Military Human Augmentation

[SvenSvensonov]

*My profile page, now view-able by anyone, states that I am a behavioral psychologist at a US university hospital in Virginia... this is only partially right. As of 21, December 2014, I was assigned to research (replacing my previous job of researching pharmaceuticals) neural augmentation on behalf of a US military contract - I will not name the organization or branch. This is an overview of what my job now entails.

@Gufi - you wanted me to post some medical info, so I'll start here and work off of this, in addition to continuing with providing military articles and info. This is just a teaser to start with, I'll go much, much further in-depth with each subsequent article.

@Nihonjin1051 - you might be interested too, though this is a bit elementary, and I would welcome your insight.

@Slav Defence - are you interested in medicine and its military applications? I'm very well versed in this as well - as it's my current job (having electronic experience really helps with trying to hard-wire a persons neural processing system), in addition to my electronic warfare experience and naval tech systems info.

What is a memory augmentation implant?

Memory augmentation implants, currently in the early stages of research and development, are a type of neural prosthesis: a technological extension of the nervous system that seeks to restore lost function, usually due to disease or injury, or to supplement normal function [1]. Memory augmentation implants can be placed within the brain and function to either restore lost memories or erase ones that are unwanted. With the many benefits of memory augmentation implants, there are also ethical concerns, which make it imperative to keep this growing field of technology regulated.

What progress has been made?

So far, there are two separate research teams that have made progress on the front of developing memory augmentation implants. One is a team of scientists, led by Sam A. Deadwyler, out of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at University of Southern California, Los Angeles (USC) and the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at Wake Forest University. This team has created a memory augmentation implant that has been tested so far in rats and primates with some success [2] [3] [4]. Their most recent test of a memory augmentation implant occurred in 2013. They successfully repaired and enhanced the memory encoded in the hippocampus of primates [4]. This result made the team hopeful that they will one day be able to use similar technology in humans to restore lost memory function.

The other entity working to make progress on this technology is a group of institutions funded by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. These institutions include University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), University of Pennsylvania, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This research, coined Project: “Restoring Active Memory”, is part of Obama’s BRAIN initiative which hopes to take strides in furthering our understanding of the brain to solve real world problems [5]. These institutions have been tasked by DARPA to design a memory augmentation implant, mainly for veterans with traumatic brain injuries. This project began within the last year and very little information has been released about its progress.

It is worth noting that both of these groups have made limited progress; it is not yet clear whether purposeful manipulation of human memory with this type of implant is feasible. Even though working devices have been created, they have not been tested on humans, and the scientists behind them are still working on pinpointing how exactly they interact with the human brain to function. The DARPA website is illustrative of this point; it cites several significant intermediary goals that need to be reached before the use of a memory augmentation implant in humans might be possible [6].

Who could benefit from this technology?

The development of this technology is mainly geared to help individuals with traumatic brain injuries (TBI’s) and dementia [7]. A traumatic brain injury is understood as any damage to the head that causes disruptions in the brain [8]. The occurrence of memory problems caused by traumatic brain injuries depends on the severity of the injury; most commonly, these problems include an inability to remember the event that caused the injury and difficulty learning or remembering any new information [9].

From 2000 to 2011, a total of 235,046 service members across all branches of the military were diagnosed with a TBI [10]. So many service members have been affected by this ailment in the last decade that traumatic brain injuries have been dubbed the “signature injury” of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan [11]. This injury is not exclusive to combat though; another 1.7 million civilians are also affected each year in the United States [12].

Furthermore, individuals with dementia could benefit from this technology. Dementia is a general term used to describe a decrease in mental ability that interferes with everyday life [13]. Alzheimer’s disease, the most common type of dementia, causes memory loss that becomes more severe over time, accompanied by other debilitating symptoms [14]. As of 2014, approximately 5 million Americans over the age of 65 have been affected by Alzheimer’s disease, which is about 11% or 1 in 9. This number is expected to increase dramatically as the age of the “Baby Boomer” generation shifts. It is estimated that by 2029, the elderly ages 65 and older will make up 20% of the total US population, compared to almost 14% in 2012 [15]. As of now, there are drugs and cognitive therapies that can temporarily improve symptoms of dementias, but no cure [16]. Moreover, with the forecasted increase in prevalence of dementia, there is a great need for a device that can restore individual memory capacity.

The focus of research right now is on developing implants with the capability to restore memory capacity in order to aid those who urgently need the assistance in order to function. Memory erasure is another possible use of memory augmentation implants.

What are potential ethical concerns of this device?

Although these implants are still in their early stages of development, there are already ethical concerns about their development and implementation. If clinical human trials do begin with this device, as they are planned to, there is risk to the patient due to the nature of the placement of these implants inside the brain as well as their intention to change memory. Although researchers might have data from animals that shows the devices work, they cannot truly give informed consent to a participant in a research trial because researchers cannot be sure of what will actually happen [17]. Memory is a fundamental part of a person’s identity, and although the gains of altering it could be great, there is a looming risk of a mistake that could erase part of what makes a person unique.

If a working, approved device emerges from all of this research there will be a concern, just as there is for all neural prosthetics, about how it should be used, specifically whether only for restoration or also for supplementation [18]. Individuals with TBI or dementia could greatly benefit from having their memory capacity restored. But what about non-impaired individuals? Should they have access to technology to selectively erase their memories or, potentially, to have immense amounts of information downloaded straight into their brains? If these implants do become commercially available and if they are expensive, they could further class divisions. As with most medical technology, it is apparent that as this technology develops, it must also be regulated.

