”You want that story,” says Dr Stuart Meloy, laughing. It's a frantic day for
the pain-relief surgeon at the Piedmont Anaesthesia and Pain Consultants in
North Carolina, but the chance to talk about his discovery is irresistible.
”In 1998 I was placing a spinal-cord stimulator into a woman with leg pain,”
he says, describing a pain-relief procedure where electrodes placed parallel
to the spine stimulate nerves supplying the leg, removing the pain. ”When I
turned the energy on, the patient let out something between a wail and a
moan — very different from the ”Wow’ I sometimes hear.” Meloy leant around
the curtains to ask the patient what she felt. She caught her breath and
said: ”You're going to have to teach my husband how to do that.”
”I had no idea what she was talking about,” he chuckles. It turned out the
electricity had given her an orgasm. She had another one when he tweaked the
power to find out if that had caused it. After news leaked out that Meloy
had patented a cigarette-packet-sized implant that could stimulate an orgasm
using a handheld remote, the media went crazy. Everyone wanted to hear about
"Dr Pleasure" and his "orgasmatron". But Meloy, who aims to have an
affordable product, similar in price to breast implants, on the market in
about three years, insists there is a serious reason for the device.
According to the surgeon, orgasmic dysfunction affects about a quarter of
women in the US, and he hopes that this implant will help women worldwide.
Using tools to replace lost functions, or to enhance our existing ones, is
something humans have been doing for thousands of years; a simple stick to
help a person walk, or a telescope to enable us to see further than the
human eye. And as the tools have become more sophisticated, so has our
ability to repair ourselves.
For the first time in history, the fields of neuroscience, biomechanics,
robotics, mathematics, computer science, materials science, tissue
engineering and nanotechnology are starting to merge — sharing their
expertise on an unprecedented scale. Writing in Scientific American magazine
earlier this year, Bill Gates captured this sense of excitement when he
declared that the emergence of the robotics industry today is comparable to
the development of the computer industry 30 years ago. All of this, coupled
with exponentially increasing computer power, and falling software price and
size, has experts predicting that our future relationship with technology
will be much more intimate — even more so than the orgasmatron suggests.
"Oh my God, you have no idea!" a young woman shrieks with delight. She is
walking up and down steps outside the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) Media Lab in Boston trying out one of the latest prosthetic legs
developed by Professor Hugh Herr, director of the Biomechatronics group at
the lab. He has spent the past decade developing robotic legs, knees and
ankle supports to give millions of people with amputated or paralysed legs
the chance to walk normally and, in the future, more efficiently. Instead of
standard prosthetics, which are passive and often tiring, his designs use
motors that act like muscles to mimic natural movement, which means that the
leg pushes up and propels amputees as they walk. His latest foot-ankle
system is the first prosthesis to mimic natural gait, and requires wearers
to use 20% less energy than any previous prosthesis. When he reaches his
goal, Herr hopes amputees will walk more efficiently than an able-bodied
person. "I‘m like a kid," the young woman says, pacing up and down. "I could
do this over and over!"
When Herr was 17, he lost both his legs from below the knee in a climbing
accident. Speaking at May’s MIT conference, New Minds, New Bodies, New
Identities, which brought over 900 experts together for the first time to
discuss a new era in human adaptability — one where talk of merging machines
with human bodies is standard — he announced that "in the next decade we
will have artificial legs that are better than human legs for running", and
rolling up his trousers, unveiled his latest prostheses. Beyond the knees,
Herr’s legs morph into impressive metal struts with powerful knees and
flexible ankles. When he walks, his legs move as if they are real. Although
Herr’s new prostheses aren't attached to his body at the moment — he takes
his legs off when he goes to bed — with advances in tissue engineering and
ways to connect machines to the nerves, that looks set to change.
At a press conference in Chicago last year, Claudia Mitchell — a former US
marine who lost an arm in a motorbike accident — showed off her new "bionic"
limb. Surgeons moved the ends of the nerves from the shoulder that used to
control her arm and attached them to nerves in her chest muscle. Now, when
she thinks about moving
her arm, electrodes on her skin pick up the nerve signals and a computer sends
commands to motors in the arm. Although there is little control of detailed
movements — she can't, for example, thread a needle — according to Professor
Henrik Christensen, the director of the Center of Robotics and Intelligent
Machines at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, this is
nonetheless an enormous step forward. "You just have to remember that any
kind of modern invasive medicine where we think about the nervous system is
within the last 100 years. So if you look forward another hundred years, we
are going to see a tremendous amount of change."
