed…
Eddie Morrell is 20 and works at one of the two Cingular kiosks in St. Petersburg’s Tyrone Square Mall. He said he sometimes falls asleep with the thing still on his ear.
If you’re looking to significantly augment your memory skills, but don’t have the patience to wait for a cybernetic memory implant, mnemonic techniques may be the answer.
In his Confessions St. Augustine, contemplating the excesses and indiscretions of his youth famously pronounced the verdict, O Lord, how crooked and sordid, bespotted and ulcerous was I. From Paul to the present, the Church has expressed especial hostility to the pleasures and meanings aroused in the free play of human bodies and brains in the world, and preached mortification of the flesh and faithful obedience as routes to the presumably deeper, more spiritual satisfactions the Church offers instead.
Global warming isn’t the only topic being discussed at this week’s AAAS meeting. University of Pittsburgh researchers at the conference announced a significant step forward in the development of functional-replacement artificial limbs. They created a simple artificial arm which can be controlled by neural impulses directly from the brain, via a series of extremely thin implanted probes. A test monkey (its healthy real arms restrained) was able to learn to move the prosthetic arm with sufficient precision to be able to feed itself. Or, rather, the monkey and the arm co-learned: the monkey learned how to control the arm, and the arm’s software learned what the various brain signals meant. The next step will be to create more complex hands and fingers for the artificial arm, and ultimately to make neurally-controlled prosthetics available to humans with missing or paralyzed limbs.
The current definitions of brain death are predicated on the prognostic observation that brain dead patients would quickly die even with intensive care. But this is now shown to be untrue[1],[2],[3],[4].
Neuroremediation technologies and advances in intensive care will make it increasingly possible to keep alive the bodies of patients who would currently be classified as brain dead, and recover much of the memories and capabilities that we currently consider irrecoverable.
Abstract The transplantation of porcine organs to humans could in the future be a solution to the worldwide organ shortage, but is to date still highly experimental. Further research on the potential effects of crossing the species barrier is essential before clinical application is acceptable. However, many crucial questions on efficacy and safety will ultimately only be answered by well-designed and controlled solid organ xenotransplantation trials on humans. The question then rises of what conditions are necessary in order to resume clinical trials if risks of PERV-transmission cannot be excluded through pre-clinical models. An alternative means of overcoming the safety and ethical issues is: willed body donation for scientific research in the case of permanent vegetative status. In this paper the argument will be presented that conducting trials on such bodies with prior consent is preferable to the use of human subjects without lack of brain function.
What does it mean to be human? We are, of course, biological creatures, and the question allows a literal answer when approached at that level. Modern humans are classified biologically as Homo sapiens sapiens. We are definable by our genetic code, and are closely related to chimpanzees and bonobos—somewhat less so to gorillas, orang-outangs and gibbons. It is to our own species that Jared Diamond is alluding in the title—and text—of his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee (1991).
This paper examines ethical issues associated with cyborgs. A core issue is whether the cyborg body offers a fredom for the fantasies of the mind. It is a freedom that enables the mind to explore into the new environments. To characterize such a cyborg based freedom for fantasy creation, we propose the term “CYBOFREE”.
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Contact: Executive Director, Dr. James J. Hughes,
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Stelarc Ear-on-Arm Suspension (warning: not for the squeamish!)
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