References:

[1] NIH. “Neural Interfaces Program.” National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Neural Interfaces Program: National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS)

[2] Berger, Theodore W., Robert E. Hampson, Dong Song, Anushka Goonawardena, Vasilis Z. Marmarelis, and Sam A. Deadwyler. “A cortical neural prosthesis for restoring and enhancing memory.” Journal of Neural Engineering 8, no. 4 (2011): 046017.

[3] Hampson, Robert E., Greg A. Gerhardt, Vasilis Marmarelis, Dong Song, Ioan Opris, Lucas Santos, Theodore W. Berger, and Sam A. Deadwyler. “Facilitation and restoration of cognitive function in primate prefrontal cortex by a neuroprosthesis that utilizes minicolumn-specific neural firing.” Journal of neural engineering 9, no. 5 (2012): 056012.

[4] Hampson, Robert E., Dong Song, Ioan Opris, Lucas M. Santos, Dae C. Shin, Greg A. Gerhardt, Vasilis Z. Marmarelis, Theodore W. Berger, and Sam A. Deadwyler. “Facilitation of memory encoding in primate hippocampus by a neuroprosthesis that promotes task-specific neural firing.” Journal of neural engineering 10, no. 6 (2013): 066013.

[5] “BRAIN Initiative.” The White House. BRAIN Initiative | The White House

[6] DARPA. “Restoring Active Memory (RAM).” Biological Technologies Office. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency our_work/bto/programs/restoring_active_memory_ram.aspx.

[7] The CDC, NIH, DoD, and VA Leadership Panel. “Report to Congress on Traumatic Brain Injury in the United States: Understanding the Public Health Problem among Current and Former Military Personnel.” (2013).

[8] Aftandilians, Tania. “Traumatic Brain Injury: The “Signature Injury” of the Iraq War.” Berkeley Scientific Journal 12, no. 1 (2009).

[9] Alzheimer’s Association. “Traumatic Brain Injury.” alz.org. Dementia – Signs, Symptoms, Causes, Tests, Treatment, Care | alz.org traumatic-brain-injury-head-trauma-symptoms.asp.

[10] Cronk, Terri Moon. “DARPA Developing Implants to Help with TBI Memory Loss.” U.S. Department of Defense. Last modified July 15, 2014. Accessed December 22, 2014. United States Department of Defense (defense.gov) newsarticle.aspx?id=122673.

[11] CDC. “Traumatic Brain Injury in the United States: Fact Sheet.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Accessed December 22, 2014. CDC - Traumatic Brain Injury - Injury Center get_the_facts.html.

[12] Cronk, Terri Moon. “DARPA Developing Implants to Help with TBI Memory Loss.” U.S. Department of Defense. Last modified July 15, 2014. Accessed December 22, 2014. United States Department of Defense (defense.gov) newsarticle.aspx?id=122673.

[13] Alzheimer’s Association. “What Is Dementia?” alz.org. Accessed December 22, 2014. Dementia – Signs, Symptoms, Causes, Tests, Treatment, Care | alz.org

[14] Alzheimer’s Association. “What Is Alzheimer’s?” alz.org. Accessed December 22, 2014. Alzheimer's Disease & Dementia | Alzheimer's Association

[15] Pollard, Kevin, and Paola Scommegna. “Just How Many Baby Boomers Are There?” Population Reference Bureau. http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/JustHowManyBabyBoomers AreThere.aspx

[16] Alzheimer’s Association. “What Is Dementia?” alz.org. Accessed December 22, 2014. Dementia – Signs, Symptoms, Causes, Tests, Treatment, Care | alz.org

[17] Chhatbar, Pratik. “The future of implantable neuroprosthetic devices: ethical considerations.” Journal of long-term effects of medical implants 19, no. 2 (2009).

[18] Ibid.

From Exploring Emergent Technology: Memory Augmentation Implants | Triple Helix Online

DARPA, at the behest of the US Department of Defense, is developing a black box brain implant — an implant that will be wired into a soldier’s brain and record their memories. If the soldier then suffers memory loss due to brain injury, the implant will then be used to restore those memories. The same implant could also be used during training or in the line of duty, too — as we’ve reported on in the past, stimulating the right regions of the brain can improve how quickly you learn new skills, reduce your reaction times, and more.

The project, which DARPA has wittily named Restoring Active Memory, is currently at the stage where it’s seeking proposals from commercial companies that have previously had success with brain implants, such as Medtronic. As yet, we don’t know who has submitted proposals to DARPA, but it’ll probably be the usual suspects. Medtronic, which creates deep-brain simulation (DBS) implants that are almost miraculous in their ability to control the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s disease (video embedded below), is surely interested. Brown University, which famously created a brain-computer interface that is implanted into the brain and communicates wirelessly with a nearby computer, must be a contender. Companies with big R&D budgets, like IBM and GE, might be involved as well.

The Restoring Active Memory project has two key targets. First, we need to be able to actually analyze and decode a human’s neural signals. Some work has been done in this area, such as brute-forcing the encoding of the optic nerve, but we’re a long way away from reading a bunch of neural spikes and knowing exactly what the person is thinking or experiencing. Second, we want to take that knowledge of how we encode memories (stored experiences), and somehow use it to re-program a human brain that has experienced memory loss. “Ultimately, it is desired to develop a prototype implantable neural device that enables recovery of memory in a human clinical population,” says the proposal. (Read: What is transhumanism, or, what does it mean to be human?)