In the UK, Professor Kevin Warwick — professor of cybernetics at the
University of Reading — is holding his arm up and wiggling his fingers in
the air. "The brain is an amazing processing device," he tells me. "Even a
simple movement, such as moving my fingers, sends very complex nerve signals
to and from the brain. The brain is adapting to muscle movements,
temperature changes and different pressures and forces all the time. And at
the moment there's very little known about how the signals get from the
brain to wherever they are going and come back again." There have been some
breakthroughs though — scientists have discovered how to read certain
electrical impulses between neurons carrying information in the brain, and
to interpret the code.
Cochlear implants — attached directly to nerves in our brain — have restored
the hearing of over 100,000 people. The device wraps electrodes around the
ear's auditory nerve and turns sound into electrical impulses that the brain
can decipher. "On the first day of wearing the cochlear implant I was able
to hear environmental sounds like clocks ticking and footsteps tapping,"
says Michael Chorost, who wore hearing aids from childhood and finally lost
all hearing at the age of 36. "But speech sounded like synthesised
gibberish. It took about two months before it really felt like I was hearing
speech in a way that was intelligible." But when you think that a human ear
has about 15,000 hair cells, about 3,000 of which receive sound — in a sense
we have 3,000 channels of hearing. That's a big jump from 16 offered by
standard implants. So much so that when they were first designed, scientists
were sceptical. "Some people said it would need thousands of electrodes. But
in the end, about six was sufficient," Warwick explains. "Now, it's about
22, and that gives an incredible range." And Chorost has just been given an
implant upgrade with 121 electrodes. But how does the brain make sense of
the new signals?
"One of the remarkable discoveries from this work was how flexible the human
brain is," says Warwick. "It can learn how to take the signals in and to
adapt. That is a key issue." Already, stroke patients can learn to move an
arm, even if the parts of the brain that are needed to move the arm are
defunct. Because the brain is so adaptable it can recruit different regions
to take over. This is an ability that may well play a large part in
technologies of the future.
Millions of people suffer from eye diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa,
where light-receiving cells in the retina degenerate. With them in mind,
German scientists have recently developed chips that sit in the retina and
convert light into electrical signals that are sent to the brain and help
restore sight. These chips are just three millimetres across and thinner
than a human hair. "At first it was like facing the flashes of 10
photographers," says the 27-year-old student Daniel Brück — one of the seven
people to take part in the first implant trials. "But it was inserted for a
month and I got used to it. I went from seeing nothing in my eye to being
able to distinguish between night and day and locate a window — I was
amazed." But he says he will only do the tests again if a breakthrough in
the technology enables him to actually see objects.
Although retinal-implant trials are promising, they have been nowhere near as
successful as the auditory implants, mainly because such a large part of the
human brain is devoted to visual processing. "With vision, it's more
difficult," explains Warwick. "The optic nerve is an extremely complex
thing, much more so than the auditory nerve. But I do believe that we will
see enormous development in the future."
Anyone who has witnessed the violent shaking and tortuous gait of Parkinson's
sufferers will understand the pressing need for a cure. Incredibly, deep
brain stimulation (DBS) implant technology can steady limbs and even restore
normal walking. Used by around 40,000 people, the device continually sends
electrical currents into specific regions of the brain to drown out
defective brain signals. Warwick, in conjunction with neurosurgeons at the
John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford, is designing the next generation DBS —
one that promises to outthink the human brain. "Instead of stimulating the
brain all the time, this will stimulate the brain only when it needs to,"
Warwick explains. "The implant itself has to detect when tremors are going
to occur and then to stimulate the brain before they do to stop them
occurring."
Another device being developed by scientists in the US is an epilepsy sensor.
The aspirin-sized implant can detect aberrant electrical signals in the
brain and gives advanced warning of an attack. Scientists hope the device
will one day deliver drugs when a glitch is sensed, and so stop the attack
happening in the first place.
I am staring at a computer screen projected onto a wall at Brown University,
Rhode Island. A 26-year-old man is drawing a circle on the screen — and, as
the line moves to join up the ring, it veers wildly to the left. Not
impressive by normal standards, but when he tries again and the circle
meets, the room erupts with applause. "That was the world's first neurally
created artwork," beams the neuroscience professor John Donahue, proudly.
