By Rob Fixmer
New York Times
From the San Francisco Chronicle, Friday, August 14, 1998
New York
We humans have been trying to accelerate our own evolution for millennia, and while in some ways we appear to be getting away with it, biological computing could well test the forbearance of Mother Nature.
Until now, the most ambitious efforts to outwit natural selection have been cloning and the Human Genome Project, which sets out to map the results of random mutation and natural selection on our collective genetic inheritance.
Scientists embark on these projects not out of mere curiosity but with the hope of remaking ourselves into organisms more fit for survival than our ancestors.
But photocopying genes and building a repair manual for them are only ways of tinkering with natural selection. Far more ambitious are efforts to meld machines and living cells being undertaken now in several areas of research. If these endeavors ever realize their goals, the personal computer will become very personal indeed.
Consider the work of researchers at British Telecommunications PLC in the area of implanted chips. One project, somewhat ominously dubbed "Soul Catcher," seeks to develop a computer that can be implanted in the brain to complement human memory and computational skills.
In addition, it would enable the gathering of extrasensory information -- in this case, data transmitted by wireless networking.
This area of research may seem farfetched, but it is really the logical extension of devices like pacemakers, ocular implants, which simulate hearing for the deaf, and neuro-stimulators, which send small electrical charges through nerves to alleviate certain kinds of pain.
In a metaphorical sense, the morphing of man and machine is already taking place. Among Silicon Valley researchers, the human brain and its products are commonly alluded to as "wetware," while intelligence is expressed in "bandwidth" -- as in, "A lot of valuable wetware was invested in that product, but we couldn't sell it to a bunch of low-bandwidth vulture capitalists."
At the same time that electronics is making its way into the human body, biological organisms are instructing chip design. British Telecom is investing in Soul Catcher not only for the long-term potential of brain-chip implants but on the assumption that, conversely, the workings of the human central nervous system can teach chip makers a thing or two about network efficiency.
After all, while our information storage capacity and computational skills are limited compared with those of computers, the responses of even a 1-year-old child to stimuli like pain, light or sound suggest that the nervous system is a far more robust network that the fastest Ethernet.
Biology is already invading computer architecture. Two University of Rochester professors -- Dr. Animesh Ray, a biologist, and Dr. Mitsunori Ogihara, a computer scientist -- collaborated two years ago in building a rudimentary device that uses nucleotides to perform functions typically handled by transistors in a silicon processor.
And across the continent, in Santa Clara, engineers at a company called Affymetrix are making computer chips containing DNA to diagnose genetic mutations.
Will the merging of machine and organism bypass evolution or is it merely an extension of the evolutionary process?
Peter Cochrane, the head of research at British Telecom as well as a celebrated futurist and a specialist in "human-computer interfaces," embraces the latter view. In fact, he says the future of the human species depends on our continuing and expanding ability to process information. If not, he wrote in a 1996 column for the Daily Telegraph in Britain, "systems more efficient at information processing may supplant us."
In some ways, the spread of the Internet suggests that people are already on the threshold of a major evolutionary step as information-processing organisms.
Communication over the Internet breaks old time and space bounds, allowing those who are connected to share, interactively, an enormous and growing wealth of information. The technology itself is quickly evolving into a sort of global nervous system.
It is hard to imagine the full consequences of uninterrupted access to that network through an implanted computer that renders each of us a node in a global tapestry of information.
Without safeguards, for example, the enhancement of our brains could easily destroy our minds, leaving us unable to distinguish reality from virtual reality -- maybe even self from non-self. Powerful software would have to be developed to help us sort, sift and prioritize the constant deluge of information lest our brains degenerate into data landfills.
Many people already feel overwhelmed by information. One more billboard, radio jingle, dashboard gauge or spam e-mail and we suspect we will fry like an overloaded circuit.
In the end, perhaps the most frightening question in these futuristic visions of the mind-machine meld is who or what can be entrusted to run the system. Who among us would entrust our innermost thoughts and the plumbing for all this incoming data to an "encephalized" operating system?