Is it ethical to invade the human body? There are people who don’t ask such questions, but rather happily take every opportunity to become the best possible version of themselves.
Body explorers
In the 21st century, man knows almost everything about himself. And as we have known since biblical times, “much knowledge is much sorrow. Understanding how limited the human body is, how weak it is under the influence of the environment, forces people to try all sorts of ways to improve their own bodies. In fact, the biohacker movement grew out of the desire to defeat “our own biology.
The word “biohacking” refers to completely different things: from experimenting with diets to implanting chips under the skin. But all of these approaches are driven by the same goal: to find the limits of the body’s abilities and to try to go beyond these limits. Or push them back, whichever way you prefer.
However, for avid biohackers, what is often important is not only the benefits to the body, but also a commitment to a certain idea. The idea is that the human body and everything that makes it up is not something inviolable and sacred. On the contrary, nature has played a funny joke with us, imprisoning the human mind into a kind of bioconstructor, which can and should be played with. By implanting implants and editing their own genes, biohackers must feel about the same as programmers playing with code or chemists testing a newly discovered substance. And their most likely reaction to mistakes is: “Wow, that’s interesting!”
Is that reasonable? With no white spots left on Earth, and with no other planets (unless you count the Moon) mankind has not yet reached, our body remains a large space for various discoveries. Taking into account the latest trends in the development of world science, biohackers can either turn out to be visionaries, who started modifying their own bodies even before it became a common practice, or they can become the object of persecution from those who do not like the “wondrous new world”. Either way, they are trying to stay on the crest of science.
Biology punks
No one can say exactly when the biohacker movement began. In the 1990s, those who tried to “dabble” in implanting chips or working with genes were more likely to be called biopunk (the English word punk also translates as “renegade”). Their activities did not resonate much, and there was no place for their special achievements: after all, biotechnology is an expensive and resource-intensive industry, so only people with large corporations behind them could do something cool.
In fact, in all industries and spheres of activity where big money is made, biohacking is firmly entrenched. Take professional sports, for example, where – and this is a polichinelle secret – doping is used everywhere. And that is exactly what allows, by interfering with the biochemical processes of the body, to expand its limits, making people run faster, jump higher and hit harder. But the use of such drugs has many side effects that hit the body hard. Athletes actually pay with their health for their professional achievements. Their goal is not so much to get better, as to get ahead of the competition, and in the world of professional sports all means are good. Do-it-yourself biology, as biohacking is also called, is not really about that.
If taking drugs isn’t cheap, what about changing your own DNA? But this is where things have changed markedly for the better. For example, 20 years ago, the cost of sequencing the human genome was tens of millions of dollars. Today, such a procedure can be done for $1,000, and the test for the most basic mutations is even cheaper. Therefore, being a biohacker in the 21st century is no longer as expensive as it used to be.
Forgetfulness as a path to chipping
At the same time, it is no longer fashionable to change the body’s properties. The new trend is to integrate electronic devices into your body. Yes, yes, we are talking about the very chipping, which everyone is frightened of and which is supposed to happen with the general vaccination against coronavirus. While ordinary people are trembling in fear of the coming digital concentration camp, some have been chipping for years and are feeling fine. One of the pioneers of chipping was Amal Graafstra, founder of a company with a catchy name: Dangerous Things. Mr. Graafstra began his “business” with Dangerous Things back in 2005, when he worked in an IT consulting company for medical institutions. And the reason for such meddling in his own body was Amal’s forgetfulness. He always left the electronic key to the office at home, and because of this he could not stay at work longer than anyone else.
What does it take to never forget a key? To carry it with you at all times, or, more precisely, in yourself. Graafstra ordered parts for the chip on the Internet that should not cause rejection in the human body, assembled the device at home and injected it under his skin with a veterinary needle. He settled on NFC, the wireless data transmission technology now built into most smartphones. No one was mass-producing NFC chips back then, much less implanting them in themselves,” Amal said.
Graafstra’s experiments with the unusual way of opening doors were noticed by his colleagues and spread the news about him all over the web. The chipped man was only happy about such fame, handing out tips to all the DIY biohackers and gathering around him those willing to become “cyborgs on minimum wages.” And in 2013, Amal created his own company to monetize his personal experience.
Amal began to work according to the precepts of biopunkers: he created the company in a garage with a small share capital (only 12 thousand dollars). But the very next year, his revenue was 100 thousand at once! The founder of Dangerous Things recommends turning to piercers for implantation of chips, since they are the only ones who know how to do subcutaneous implantations.
By the way, an important note: in biohacker communities, it is tacitly accepted to despise people who undergo electronic implantation procedures in specialized clinics. Everything has to be hardcore: the chip is implanted either on its own, or with the help of a friend, neighbor, or non-specialist; and it is in bad taste to go to a medical institution for such a procedure.
