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     Making 'the Blind See and the Lame Walk' 
     There is a touch of religious zeal in the companies' quest to change the human state. "We are going to make the blind see and the lame walk," said Jeffrey H. Greiner, president of Advanced Bionics. 
     Gregory Stock, director of UCLA's Program on Science, Technology and Society, said it has only been with the advent of computers--with their speed, precision, small size and personal nature--that the idea of joining humans and machines has become something other than grotesque. 
     "We are born into a sea of machines and telecommunications now," Stock said. "The boundaries have begun to break down as the interfaces become easier and more natural. It is evolutionary in a biological sense. But for society as a whole, it is a revolution." 
     The roots of the human-machine hybrid trace back to two researchers in the 1960s who were investigating the survivability of humans in space for NASA. 
     Manfred E. Clynes, then chief research scientist at New York's Rockland State Hospital, and Nathan S. Kline, the hospital's director, believed that humans could survive the rigors of radiation, low gravity, carbon dioxide buildup and a host of other conditions only if the body's mechanisms were radically changed. 
     They proposed the use of a host of drugs that would be administered automatically, allowing the astronauts the freedom "to explore, to create, to think and to feel." 
     They coined the term "cyborg" to describe their hybrid creation--short for "cybernetic organism." They published a picture of the first cyborg, a white laboratory rat with an osmotic pump attached to its tail. 
     Clynes' and Kline's idea soon dropped out of favor with NASA as the word was embraced by science-fiction writers, but the research into implantable devices continued. The development of the transistor cleared the way for the 1958 introduction of the first implanted electronic device--the cardiac pacemaker. 
     In the decades since, at least half a dozen companies have emerged that produce such devices--used to control pain, regulate breathing and activate paralyzed hands. 
     Medtronic, which built its brand in the pacemaker market, is already selling about $150 million in neural stimulators annually. The company expects this newer business to double shortly after the turn of the millennium, said Vice President Michael Selzer. 
     Advanced Bionics, a 7-year-old company that evolved out of pacemaker manufacturer Pacesetter Systems, plans to expand from its single product, a cochlear implant for the deaf, into a range of neural products. 
     "Advanced Bionics is a neural stimulation company now," said Greiner, the company's president. "In the next five years, you will see many other products. We are going to move all across the body." 

     Controlling the Cursor by Thinking 
     For all the ingenuity of these implants, they are still crude compared with the elegance of the human body, like pieces of Frankenstein dug up from some high-tech graveyard. Many of the devices must be activated by the user. For example, patients implanted with NeuroControl's FreeHand system typically shrug their shoulders to make a paralyzed hand grasp an object. 
     But research into automatic and natural control is moving quickly. This year, Drs. Roy Bakay and Philip Kennedy of Atlanta's Emory University() announced the development of a brain implant that allows paralyzed patients to command a computer with their thoughts. 
     The implant, a tiny glass cone seeded with material that encourages nerve cells to grow inside, detects electrical activity in certain parts of the brain's motor cortex. The pattern of activity is then interpreted to control the movements of a computer cursor. The cursor can be placed on icons that activate the computer to speak and type messages. 
     The device was implanted in a paralyzed 52-year-old man, who has learned to control the cursor movements by simply thinking of moving his eyes and eyebrows. 
     One of the oldest and most successful of the devices that communicate with the nervous system is the cochlear implant, a device that can help the deaf by directly stimulating the auditory nerve. 
     The implants fit inside the tiny spiral tube of the cochlea, deep within the ear. The cochlea is usually lined with thousands of hair cells, which produce an electrical charge when they are moved by sound waves. Each section of the cochlea's tube relates to a different pitch. Cochlear implants bypass the hair cells and directly stimulate the nerves with their own electrical signal. 
     The first devices had only a single electrode, but since the mid-1990s, microprocessor-controlled implants with multiple electrodes have appeared, allowing for a fuller reproduction of sound. 
     For Brian Winic, a warehouse clerk in Marina del Rey who was born deaf, the implant has been a life-changing experience. 
     It took months for his brain to adjust to the new sounds, but eventually he began recognizing noises he'd never heard before. He could hear the refrigerator and the bubbling pump on his fish tank. He remembered hearing a loud ticking one day as he was driving, then realized it was the turn signal on his car. The implant tossed Winic from the deaf world into the hearing world, subtly changing his circle of friends and his perspective on life. 