The artist is Matt Nagle who — paralysed from the neck down after being
stabbed — has a tiny microchip inserted into
the region of the brain's motor cortex that controls his arm; this microchip
is known as the BrainGate. By incorporating a hundred minute electrodes, the
chip enables him to send brain signals to a computer, which translates them,
and allows him to move a cursor on a screen. Nagle and others with the
technology can check e-mail, play computer games and type — in fact, he can
be coupled to any electronic device. And by coupling BrainGate to electrodes
in his upper chest, the team hope that Nagle will be able to move his own
arm — by thought alone. "The technology isn't very fancy yet," Christensen
explains. "But the fact that here is a brain that's been trapped inside a
body with no possibility of interacting with the world, and now this man can
turn the light on and off on his own — it's a huge step forward for him."
Nonetheless, not everyone embraces these technological advances. "About five
or six years ago there was some character in France who said I was
subjugating women," says orgasm-implant inventor, Meloy. "Sorry! I thought I
was trying to help." The issue of ethical robotics is set to be a
sticky one.
But where do ethicists stand when robotics are not "around us" but inside us?
"What if it's a case of ’It’s not me, it’s my implant!’" Warwick warns. "If
I have a prosthetic arm and it goes nuts, who is responsible for that? Is it
the surgeon, the technology, the company?" Christensen echoes his concerns,
and highlights the importance of finding a way of having some shared
responsibility between the user and the producer. "Why should I spend time
developing a smart prosthetic device if everybody's going to sue me
afterwards?" he says.
Meloy takes a philosophical approach. "I think there is a large population
that would want to have better sex, or sex on demand," he says. "You could
postulate a situation where somebody else got hold of the remote and was
making people do stuff against their will or using it in some kind of
degrading fashion. But I think that kind of thing goes on whether you have
an electrode implanted in your back or not — there are ways you could misuse
any kind of technology."
In March, the 20-year-old athlete Oscar Pistorius sprinted into second place
in the 400 metres at the South African athletics championships. Dubbed the
"fastest thing on no legs", Pistorius is an amputee runner whose legs end at
the knee and who runs on carbon-composite Cheetah legs — prostheses that the
model and athlete Aimee Mullins was among the first to use for sprinting.
Pistorius's competitors were all able-bodied. Though experts explain that
his artificial legs lack muscles to generate their own power and so provide
much less energy overall than natural legs, at the time the International
Association of Athletics Federations debated whether to allow him to run
world-class able-bodied races in the future, because there was some
suspicion that his prostheses might enhance his performance. Last month he
was given permission to run, but if officials were debating about carbon
struts that have no robotic enhancement, who knows what they will make of
prosthetic legs in the future.
In the Herr lab in Boston, a muscle twitches violently in a Petri dish. It is
wired up to a power source that stimulates the cells to contract.
Herr hopes that, in the future, muscle like this will make up an optimal
prosthesis, one that's not purely silicon and steel, but will incorporate
biological materials as well. Herr also believes that in two years, his legs
might be powered by his mind, using devices implanted into his body that
measure the extent to which his spinal cord is activating muscles in his
biological leg. These signals, when sent out to a robotic foot-ankle system,
means he will be able to think and use his ankle. "In future, when we
architect a machine, we'll ask, should we use skin, steel or composite?" he
says.
Herr's goal is radical. He wants to create artificial legs that outperform
natural ones in every way. Even today, Herr wouldn't swap his prosthetic
legs for natural ones. "Would you buy a computer system if you were
told you couldn't upgrade it for 50 years?" he asks.
His concepts don't stop at this. He is currently building robotic leg
exoskeletons that move in parallel to the human limb. "Imagine a future
where, instead of a bicycle rack, you go to a leg rack and strap on these
fancy pants," he explains. "You'll be able to run anywhere your legs can
take you, but without breathing hard — imagine running through the
wilderness, day after day, 60 miles a day, jumping over logs and rocks."
Back in the UK, Warwick shows me his lab. He is excited about rat nerve cells
in a Petri dish. The cells are growing over a microchip that is hooked up
via a computer to a little robot that bumbles around on a lab bench. "Rather
than having robots controlled by computers, we are looking at having robots
controlled by biological networks," he says. The hope is that this
technology could stimulate regions of the brain in which cells are missing
and help rehabilitate brains with Alzheimer’s.
But could brain-chip technology be harnessed in more surreal ways? Warwick
rummages around his desk and picks up a small box. The minute black chip
that he places carefully in my hand is familiar — it is the BrainGate that
Donahue used to transmit signals from the brain that caused such a stir last
year. "What if — instead of sending electrical signals from our nerves and
into machinery — we could send information the other way, directly into our
brains?"
