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These articles comes courtesy of Reuters and ABC News.com. The originals are at: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20011222/tc/bizchips_dc_1.html and
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/living/SecondOpinion/secondopinion010905.html
Saturday December 22 3:54 PM ET
Microchips Under the Skin Offer ID, Raise Questions
By Kevin Krolicki
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Picture a chip the size of a grain of rice that can be injected into your body and give detailed information about you to anyone with the right scanning equipment.
A scene from a bad science fiction film? A radical research project in some secret government laboratory?
The chip is neither fiction nor obscure science, but instead it is asoon-to-be-marketed product ready to make its way to customers in the year ahead.
The use of high-powered chips melded to the body has been a recurrent theme of sci-fi from the 1984 cyberpunk novel ''Neuromancer'' to the 1999 blockbuster film ``The Matrix,'' but the announcement of a commercial-ready product by Applied Digital Solutions (Nasdaq:ADSX - news) this week will focus real-world attention on the potential and risks of such technology, experts said.
Designed to store critical personal medical data, the chip could mark the start of a more urgent debate about potential privacy invasions at a time when privacy
advocates are on the defensive over anti-terror initiatives after Sept. 11.``It's certainly going to raise issues that we haven't dealt with before,'' said Stephen Keating, executive director of the Denver-based Privacy Foundation.
Such radio-activated chips are already used to track cattle, house pets and salmon.
But this would mark the first attempt to apply the technology to human beings, offering a potentially controversial means for hospitals to ``scan'' patients in emergency
rooms and for governments to pick out convicted criminals.Applied Digital said Wednesday it would begin marketing its implantable VeriChip in South America and Europe, initially as a means to convey information about
medical devices to doctors who need a quick way to find out how and where patients with pacemakers, artificial joints and other surgically implanted devices have
been treated.When activated by a radio scanner, the chip would emit a radio signal of its own from under the skin that would transmit stored data to a nearby Internet-equipped
computer or via the telephone, the company said.The chip itself could be implanted in a doctor's office with a local anesthesia and the site of the injection could be closed without stitches, it said.
But the company already has its sights on more ambitious applications for the chips, which are currently capable of carrying the equivalent of about 6 lines of text.
Future versions could emit a tracking beacon or serve as a form of personal identification, an executive said.``There are enough benefits that outweigh the concerns people have about privacy,'' said Applied Digital Chairman and Chief Executive Richard Sullivan.
Other experts remain skeptical, citing immediate practical problems, such as the need to set standards that would make such chips more universally readable, and
longer-term concerns over civil liberties.Even so, such implants are certain to become more widespread, said technology forecaster Paul Saffo.
``Of course, we will do this,'' said Saffo of the Silicon Valley-based Institute for the Future ``And it won't be just for the functionality. It will also be for fashion.
You've got a generation that's already piercing themselves. Of course, they're going to put electronics under their skin.''TOUCHED BY A DIGITAL ANGEL
Applied Digital, which has a $95-million market value and has been scarcely followed on Wall Street, plans to file an application with the Food and Drug
Administration in January to market the chip in the United States, a process that could take another year to 18 months, Sullivan said.The Federal Communications Commission has already licensed the chip's use of radio frequencies because of an existing version used to track runaway pets, said
Sullivan.The Palm Beach, Fla.-based company is just coming through a two-year-long restructuring, reorganizing a far-flung telecommunications business around a patent it
acquired in December 1999 for a transmitter that could be implanted in the body and powered by muscle movements.The first related commercial application was a remote-monitoring device called Digital Angel, introduced at the end of November, which combines a wristwatch-like
sensor linked to a wireless transmitter and a global positioning system.The device can transmit information on body temperature, pulse and location and has been sold as a way to track Alzheimer's patients and children who might
wander from home.The company has also won a three-year trial contract with California to supply a version of the product that would track paroled prisoners in Los Angeles and alert
authorities when they had violated the terms of their parole by leaving a set area.Sales of the new implanted chip could total $2.5 million to $5 million in 2002, Sullivan estimated, a small fraction of a potential market the company has projected
could be worth $70 billion or more.Wall Street is excited about the chip. Applied Digital, which saw its stock rise 18 percent to 45 cents on the Nasdaq on its initial product announcement on
Wednesday, is in talks with major pacemaker manufacturers about a joint-marketing plan that would see the VeriChip implanted at the same time as the
heart-regulating devices, he said.Some see new opportunities for high-tech security after the hijacking attacks on New York and the Pentagon killed nearly 3,300 on Sept. 11. The attacks brought
new support for the use of such technology by government and more interest in its future commercial applications, Sullivan said.``People are becoming less concerned about what information is out there,'' he said.