     Effect Depends on Motives of Users 
     The power of the implants to alter such basic things as friendship, community and identity is at the core of a conflict between the hearing and deaf worlds(). It may be the first of other conflicts that emerge as the use of neural implants spreads through the body. 
     There is little debate over the use of cochlear implants in adults, particularly those who grew up as hearing people. For them, the implants only restore an ability that was lost. But many deaf organizations, including the World Federation of the Deaf, have rallied against using the devices in children who were born deaf. The problem is not so much the device itself, but the perception of the deaf that it engenders. 
     Lawrence Fleischer, chairman of the deaf studies department at Cal State Northridge, said the implants bring with them a vision of deafness that the deaf themselves reject: that they are damaged humans who must be repaired by technology. 
     "The deaf community already has a language," Fleischer said. "It has its own beliefs and values. The medical field doesn't see it in the same light. They see an ear that needs to be fixed." 
     While the argument may seem strained to those in the hearing world, it is a central belief of many in the deaf community that the inability to hear is not a loss but simply a difference, like skin color or height. The deaf movement against cochlear implants highlights a theme that has resurfaced with each advance in technology: that the machine enforces a slightly different sense of life, one that becomes more compelling and threatening as it penetrates deeper into human society. 
     Even Warwick's small experiment with an implanted transmitter drew a variety of responses from around the world, including some who likened the implant to the mark of the beast in the Bible. Reporters from Moscow and South Africa questioned him about the implant's potential use by a police state to control and identify its citizenry. Warwick is more sanguine about the role of the device, saying it could be used to monitor criminals, confirm the identities of parties in a business transaction or help the disabled navigate through a smart building. 
     The use or abuse of technology is in the hands of its human users, he said. "I didn't really feel any negatives, even though people knew where I was all the time. I didn't really feel anything except that as the implant was removed, I began to feel I was going to miss it." 
     The ability to add senses, change our bodies and even manipulate our genetic code has begun to reshape the very concept of what it means to be human. It has prompted the rise of social thinkers who, like Marx and Engels before them, have begun to ponder the changing relationship between humans and their technological creations. 

     'A Cyborg Manifesto' 
     At the center of the movement is Donna Haraway, a professor at UC Santa Cruz who wrote a 1985 essay titled "A Cyborg Manifesto." 
     Haraway, a science historian, wrote that the power of advanced technology to reconstruct the human state is breaking down strict social hierarchies. These rigid divisions of identity--men and women, black and white, smart and dull, strong and weak, mechanical and organic--have dominated our times, largely as tools of control and oppression, she argues. 
     Technology has exposed the triviality of these distinctions and opened the possibility of creating a multitude of selves, she wrote. Identity is ambiguous, human nature is free-flowing, confusion is to be celebrated. 
     While traditional philosophers have barely acknowledged Haraway's ideas, she has found a passionate following in cutting-edge academic departments with hybrid names as blurry as the word "cyborg" itself. 
     Chris Hables Gray, a professor of computer science and cultural studies of science and technology at the University of Great Falls in Montana, said the cyborg model has resonated in a variety of fields precisely because it is ambiguous and open-ended. 
     "We're going through a fundamental change in human culture, and the idea of the cyborg touches on all of the big issues--gender, race, the body," said Gray, editor of the Cyborg Handbook, a collection of essays. 
     "There are two questions humanity is struggling with now, and the cyborg addresses both of them," said Hugh Gusterson, a professor of anthropology and science studies at MIT. 
     "Do we control technology or does it control us? Are we just machines or are we more than that?" 

Copyright 1998 Los Angeles Times. All Rights Reserved 

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