This is the microchip that, five years ago, the professor attached to nerves
in his arm. "I trained my brain to receive pulses for six weeks and then put
a chip into my wife Irena's arm to see if we could feel when the other moved
their hand. Irena said it felt like lightning running down her finger." But
Warwick wants more. Within six to seven years, he plans to insert a chip
directly into his brain's cortex, and into that of a volunteer, to see if
they can interact. "You have this enormous problem of getting the electrical
signals from your brain onto the wires and back the other way," the
professor explains. "And actually making the final link to go all the way to
someone else's brain is extremely complex, but it's nearly there. I see it
as being achievable in my lifetime and I want to do it."
And, far from balking at the challenge, it seems that there are surgeons only
too willing to be of service. "They understand that the potential to help
people is enormous," says Warwick.
What about existing technologies — can we exploit them? "I ask my students the
question: how can we link a cochlear implant to the internet? I believe
there is no reason why, with funding, we can't develop this technology in
three to four years," he says. "But in terms of a commercial product that
everyone who has a cochlear implant can get, we're probably looking at a
10-year time frame." The futuristic possibilities this opens up in terms of
new forms of communications are mind-blowing. "Linking a human brain to the
internet means you can extend the nervous system as far as the internet
takes it, so the body is no longer limited to one place," he enthuses.
Warwick has already used his implant to control a robot arm from New York.
"Why should we stop with the web?" he asks. "How about receiving phone calls
by earpiece? And if retinal implants are in use — it might even be possible
in the future to add additional properties, like sensing infrared light."
Enhancing human performance does of course have obvious relevance to the
military. Warwick has been approached to see how his "cyborg" experiments
could help them, and the dream of creating supreme fighting machines propels
many recent cybernetics advances worldwide. If you can overlay lifelike
silicon skin onto prosthetics at the moment, why not include solar panels,
UV and infrared detectors too? And by tapping into the brain signals
directly, we could create super-intensity binoculars, and even sonar sensing
in our heads — projects that the US are already funding today.
Such visions are the lifeblood of roboticists.
"I want to get my memory back," confesses Christensen. "I am already at the
age when I'm starting to think, ’Oh damn, what was his name?’ Wouldn't it be
wonderful if I could have infinite memory and remember everything?" This might sound far-fetched, but computer experts are already talking about all
the memories in your head fitting into the memory of a laptop computer
today.
"Imagine if I could store my life and access it when I needed to," the
professor continues. "I wouldn't just have abstract memories of my
childhood, I'd actually be able to say, ’Hey, I’ve done this.’ It would be
wonderful."
Christensen is describing a world often expounded by futurists, where the
boundary between organisms and devices begin to blur — a world where neural
implants create a direct link to the brain, essentially making computers an
extension of our minds. Futurists don't talk of connecting to the
"bog-standard" PCs of today, but to sentient computers, thousands of times
cleverer than a human brain and with up to a million times more processing
power.
But what is the likelihood of creating these intelligent machines? Experts
describe the world's most powerful supercomputer today as roughly half as
powerful as a human brain in processing terms, but in terms of intelligence
only about 1%. But we don't know how to use that processing power yet;
obviously there is far more to intelligence than just number-crunching
ability. Christensen uses the analogy of airplanes. "When people started to
build aircraft, they would try and build something that actually flapped its
wings, when they understood the underlying aerodynamic principles of lift,
which is used by birds and by airplanes, then they built them differently.
Who would want to sit in a 747 that flapped its wings?"
Based on technological advances today, it seems possible that in the future
nervous systems and IT could be inextricably linked.
But how close are we to a future in which technologies inside us make us
cleverer, more in control, and — most importantly — healthier?
Today, heart-regulating pacemakers are standard. Cochlear implants are a huge
success from a bioengineering point of view but, although the technology is
improving rapidly, wearers often struggle to understand every word. Those
with retinal implants report seeing bright lights, and at best, dots of
light in a pattern, and we, as Warwick says, might need to go through "a
little bit of evolution" before our brains can do all the things we
hope they might do. But despite the hurdles ahead, Herr believes that we
will merge with technology to create physically superior hybrid humans where
combinations of biological and synthetic materials "will deliver optimal
performance".
Warwick dreams of taking investigative engineering to new heights by
communicating brain-to-brain, and Christensen sees technology augmenting
people, making them "much smarter and much brighter". The roboticist
Professor Rodney Brooks of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory in Boston, predicts that the lives of our
grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be as unrecognisable to us as our
use of information technology in all its forms would be incomprehensible to
someone from the dawn of the 20th century, writing that: "We will have the
power to manipulate our own bodies in the way that we currently manipulate
the design of machines."
But what of a world where intelligent machines preside? "There is no need to
worry about mere robots taking over from us,"
Brooks writes, reassuringly. "We will be taking over from ourselves."
