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National Post, Thursday, January 27, A17 TECHNOLOGY A cybernetics professor in England hopes to use implants to send movement commands from his body into his spouse's, but other researchers remain skeptical Inventor gets on wife's nerves BY SCOT LEHIGH

No, he's not quite the bionic man some have suggested, but if everything goes as Kevin Warwick hopes, he may soon become one of humankind's first real cyborgs. Until now, the notion of being part human, part computer has been the stuff of science fiction. But in the next two years, a surgeon will slice open Warwick's left arm, fix a delicate collar around his nerve fibres, attach an array of electrodes, and wire them to an inch-long microelectronic implant capable of recording neural signals and transmitting them to an external computer. Thus Warwick, a cybernetics professor at Reading University in England, will become a human guinea pig in the effort to merge man and machine.

PAUL BARKER / AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE Kevin Warwick prepares robot volleyballers at a science festival. Below, he shows the microchip, which will be implanted in his arm.

He hopes to receive the implant in the summer of 2001, but the date is not firm. it may happen a lot sooner, it may happen a lot later. We don't want to do it until we are ready, he says. Presuming no glitches with Warwick's implant, his wife, Irena, will also receive one, six or seven months later. The couple will then see if one can trigger not simply motion but emotion in the other. Should the experiment succeed, a ponopoly of possibilities-and a host of moral and ethical questions-will stretch like the new century on the horizon. In the first phase-involving only Warwick-a research team will try, for example, to record the electric nerve signals that move a hand or a finger, store them in a computer, and then see if data, transmitted back to his implant and into his neural network, will trigger the same muscle movement.

Warwick's hopes are far grander than just using stored neurological messages to recreate muscle movement in himself, however. "What I would really like to achieve is being able to communicate from person to person by means of thought signals alone," Warwick says. "This is a step on the way" Even Warwick, optimist that he is, doesn't see actual conceptual thought being transferred via his temporary implant. That would take a bram implant. He does, however, believe it's realistic to theorize that nerve impulses in one person may trigger muscle motion in the other. "One thing we would like to try is, let my wife have a trip to Boston, and from here I would move my finger and see if, at the exact same time, her finger moves." Yet another experiment will take him across the boundary into a strange new world where technology could change the very nature of what it means to be human. He'll feed extrasensory information, such as ultrasonic impulses, into his nervous system to see if it allows him to sense objects in his path, the way, say, a bat would. He'll also test whether his nervous system can make any sense of infrared data to detect heat from afar. If any of that works, it would be stunning. But his hopes are higher still: to transfer sensation, such as pain and emotion itself, to his wife. That, Warwick says, could open up a whole new world of communication, where two people might actually share a state of feeling, even at great distance. "The technology is there, once we are hooked in via implants, of having impulses sent across the Internet to anyone else with an implant," he says. Certainly that would be a great advance in existing research, which at its most promising has seen neurosurgeons at Emory University in Atlanta in 1998 implant a neurotropic electrode in the brain of a paralyzed stroke victim, enabling him to move a computer cursor, and thus communicate, by thought impulse. If Warwick does succeed, it will surprise many skeptics who, citing the current state of knowledge, believe his prospects to be slim. Even Warwick's recycling his own nerve signals to recreate similar muscle movement in himself would be a real breakthrough, says Steve M. Potter, a senior research fellow in biology at the California Institute of Technology. "There will be quite a few scientists who will be very surprised if he does that," said Potter. They are nowhere near at that stage. That kind of thing is 10 years down the line." And as for Warwick's hopes to transfer emotion? "It sounds like science fiction to me," says Bruce McNaughton, director of the University of Arizona's graduate program in cognition and neural systems. "I would say the technology is a few centuries away." A second problem, says Thomas Murray, president of the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute in Garrison, N.Y., is that emotion is not merely neurological messages, but a complex matrix of feeling and thought. "It is an enormous leap to say, well, we can measure a few electrical nerve impulses, so if I can somehow transmit them to me, I can feel the same emotion," says Murray. But not everyone is as pessimistic. Roy Bakay, one of the Emory neurosurgeons who did the pioneering brain-implant work, says that at least the initial part of Warwick's experiment- trying to trigger motion in his hand by reintroducing his own nerve signals-is feasible. "I see a lot of potential technical difficulties," he says, "but there is nothing wrong with it scientifically, and the technology is there." Now, with Warwick's plans beginning to attract international attention, both fascinating possibilities and thorny questions swirl in the background. For example, could doctors use neural signals from a healthy person to help someone learn to walk again after an injury that damaged motor functions? And if moods can be shared, could depression be treated by storing a person's nerve signals during a happy state and then transmitting them back when he or she is depressed? And then there is sex. Warwick hopes he and his wife will be able to share the sensations of sexual arousal by intermingling nerve impulses. "That's a part of the experiment I will be looking forward to," laughs Warwick. "What if it would be possible to get the sexual stimulation of intercourse without actually doing it?" More immediately, Warwick says his wife is both apprehensive and intrigued by her impending voyage into the unknown. "I think certainly she's scared of what's going to happen, but also excited at the possibilities." Boston Globe, with files from National Post

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