Playing God

At the Loyola Neuroscience Banquet held on Satuday, November 2nd, 2013, author of Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts, Emily Anthes, presented insight on animal cyborgs.  She explained how we can "hack" into animal's brains and use them for warfare, as spies, or for civilian application, such as search and rescue.  We have turned to animals in order to do these things because they power themselves, which allows for smaller sizes of "robots."  If we were to try to create our own little flying robot, the battery to charge it would be so heavy, it might not fly, or it would be too big.  UC Berkley was the first to implement the new strategy of cyborgs by experimenting with the flower beetle, an insect found in South Africa, which has a large enough size to carry the necessary machinery, and brains large enough to make mini "brain surgeries" an easier task.  So far they have gotten the insects to fly left or right, or stop and completely drop down from the air.  The goal is to fine tune them to be able to control the depth, degree, and altitude at which they fly at.  Experiments such as these have also been done on rats by implanting wires in their somatosensory cortex in order to create stimuli in order to get the rats to more a certain direction.  The rats are rewarded for following the seemingly natural stimuli by receiving impulses to their medial forebrain bundle, and thus creating a "feel good" response.

There is no doubt that these outstanding technological and neural advances will provide great benefit to human beings, but is it ethical?  Is it ethical for us to hijack another beings brain, one who has no say in the process?  Some can say higher organisms do have the right to lead their own lives, but at what extent would you let a human being suffer or risk being lost in destruction just so an animal can have freedom of choice.  Whose life is worth more?  Is there a distinction between instinct and mammal?  Of course, the pain that accompanies the brain surgeries on these animals is kept to a minimal by using anesthesia.

Not only can we hijack their brains to control their actions, but scientists today are also looking into giving organisms cognitive enhancements.  Neuroprosthetics are a way to stimulate cognitive areas of a brain in order to create a new or better way of "thinking."  In 2011, University of Southern California implanted a neuroprosthetic in the hippocampus of a rat and increased its score means test.  They also implanted a device in the prefrontal cortex of a Rhesus monkey and improved its memory.  They've also done experiments where they have increased mental performance simply by giving the organism cocaine.  Duke University even gave rats infrared vision detectability by creating a receptor that would take in infrared and stimulate their somatosensory cortex so that they would "sense" the infrared.

Many people aren't please with the way we are, in a sense, playing God.  Scientists have been doing so for a while now by manipulating different species, even manipulating humans, deciding who lives, who dies, cloning, manipulating genes, and now who gets extra senses or their will power taken away from them.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is an organization well known for their incredible devotion to animals, sometimes even to questionable extremes.  Recently an article written by Anita Hamilton in Time magazine, PETA's stance on the cyborg issue is clear, and of course, they oppose the new technology.  Hamilton humorously begins her article by commenting that, "People have done many terrible things to cockroaches in the name of fear: impaled them with a shoe, squashed them in a tissue, and water tortured them down the drain. Now People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is claiming that a government-funded neuroscience startup is doing terrible things to roaches in the name of education."  Hamilton writes on how PETA is trying to stop RoboRoaches, the cool roach kits that Anthes spoke about at the banquet dinner, from being produced.  Hamilton notes that PETA's concern are for the pain of the animals.  They don't believe it is right to mutilate or kill helpless, small animals.  But we need to keep in mind, if many of us found a beetle or roach in our homes, we would probably just kill it anyway.  So if we were to humor PETA's concern for a moment, is it ethical that we mass provide "victims" to consumers, only to have them be mutilated and killed?

Hamilton, Anita. "Resistance is Futile: PETA Attempts to Halt the Sale of Remote-Controlled Cyborg Cockroaches Read more: RoboRoach Cyborg Cockroaches Boycotted by PETA | TIME.com http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/11/01/cyborg-cockroaches-are-coming-but-not-if-peta-has-anything-to-say-about-it/
Anthes, Emily. "Animal Cyborgs." Loyola Neuroscience Banquet. The Neuroscience Society. Loyola University Water Tower Campus, Chicago. 02 Nov 2013. Keynote.