This might sound like something out of a sci-fi film — and to be honest, we’re probably quite a few years away from such an implant. While we’ve had a fair amount of success withtDCS and DBS, we’re still very much at the dumb, brute-force stage of neuroscience. The lobotomy might be out of vogue, but modern implants aren’t that much more refined — they just run electricity through a specific part of the brain. We’re not entirely sure why it works, and except for turning the device off we can’t really control it. We are a long, long way away from measuring the exact pattern of neurons firing that gives a soldier the ability to use a sniper rifle or defuse a bomb. (Read: MIT discovers the location of memories: Individual neurons.)

Still, an implanted device — rather than external, cranial-mounted instrument — is definitely the way to go, if we want to learn more about how the human brain encodes memories. When you boil it down, all memories are ultimately just a specific set of neuron connections and electric pulses (spikes). It stands to reason that, eventually, with enough painstaking data collection (provided by the implant) and a lot of analysis (supercomputers) we’ll be able to work out the exact combinations required to re-program a human brain to remember certain experiences, memories, and skills.

From US military begins work on brain implants that can restore lost memories, experiences | ExtremeTech

 

[SvenSvensonov]

Be More Than You Can Be

Heat-resistant. Cold-proof. Tireless. Tomorrow’s soldiers are just like today’s — only better. Inside the Pentagon’s human enhancement project.

The lab is climate-controlled to 104 degrees Fahrenheit and 66 percent humidity. Sitting inside the cramped room, even for a few minutes, is an unpleasantly moist experience. I’ve spent the last 40 minutes on a treadmill angled at a 9 percent grade. My face is chili-red, my shirt soaked with sweat. My breath is coming in short, unsatisfactory gasps. The sushi and sake I had last night are in full revolt. The tiny speakers on the shelf blasting “Living on a Prayer” are definitely not helping.

Then Dennis Grahn, a lumpy Stanford University biologist and former minor-league hockey player, walks into the room. He nods in my direction and smiles at a technician. “Looks like he’s ready,” Grahn says.

Grahn takes my hand and slips it into a clear, coffeepot-looking contraption he calls the Glove. Inside is a hemisphere of metal, cool to the touch. He tightens a seal around my wrist; a vacuum begins pulling blood to the surface of my hand, and the cold metal chills my blood before it travels through my veins back to my core. After five minutes, I feel rejuvenated. Never mind the hangover. Never mind Bon Jovi. I keep going for another half hour.

The test isn’t about my endurance; it’s about the future of the American armed forces. Grahn and his colleagues developed the Glove for the military — specifically, for the Pentagon’s way-out science division, Darpa: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. For nearly 50 years, Darpa has engineered technological breakthroughs from the Internet to stealth jets. But in the early 1990s, as military strategists started worrying about how to defend against germ weapons, the agency began to get interested in biology. “The future was a scary place, the more we looked at it,” says Michael Goldblatt, former head of Darpa’s Defense Sciences Office. “We wanted to learn the capabilities of nature before others taught them to us.”

By 2001, military strategists had determined that the best way to deal with emerging transnational threats was with small groups of fast-moving soldiers, not hulking pieces of military hardware. But small groups rarely travel with medics — they have to be hardy enough to survive on their own. So what goes on in Grahn’s dank little lab at Stanford is part of a much larger push to radically improve the performance, mental capacity, and resilience of American troops — to let them run harder and longer, operate without sleep, overcome deadly injury, and tap the potential of their unconscious minds.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency was founded in 1958 (the D was added in 1972) as a place to noodle around on ideas too big, or too far out, for the Cold War military-industrial complex. The results can sometimes be spectacular failures (nuclear hand grenade, anyone?). But Darpa has also pushed the development of some things that have become part of the fabric of military and civilian life: wearable computers, long-range drone aircraft, night vision, even the M16 rifle and the computer mouse.

But the agency had mostly avoided the life sciences. Darpa’s directors in 1980s and 1990s weren’t interested — and were happy to avoid the tangled ethical issues that often go along with research on human beings. Then, in June 2001, Tony Tether, an electrical engineer and Darpa veteran, left his job at the Sequoia Group, a venture capital firm, and returned to head the agency. Under his guidance, Darpa’s embryonic biology efforts began to multiply and expand. Research on biodefense led to research on the immune system, which led to more general research on the human body. “There was a sense before that Darpa wouldn’t get into human R&D. That was somewhere Frank Fernandez didn’t want to go,” one former program manager says, referring to Darpa’s director from 1998 to 2001. But Tether “had a more open attitude. He was more permissive about dealing with humans.”

The agency had already enlisted an unusual team of bioscience experts. One program manager had been a chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory working on biomimetics; soon he was funding research on artificial limbs. Another early member of the team, Joe Bielitzki, studied the effects of space travel on animals while he was NASA’s chief veterinary officer. To head the push, Darpa had turned to Michael Goldblatt, VP of science and technology at McDonald’s. He’d helped develop a self-sterilizing package and pitched Darpa on the material’s potential as a bandage, figuring that what was good for a Big Mac might be good for bullet wounds. The agency offered him a job... which he turned down. But two years later Darpa supersized the offer — Goldblatt was hired to head the Defense Sciences Office, a division with a major focus on human enhancement.