Erwin Chemerinsky, a civil rights expert and law professor at the University of Southern California, conceded that the public mood has shifted, but said: ``It all
depends on how this is used ... when the government is invading the body there are always special privacy concerns.''``This is rightly going to prompt debate, as you can imagine, but the good news is that we'll have years to figure it out,'' said futurist Saffo.
Remote Mind ControlWhat if Brains of the Future Run With Computer Circuitry?
Commentary
By Nicholas Regush
Sept. 5 � We appear to be edging towards an era of "mind control" � a time when human brains might be manipulated routinely by highly sophisticated technology.
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On the bright side, the powers of this science could be used to mend broken and diseased brains. On the dark side, there would be plenty of opportunity to tinker with consciousness and control human behavior in menacing fashion.Stranger Than Fiction?
These days, science fiction writers need a triple dose of smart pills each morning to stay ahead of the scientists � especially the brain scientists, who are beginning to put on quite a show.
At Reading University in the U.K., cybernetics whiz Kevin Warwick may soon take matters into his own brain � and his wife, Irena's.
The couple has planned to have two-inch-long silicon chips (with power source, tuner and radio transceiver) surgically implanted in their arms above the elbow and connected to nerve fibers.
When Warwick moves his fingers, it is expected that signals from the chip will be transformed into radio waves and sent to a computer, which will then move the signal along to his wife's silicon chip. Her fingers should also move.
The idea here is that this type of technology could potentially be developed to help people who have been paralyzed. Someone, for example, who has nerves functioning in a leg could use a Warwick-like system to enable the signal transmission from those nerves to by-pass spinal cord damage and get to the brain, thus allowing for movement.
Implants are also being used to enhance sensory functions or recover a specific sense. Retinal implants are in the early test stage, but an implant that stimulates nerve endings in the middle ear is already being used in deaf children. Sounds are picked up by a microphone and computer outside the body and then relayed to the implant.
And in numerous labs in the U.S. and elsewhere, scientists are focusing attention on how brain cells compute and relay information and form, change and maintain connections (networks).
Robo-brains?
At Caltech, for example, scientists have been studying a "neurochip," living brain cells from rat embryos wired up to electrodes that sit in a silicon chip. The system, involving computers that record the data from the neurochip, allows for extensive study of how these brain cells interact and how their network functions.
This is slow, painstaking work, involving the analysis of huge amounts of data, but it is this type of knowledge that may enable surgeons to one day implant more refined implants to help heal an impaired brain.
On the dark side, of course, is the possibility that greater understanding of how the brain works and the emergence of far more precise technology may one day translate into more potential for not-so-nice manipulation of human behavior.
The current flurry of recently well-publicized activity in brain pacemaker research offers another example of how things could get out of control.
This research involves implanting an electrode in the brain to stimulate any one of its regions. The electrical pulses are provided by a small power unit in the patient's chest.
On the bright side, researchers at several centers in the U.S., Canada and Europe are hoping that the use of these devices will benefit patients with neurological problems such as tremors, epilepsy and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Plans are also well underway to use this technology to treat depression, obesity, anorexia, and addiction.
The implantation of electrodes in the brain is typically compared to heart pacemakers which employ electrical stimulation to maintain a certain heart rhythm. Heart pacemakers have been highly successful and therefore the brain pacemakers will also be successful, or so the mantra goes.
Risks High With Brains
This is not a smart comparison. In fact, the history of brain science strongly suggests we need to be extremely wary of grand promises and cavalier forays into neurological treatments.
For instance, back in the 1960s, a team of brain scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital, including Frank Ervin and Vernon Mark, focusing on temporal-lobe epilepsy, experimented with implanted electrodes that produced mild electric currents. The goal was to determine the areas of the brain that produced reactions approximating a seizure. The next step was to send heat down the electrodes to burn the appropriate tissue.
The results were promising, and in the course of these procedures, the scientific team learned that patients with temporal-lobe epilepsy also had histories of impulse-control loss and violent behavior.
This discovery led to highly controversial brain surgery to treat carefully selected people who had violent episodes.
In 1968, Life magazine, taking note of the riots that had occurred in the Roxbury section of Boston and Newark, N.J., heralded their work as a young science that offered "insight and a potential remedy for a worried society." But not everyone was pleased about this "potential" because it was felt that it set the stage for violence to be defined very narrowly as being mainly brain induced, and not a reactive product of racism and poverty.
Furthermore, critics argued that the surgery was primitive. Far too little was understood about brain function. But just how much more do we really understand nowadays?
Where will the new brain science lead us? The financial incentives and fierce competition in medicine could eventually lead to all sorts of attempts at neural behavior modification.
This is a red flag worthy of our attention.