Cheap and futuristic
By the way, an implantable chip is not such an expensive purchase. Items on the Dangerous Things website start at hundreds of dollars. A set of Cyborg Transformation Kit with several chips at a discount can be purchased for only $ 49 (less than 3500 rubles). There you can also buy everything for surgical interventions (needles, scalpels, painkillers) and various devices for setting up and programming chips.
The shelf life of the devices that Graafstra offers is 30 years. That is, if you decide to implant a chip at a mature age, it is, consider it for life. The most popular locations for devices on the body are between the thumb and index finger or on the hand, just above the wrist.
What is the purpose of all this? As Amal says, the main purpose of chipping is to hide encrypted data where intruders can’t get to it. Technically, of course, it is possible to attack a person with a chip and cut the device out from under his skin – but, you must admit, far fewer people would do that than would a trivial theft of a card from their pocket.
But there is no doubt that the majority of Dangerous Things customers are driven by a healthy (or not so healthy) curiosity and, to a certain extent, frustration with the twenty-first century. The very future that the iconic sci-fi movies – Blade Runner, Minority Report, The Matrix – painted never happened. Implanting a chip under one’s skin is an attempt to at least partially make it a reality.
Who are the Grinders?
Biohacking is a rather motley field, and there is even a system of classification of biohackers, in order to distinguish among them those who are engaged in radically different things. Those who are not afraid and do not hesitate to experiment on themselves, called grinders.
One of the most famous grinders is Gabriel Lisina. He is known primarily for his high-profile project to create a “pirated copy” of one of the most expensive officially approved drugs in the world, Glybera. This drug is used to treat a rare genetic dysfunction, proteinlipase deficiency. One injection costs a million dollars. But Lisina and several biohacker colleagues created a counterpart that is more than 100 times cheaper, costing only seven thousand dollars.
But in the context of this article, Lisina’s other exploits are far more interesting. For example, the biohacker’s attempt to turn his eyes into thermal imagers. Together with physician Jeffrey Tibbetts, Lisina injected a mixture of chlorine E-6 with insulin, dimethyl sulfoxide, and saline into his pupils. The main active ingredient in this mix, the same chlorine E-6, is an analog of the photosynthetic pigment chlorophyll, which is used to treat nyctalopia, an impaired ability to see in the dark.
Two hours after the injection of chlorine, Lisina was able to read in the dark signs (letters, numbers, figures) that were not seen by the people invited to participate in the experiment. The biohacker was also able to determine with one hundred percent accuracy the location of other people in the dark among the trees, while the other subjects were able to do it only one third of the time. The next morning, Lisina’s vision returned to normal, and for 20 days after the experiment, he noted no side effects.
It would seem that the experiment is not as “hardcore” as most chip implantation experiments – but just look at his eyes! Not to mention the fact that there was no complete guarantee that his eyesight would return to normal. This experiment perfectly illustrates the attitude of biohackers to their own bodies: for them, it is primarily a field for experimentation.
One of the most famous Grinders is the Briton Kevin Warwick, the man who officially became the first cyborg on Earth. Back in 1998, Warwick implanted a simple RFID chip under his skin, with the help of which he was able to implement certain elements of the “smart home” concept: to open and close doors and remotely turn on lights.
And in 2002, Warwick decided on a more complicated experiment on himself: a rather complex implant was implanted into his left arm, connected to the median nerve of his left hand. The implant was to transmit signals from the nervous system to the computer and store them there. To make the experiment more spectacular, the Briton created a special mechanical hand that worked in sync with his real hand. When Warwick moved his fingers, neural impulses came from his brain to the implant, which were then transformed into electrical signals and transmitted to the computer, and the mechanical hand, depending on the type of signals, moved each time just like the real one.
A similar device was implanted under the skin of his wife Irina: Kevin planned to establish cyber communication with his wife, transmitting her thoughts through computer. Nothing came out, but Warwick got his dose of media interest and was able to tell the whole mankind why he dared such experiments on himself. According to the scientist, very soon artificial intelligence and robots will become so smart that they will push people into secondary roles: “Ordinary people will become absolutely uncompetitive compared to cyborgs that will drive them out of offices”. To compete with their own creations, humans will have to digitalize to the max.
Biohacking for medical reasons
Some people turn themselves into a cyborg out of pure interest, while others are forced to do so by life itself: for example, 47-year-old Canadian Rob Spence. As a schoolboy, Spence played with his grandfather’s rifle and lost one eye because of the violent recoil. On the one hand, a very sad story, on the other hand, who knows, if the guy had not remained disabled, would he be now known throughout the world?