Grahn and his research partner, biologist Craig Heller, started working on the Glove at Stanford in the late 1990s as part of their research on improving physical performance. Even they were astounded at how well it seemed to work. Vinh Cao, their squat, barrel-chested lab technician, used to do almost 100 pull-ups every time he worked out. Then one day he cooled himself off between sets with an early prototype. The next round of pull-ups — his 11th — was as strong as his first. Within six weeks, Cao was doing 180 pull-ups a session. Six weeks after that, he went from 180 to more than 600. Soon, Stanford’s football trainers asked to borrow a few Gloves to cool down players in the weight room and to fight muscle cramps.

In 2001, Heller went to Darpa. The agency saw the potential of the Glove for training recruits; the Stanford researchers received their first funding in 2003 and got $3 million.

In trying to figure out why the Glove worked so well, its inventors ended up challenging conventional scientific wisdom on fatigue. Muscles don’t wear out because they use up stored sugars, the researchers said. Instead, muscles tire because they get too hot, and sweating is just a backup cooling system for the lattices of blood vessels in the hands and feet. The Glove, in other words, overclocks the heat exchange system. “It’s like giving a Honda the radiator of a Mack truck,” Heller says. After four months of using it himself, Heller did 1,000 push-ups on his 60th birthday in April 2003. Soon after, troops from Special Operations Command were trying out the Glove, too.

Darpa’s human-enhancement programs were looking promising. In February 2002, Darpa asked Congress for a new, $78 million-per-year push for research including “the development of biochemical materials for enhancement of performance.” That was on top of $90 million to explore how “biological systems … adapt to wide extremes.” The human being, a Darpa fact file proclaimed in April 2002, “is becoming the weakest link in Defense systems.” Strengthening that chain meant “sustaining and augmenting human performance,” as well as “enabling new human capabilities.” Darpa was going to figure out how to build a better soldier.

Mark Roth never expected his research to have military applications. He was a biochemist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, studying how chromosomes move during cell replication. Then, about a decade ago, his second daughter, Hannah Grace, died of heart failure at the age of 1. Her death sent him down a much stranger path. “I became interested in immortality,” he says.

Roth knew that some animals hibernate — slowing their metabolisms until environmental conditions improve. He also knew that some cells can enter a kind of dormancy and then spring back to life — essentially, they go into suspended animation. Roth wanted to better understand this “metabolic flexibility.” He started testing various chemicals that slowed metabolism, like heavy water and tetrodotoxin (puffer fish poison, used in Haiti to turn people into zombies). Nothing worked. But then Roth found a loophole in one of nature’s seemingly absolute rules: Animals need oxygen. But some creatures, like nematodes, fruit flies, and zebra fish, don’t die if oxygen levels drop. Instead the critters suspend. Their hearts stop beating for up to 24 hours. They don’t breathe. And they don’t die. Wounds stop bleeding; nearly any injury becomes survivable, and the brain shuts down without damage. “If you were shot, this is exactly what you would want,” Roth says.

It’s a timing issue: At oxygen concentrations below some critical level, animals kick off. But take the oxygen level even lower than that, fast, and they don’t. The problem was, Roth couldn’t figure out how to pull off his oxygen reduction trick in mammals, let alone humans. What would a battlefield medic do? Tie a plastic bag over a wounded soldier’s head?

A television show gave Roth the clue he needed. In October 2002, he was watching a PBS show about caving in Mexico. The host had to don a breathing mask because the cavern’s air was full of hydrogen sulfide, which binds to mitochondria and impedes the body’s ability to use oxygen. “Oh my gosh,” Roth thought. “We can de-animate people.”

Three weeks later, Roth was at a meeting at the Breckenridge Ski Resort in Colorado, organized by DSO’s Bielitzki, the ex-NASA veterinarian. The agency was looking for ways to extend the “golden hour,” the period of time within which massive-trauma victims need to get medical care. Bielitzki thought Roth had the best shot, and was prepared to fund further research.

But before the program could start, DSO’s performance-enhancement push ran into trouble in Washington. The President’s Council on Bioethics was publishing reports decrying body hacks. Some in Congress worried about being accused of funding a Frankenstein army.

In response to those critics, the agency already predisposed to clandestine research — decided to go underground. Program names were changed to dull their mad-scientist edge. Metabolic Dominance became Peak Soldier Performance. Augmented Cognition became Improving Warfighter Information Intake Under Stress. Researchers were told to keep their mouths shut; many current and former program managers still won’t talk on the record, requesting anonymity for this story. The Surviving Blood Loss program, meant to fund Roth’s work, was itself put into suspended animation.

At Darpa headquarters — a blandly menacing office tower of brown stone and curved black glass in suburban Virginia — the pall of that near-death experience still hangs over the program. Or maybe it’s just the pictures of Dick Cheney that stare down from the walls of director Tony Tether’s fluorescent-lit office.

DSO isn’t trying to create posthuman troops, Tether says. “You know the old Army saying, ‘Be all that you can be’? Well, that’s really what we’re doing.” In training, soldiers “become extraordinary in strength and endurance. But it’s not any better than their body can be. And what we try to do is come up with techniques that allow them to maintain that level.” Tether is also careful not to take too much credit for Darpa’s forays into biology. “Darpa started these kinds of programs in the ’90s,” he says. “The fact that we had small units meant that the medical ability wasn’t going to be there. So we went in and started developing things that would allow soldiers to take care of themselves. As time went on we found more things we could do.” Most of Darpa’s performance-enhancement projects will take years, even decades, to show up on battlefields, Tether notes. Many are still in petri dishes or lab rats.

That pace is just fine with Tether. Darpa, he says, needs to be extra cautious. During the mid–20th century, the US government did some pretty ugly things to people in the name of science: exposing soldiers to A-bomb blasts, psychologically abusing Harvard students (including a young Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski), letting hundreds of black men die of syphilis in Alabama.

Today, things are different. Organizations that conduct research on people use Institutional Review Boards to evaluate every proposal. Anyone who wants to study human beings with Darpa money has to further apply to a second, federal IRB. “When you’re dealing with things that eventually have to be tested on living things — animals and eventually humans — yeah, you’re much more cautious,” Tether says. “We spend a lot of money on creating IRBs.” Guys like Grahn and Heller hate the extra paperwork. “It’s an incredible pain in the ***,” Grahn moans. “It’s like, ‘Heart monitors may cause chafing. In such event, will discontinue use.’” Tether’s reply: “You can’t just take the gun out in the back and shoot it, you know? It does slow things up, but it’s a good check.”

Even as the research environment grew more restrictive, Mark Roth kept working. In his first tests, he lowered the oxygen content in his mouse enclosures to just 5 percent — and watched his lab mice drop dead in 15 minutes. He gave the second group a whiff of hydrogen sulfide first. They survived in the 5 percent oxygen environment for six hours — unconscious but alive. Roth was ecstatic. He even brought his kids to see the mice in stasis and took pictures of the rodents while they were out. “I’d never done that in 30 years of research,” he says. “But this is one of those once-in-a-lifetime chances to change the playing field.”

In March 2005, the money from Darpa finally came through. The agency was looking for techniques that would keep animals alive for three hours with 60 percent of their blood gone — a lethal wound. Roth tried his hydrogen sulfide approach: He knocked rats out with a blast of the gas and drained 60 percent of their blood. They lived for 10 hours or more. Now Roth is considering going to the IRBs for permission to suspend human beings.

Bioethical safeguards haven’t stopped dozens of other DSO-funded projects around the world: energy cocktails that shave seconds off the race times of world-class cyclists, magnetic waves beamed at people’s heads to detect alertness, EEGs to detect when satellite imagery analysts spot a target — even before the analysts realize it themselves, meaning they can work much faster.

In peacetime, this work might not have much urgency. But the US military is chest-deep in a pair of nasty counterinsurgencies. Fighting this kind of war requires huge numbers of troops, none more important than the so-called “strategic corporal” — the average infantryman on patrol. The Bush administration wants to increase the overall size of combat forces by 92,000 people over the next five years.

The problem is, the military is already struggling to meet current recruiting goals. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, Congress authorized a temporary, 30,000-troop increase in the Army; the service still has 7,000 slots left to fill. Up to 12 percent of the military’s recruits can now come from the lowest admissible pool of applicants, “Category IV.” (In the 1980s and 1990s, it was 2 percent.) The maximum age for new privates has been raised from 35 to 42. Last year, 8,000 recruits got waivers for past drug use and criminal histories. Drill sergeants have been told to back off the trainees — and even allow them to do push-ups on their knees.

Those same grunts will need to pull 24-hour patrols in Iraq’s Venutian heat. Intel officers must cope with a cascade of data from sensors, drones, and informants. Rangers go on weeklong chases in the bitterly cold Hindu Kush. Everyone, in other words, has to perform at their peak.

Which brings me back to Stanford. Heller and Grahn are developing a new version of the Glove: one that fits less like a coffeepot and more like, well, a glove. And it’ll have some added functionality. Those assemblies of radiator veins in our extremities don’t just release heat — they can collect it, too, and use it to warm the rest of the body. In a green and orange tent on a balcony outside their lab, I strip down to a bathing suit to test their theory.

Next to me is a gray tub filled with 150 gallons of water, into which Vinh Cao, the pull-up–happy lab technician, dumps 30 pounds of shaved ice. It’ll take just 10 minutes or so, he says, to get the water down to 60 degrees Fahrenheit. I wait, shivering slightly in the wind.

Then, eyelids squeezed tight, I step into the water. It stings, horribly. I yip in pain. My shoulder and neck muscles clench like fists and brace to fight the elements. I exhale once, twice. I lean on my forearms and lower myself in. Deep, low-toned breaths rush out from the deepest part of my lungs. Water splashes as my biceps and legs start to twitch. “Y’know, we can cut this short,” Grahn says. After seven minutes, my fingers have turned white, and the nails have settled into a dull purple. I touch my hands to my face. It’s like being caressed by a corpse. “You’ve shut off the blood flow to these vascular structures,” Grahn explains. “Standard suite of responses.”

That’s moderately comforting. So is the fact that I’m now totally numb. For the first time, I notice three little yellow duckies bobbing in my Arctic tub. Over the next 45 minutes, Grahn talks — about the scars on his nose and cheek that he got playing center in the old Western Hockey League, about his days driving Sno-Cats at Mount Hood Meadows Ski Resort in Oregon, about the Glove’s trials at the marines’ mountain warfare training center.

But his stories get harder and harder to follow. I’ve started shivering again — all across my legs and chest, muscles pulse to a manic rhythm. And then I start having tremors. My thighs jackknife to my chest, unbidden. I moan, and darkness closes in from the edges of my vision.