Spence walked around with a patch on one eye for a long time, and on the fourth decade he still decided to have surgery, but the usual implant to the Canadian soon got bored. He decided to equip himself with something more interesting – for example, a cyber-eye. It’s a done deal: Spence, who had by that time studied filmmaking, had a camera implanted in his eyeball and became “Glasborg” (the term Eyeborg, which is how the man calls his project, is a combination of the English words eye and cyborg). By the way, he found inspiration in the 1970s science-fiction series “Six Million Dollar Man”: there, the hero also had a bionic eye instead of a normal eye.
The design of the new eyeball for Spence was developed by Phil Bowen, an eye specialist. And former MIT and SpaceX employee Kosta Grammatis created a miniature device that fit into the void in Rob’s skull. To understand the scale of the task: the dimensions of the camera had to be no more than nine millimeters in thickness, 30 millimeters in length and 28 millimeters in height. Grammatis solved it nicely, placing not only the camera, but also a battery with a signal transmitter to external devices and an image-processing software board in place of the eyeball.
Martin Ling of the University of Edinburgh helped design the architecture of the entire system. Ling designed a special receiver that receives the signal from the implant and transmits it to a laptop, tablet, smartphone or even directly to a projector. And a red LED-light, signaling the switched on camera and referring to the character from the “Terminator” movie, was invented together. It’s simple, but its effect is amazing. “One day I ran into a bicyclist on the street who immediately attacked me, scolding me for interfering with his ride. I got angry and yelled back, but I forgot the camera was on and I looked like an enraged cyborg. Anyway, the enemy fled in terror, a victory for Skynet,” Spence says.
Rob and his associates barely made it to the budget of the project. But the authoritative Time magazine immediately included Eyeborg into the list of the main inventions of the year, and a number of large Internet portals and magazines published their articles about the man with a camera instead of an eye. There was also a line of clients lined up for Spence: the cyberdirector used his camera to shoot movies and commercials for Ford and a number of computer game developers.
A brain prosthesis as an unattainable dream
Of course, Spence’s experience is very interesting, but prosthetic eye technology itself is far from new. But is it possible to make a prosthetic brain – or at least a part of it? Some experts are completely confident that nothing will work in this area. “The brain is probably the only organ of the body for which there is no theoretical or experimental basis for complete prosthetics,” says Professor Alexander Kaplan, head of one of the laboratories at the Biology Department of Lomonosov Moscow State University. – However, this does not close the prospect of creating prostheses, <…> because the brain is, although supercomplex, a sufficiently structured information-analytical device. To illustrate his point, Kaplan uses a computer as an analogy: it is unlikely that a new CPU can be assembled from readily available materials, but a USB port is quite feasible.
Perhaps the first known attempt to create a prosthesis for any part of the brain is the work of the American neurologist Theodore Berger, conducted in 2003. Using several dozen electrodes, Berger created a prosthesis of the middle part of the hippocampus for rats. Using these electrodes, electrical activity was recorded in the rodents and the corresponding part of the nervous system was stimulated. Damage to the hippocampus caused the animal to forget the pre-learned information about which of the feeders contained the treats. However, electrical stimulation restored these memories.
They began with rats and continued with humans: in the next year, the first man in the world with a brain implant was 25-year-old Matthew Nagle, a former soccer player. In 2001, Matthew got into a street fight and, in the process, suffered a spinal cord injury and was left hopelessly paralyzed. The former athlete had nothing to lose, so Nagle agreed to take part in the experiment. The paralyzed man was implanted with BrainGate chips in his brain, developed by Cyberkinetics Technology.
After such an operation, Nagle was able to control the cursor on the computer screen simply by imagining moving his hands. He read mail, played simple video games, moved his electromechanical hand, and even drew a few things. Of course, Nagle did not get his full body functionality back, but he managed to achieve a lot.
How did Brain Gate work? The signals that are generated in the brain are transmitted through a sensor – a four by four millimeter square plate with a hundred tiny electrodes. They are small millimeter metal needles that penetrate directly into the cerebral cortex.
This sensor contacts the motor area of the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for left arm movement, and connects to a connector anchored in a hole in the cranial box. When an attempt is made to make some movement, an electrical impulse is generated in the motor area, which is transmitted through the implanted electrodes to the computer.
When it is necessary to start an experiment and engage some external device, the technician connects a cable leading to the computer to the socket. If during the connection Matt tries to imagine the movement of his own arm, the sensor “overhears” the signals of the motor neurons that are activated at that moment, and transmits them to the connected device, such as a monitor or a robotic prosthesis.
We would like to write that Nagle was fine and gradually regained more and more of his skills, but reality is cruel. After a while, the BrainGate experiment had to be stopped. A few months after the implantation of the neuro-implant, for some reason he became worse at recognizing signals. The scientists could not understand what exactly the problem was. Besides, the device worked through a wire that went inside the test subject’s skull, which increased the risk of infection. Already in 2006, all neuroimplants were removed from Nagle’s head, and he died a year later. From an infection.