Then, just like on the treadmill, Grahn takes my wrist. He slips each of my hands into a modified Glove prototype. This time, the metal hemispheres inside are hot to the touch — 113 degrees. After two minutes, I can think again. The tent comes back into focus. “You can stay this way indefinitely now. You’re at a thermal equilibrium; the heat going into these two hands is equivalent to what’s going out of the rest of you,” Grahn says. “Now you’re uncomfortable again — merely uncomfortable. That’s a huge difference when you’re talking about survival.” The water is still bitter, of course. But now I can take it.


Posts got merged, sorry.

DARPA heads for robot-human hybrid: Are cyborgs on the way?

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, announced they are looking at developing a new generation of technologies combing biological and electronic systems. A new division of the military research and developer will experiment with technologies merging life with machines.

The Biological Technologies Office (BTO) will use biological organisms as the basis of new defense mechanisms. Research into those fields has already been pioneered by the offices of Defense Sciences (DSO) and Microsystems Technology (MTO).

"Biology is nature's ultimate innovator, and any agency that hangs its hat on innovation would be foolish not to look to this master of networked complexity for inspiration and solutions," Arati Prabhakar, director of DARPA, told [pdf] members of the U.S. House of Representatives on 26 March.

The BTO will focus on assisting those who have lost limbs, in addition to a wide variety of other projects merging humans and machines.
Hand Proprioception and Touch Interfaces (HAPTIX) is among the first technologies that will be explored by the group. This project has the goal of creating artificial limbs that will provide the sensation of touch to users.

Prabhakar told lawmakers that study of human/machine interfaces may make it possible to develop antibodies to new toxins in a month. That process can take decades using current technologies, she said. The director said such measures are needed to counter a growing threat of terrorists using biological and chemical weapons.

Technology developed by the BTO could be used to assist soldiers recovering from crippling injuries. It could also be used to enable the construction of super-soldiers, with powers far beyond human capabilities. Developments planned by the group include systems allowing soldiers to survive the loss of large quantities of blood.


"Recent progress in such diverse disciplines as neuroscience, sensor design, microsystems, computer science, and other longstanding areas of DARPA investment has begun to converge, revealing newly emergent potential ready to be realized," agency officials wrote in the press release announcing the formation of the Biological Technologies Office.

The Chronicle of Lineage Indicative of Origins (CLIO) program may cause some controversy. That goal of the BTO will include making "biological engineering safer by... prevent[ing] illegal acquisition or misuse of proprietary strains" of organisms, DARPA reports. Large food developers like Monsanto are involved in several conflicts with small growers over patented varieties of crops.

Geoff Ling will be the first director of the BTO. He is currently the deputy director of DARPA and is considered to be one of the most knowledgeable people in the Navy on the subject of traumatic brain injury (TBI).

Again with the merging.

Military Funds Brain-Computer Interfaces to Control Feelings

A $70 million program will try to develop brain implants able to regulate emotions in the mentally ill.

Researcher Jose Carmena has worked for years training macaque monkeys to move computer cursors and robotic limbs with their minds. He does so by implanting electrodes into their brains to monitor neural activity. Now, as part of a sweeping $70 million program funded by the U.S. military, Carmena has a new goal: to use brain implants to read, and then control, the emotions of mentally ill people.

This week the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, awarded two large contracts to Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of California, San Francisco, to create electrical brain implants capable of treating seven psychiatric conditions, including addiction, depression, and borderline personality disorder.

The project builds on expanding knowledge about how the brain works; the development of microlectronic systems that can fit in the body; and substantial evidence that thoughts and actions can be altered with well-placed electrical impulses to the brain.

“Imagine if I have an addiction to alcohol and I have a craving,” says Carmena, who is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and involved in the UCSF-led project. “We could detect that feeling and then stimulate inside the brain to stop it from happening.”

The U.S. faces an epidemic of mental illness among veterans, including suicide rates three or four times that of the general public. But drugs and talk therapy are of limited use, which is why the military is turning to neurological devices, says Justin Sanchez, manager of the DARPA program, known as Subnets, for Systems-Based Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies.

“We want to understand the brain networks [in] neuropsychiatric illness, develop technology to measure them, and then do precision signaling to the brain,” says Sanchez. “It’s something completely different and new. These devices don’t yet exist.”

Under the contracts, which are the largest awards so far supporting President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative, the brain-mapping program launched by the White House last year, UCSF will receive as much as $26 million and Mass General up to $30 million. Companies including the medical device giant Medtronic and startup Cortera Neurotechnologies, a spin-out from UC Berkeley’s wireless laboratory, will supply technology for the effort. Initial research will be in animals, but DARPA hopes to reach human tests within two or three years.

The research builds on a small but quickly growing market for devices that work by stimulating nerves, both inside the brain and outside it. More than 110,000 Parkinson’s patients have received deep-brain stimulators built by Medtronic that control body tremors by sending electric pulses into the brain. More recently, doctors have used such stimulators to treat severe cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder (see “Brain Implants Can Reset Misfiring Circuits”). Last November, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration approved NeuroPace, the first implant that both records from the brain and stimulates it (see “Zapping Seizures Away”). It is used to watch for epileptic seizures and then stop them with electrical pulses. Altogether, U.S. doctors bill for about $2.6 billion worth of neural stimulation devices a year, according to industry estimates.

Researchers say they are making rapid improvements in electronics, including small, implantable computers. Under its program, Mass General will work with Draper Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to develop new types of stimulators. The UCSF team is being supported by microelectronics and wireless researchers at UC Berkeley, who have created several prototypes of miniaturized brain implants. Michel Maharbiz, a professor in Berkeley’s electrical engineering department, says the Obama brain initiative, and now the DARPA money, has created a “feeding frenzy” around new technology. “It’s a great time to do tech for the brain,” he says.

The new line of research has been dubbed “affective brain-computer interfaces” by some, meaning electronic devices that alter feelings, perhaps under direct control of a patient’s thoughts and wishes. “Basically, we’re trying to build the next generation of psychiatric brain stimulators,” says Alik Widge, a researcher on the Mass General team.

Darin Dougherty, a psychiatrist who directs Mass General’s division of neurotherapeutics, says one aim could be to extinguish fear in veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Fear is generated in the amygdala—a part of the brain involved in emotional memories. But it can be repressed by signals in another region, the ventromedial pre-frontal cortex. “The idea would be to decode a signal in the amygdala showing overactivity, then stimulate elsewhere to [suppress] that fear,” says Dougherty.

Such research isn’t without ominous overtones. In the 1970s, Yale University neuroscientist Jose Delgado showed he could cause people to feel emotions, like relaxation or anxiety, using implants he called “stimoceivers.” But Delgado, also funded by the military, left the U.S. after Congressional hearings in which he was accused of developing “totalitarian” mind-control devices. According to scientists funded by DARPA, the agency has been anxious about how the Subnets program could be perceived, and it has appointed an ethics panel to oversee the research.

Psychiatric implants would in fact control how mentally ill people act, although in many cases indirectly, by changing how they feel. For instance, a stimulator that stops a craving for cocaine would alter an addict’s behavior. “It’s to change what people feel and to change what they do. Those are intimately tied,” says Dougherty.

Dougherty says a brain implant would only be considered for patients truly debilitated by mental illness, and who can’t be helped with drugs and psychotherapy. “This is never going to be a first-line option: ‘Oh, you have PTSD, let’s do surgery,’ ” says Dougherty. “It’s going to be for people who don’t respond to the other treatments.”


And again.


In Pursuit of Human Augmentation
The journey toward making “normal” obsolete.

When you’re sick, it’s obvious that you and your doctor should work, if possible, to help you get better. Nobody would argue against a treatment that restores normal function to a sick or disabled individual. But the consequences of going further than that–going beyond “normal”–are not commonly studied, nor endorsed by many in medicine. Indeed, in any medical procedure, there is risk. If you are already normal, then conventional wisdom dictates that that’s enough. “Do no harm,” the old aphorism says–we should focus on altering the body and mind only when the risk of the alteration is justified, preferably by the hope of solving a deficit of vastly greater magnitude.

Science has endorsed something of a parallel attitude in its pursuit of biological and biomedical research. Namely, in biology, many key insights have emerged via study of the absence of the phenomenon of interest. For example, throughout the 20th century, many insights about the brain arose from the knocking out of specific genes, or the ablation of specific neurons in animals, or the examination of human patients who have suffered the loss of brain regions from conditions such as war or medically mandated surgery. In this way, we learned that patients without their hippocampi become unable to form new memories; humans and experimental animals with prefrontal-cortex damage make bad decisions and lack impulse control; subjects without dopamine-producing neurons exhibit symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. These studies are good at demonstrating the necessity of a specific neural circuit, or brain region, to the normal state. The idea that biomedical science is supposed to bring us up to normal is embedded, to a degree, in the very structure of the experiments we commonly do in the laboratory.

There is nothing wrong with this line of thought. This angle of research is fully consistent with our medical goal. It has brought us many of the triumphs of the last century, and it continues to yield insights into the vast range of diseases that plague us throughout life. When researchers leave this line of thought, though, they point toward the possibility that going beyond normal may change us in new and unprecedented ways, improving our lives in ways that are hard to even imagine. One fascinating line of research over the past few decades has revealed that life span, which long appeared to be solidly set in stone, can be lengthened through pharmacological and genetic manipulations–at least in worms, yeast, and, most recently, mice. This work may someday (quite possibly soon) lead to drugs that can extend human life span. Or note that this past summer, double amputee Oscar Pistorius won second place in a race against able-bodied runners, racing with his prosthetic carbon-fiber legs. Now he is hoping to take on the Olympics, which has led international athletic bodies to worry that augmented humans may be better at running than normal ones are. As a final example, cognitive-augmentation drugs such as modafinil, which enhances alertness even after long hours of wakefulness, are becoming widespread. (Broadly interpreted, good ole coffee might be considered the original neurotechnology, having augmented attention, alertness, and memory in tired humans for millennia.)

It’s arguably time for a discipline to emerge around the idea of human augmentation. At the MIT Media Lab, we are beginning to search for principles that govern the use of technology to augment human abilities–that make the idea of normal obsolete. As a codirector of the Center for Human Augmentation, I lead a lab, the Neuroengineering and Neuromedia Lab, that is developing devices that will hopefully eventually allow us to enhance memory, creativity, and happiness in humans. One interesting observation that has emerged is that it’s much easier to know when something is gone than it is to characterize it in its intact state. For example, it’s far easier to demonstrate that an animal can form no new memories than it is to characterize the trajectory that memories take as they are learned, consolidated, and forgotten throughout the lifetime of that animal. And whereas many measures of depression and sadness have been defined, a coherent description of happiness remains elusive. How can you augment something if you can’t define it? One of the first things we are doing is developing better, measurable definitions of such phenomena. Another issue is that radically new tools are needed to augment the mind. We are developing new kinds of neural stimulators, for example, that enable highly targeted manipulations of the brain. Some of our inventions, like the ability to turn specific sets of neurons on and off with brief pulses of blue and yellow light, may be used chiefly in animals for the next few years, but I think they will find many compelling uses in humans in the years to come, as their power becomes manifest through the efforts of a great many neuroscientists and engineers.

Cognitive augmentation will require new technologies.

One argument in favor of going for optimality, and forgetting about normal, is that it’s becoming harder and harder to know what is normal. For example, it’s been demonstrated that two-thirds of all people have at least one copy of a DNA sequence that makes them more likely to become depressed after a stressful life event. The rest of all people, a minority of one-third, are more resilient to stress than the other two-thirds are. Thus, it could be argued that becoming depressed in response to stress is the normal state. As a neuroengineer, I think it’s easier just to develop neurotechnologies that will enable us to make people as happy and intelligent as possible, and perhaps to even go farther: taking on the questions that philosophy struggles with, such as how to find meaning in one’s life. (More on that last point in a future post.)

What is a problem, and what is a feature of the human condition? They are not necessarily distinct. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to find better ways to make life better. In that way, we’ll hopefully move, in the century to come, from “Do no harm” to “Do good.”

 

[Aepsilons]

Military augmentation ! So it is , indeed, possible ! One step closer in creating a real life Master Chief !

Be More Than You Can Be

Heat-resistant. Cold-proof. Tireless. Tomorrow’s soldiers are just like today’s — only better. Inside the Pentagon’s human enhancement project.

The lab is climate-controlled to 104 degrees Fahrenheit and 66 percent humidity. Sitting inside the cramped room, even for a few minutes, is an unpleasantly moist experience. I’ve spent the last 40 minutes on a treadmill angled at a 9 percent grade. My face is chili-red, my shirt soaked with sweat. My breath is coming in short, unsatisfactory gasps. The sushi and sake I had last night are in full revolt. The tiny speakers on the shelf blasting “Living on a Prayer” are definitely not helping.

Then Dennis Grahn, a lumpy Stanford University biologist and former minor-league hockey player, walks into the room. He nods in my direction and smiles at a technician. “Looks like he’s ready,” Grahn says.

Grahn takes my hand and slips it into a clear, coffeepot-looking contraption he calls the Glove. Inside is a hemisphere of metal, cool to the touch. He tightens a seal around my wrist; a vacuum begins pulling blood to the surface of my hand, and the cold metal chills my blood before it travels through my veins back to my core. After five minutes, I feel rejuvenated. Never mind the hangover. Never mind Bon Jovi. I keep going for another half hour.

The test isn’t about my endurance; it’s about the future of the American armed forces. Grahn and his colleagues developed the Glove for the military — specifically, for the Pentagon’s way-out science division, Darpa: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. For nearly 50 years, Darpa has engineered technological breakthroughs from the Internet to stealth jets. But in the early 1990s, as military strategists started worrying about how to defend against germ weapons, the agency began to get interested in biology. “The future was a scary place, the more we looked at it,” says Michael Goldblatt, former head of Darpa’s Defense Sciences Office. “We wanted to learn the capabilities of nature before others taught them to us.”

By 2001, military strategists had determined that the best way to deal with emerging transnational threats was with small groups of fast-moving soldiers, not hulking pieces of military hardware. But small groups rarely travel with medics — they have to be hardy enough to survive on their own. So what goes on in Grahn’s dank little lab at Stanford is part of a much larger push to radically improve the performance, mental capacity, and resilience of American troops — to let them run harder and longer, operate without sleep, overcome deadly injury, and tap the potential of their unconscious minds.

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The Advanced Research Projects Agency was founded in 1958 (the D was added in 1972) as a place to noodle around on ideas too big, or too far out, for the Cold War military-industrial complex. The results can sometimes be spectacular failures (nuclear hand grenade, anyone?). But Darpa has also pushed the development of some things that have become part of the fabric of military and civilian life: wearable computers, long-range drone aircraft, night vision, even the M16 rifle and the computer mouse.

But the agency had mostly avoided the life sciences. Darpa’s directors in 1980s and 1990s weren’t interested — and were happy to avoid the tangled ethical issues that often go along with research on human beings. Then, in June 2001, Tony Tether, an electrical engineer and Darpa veteran, left his job at the Sequoia Group, a venture capital firm, and returned to head the agency. Under his guidance, Darpa’s embryonic biology efforts began to multiply and expand. Research on biodefense led to research on the immune system, which led to more general research on the human body. “There was a sense before that Darpa wouldn’t get into human R&D. That was somewhere Frank Fernandez didn’t want to go,” one former program manager says, referring to Darpa’s director from 1998 to 2001. But Tether “had a more open attitude. He was more permissive about dealing with humans.”

The agency had already enlisted an unusual team of bioscience experts. One program manager had been a chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory working on biomimetics; soon he was funding research on artificial limbs. Another early member of the team, Joe Bielitzki, studied the effects of space travel on animals while he was NASA’s chief veterinary officer. To head the push, Darpa had turned to Michael Goldblatt, VP of science and technology at McDonald’s. He’d helped develop a self-sterilizing package and pitched Darpa on the material’s potential as a bandage, figuring that what was good for a Big Mac might be good for bullet wounds. The agency offered him a job... which he turned down. But two years later Darpa supersized the offer — Goldblatt was hired to head the Defense Sciences Office, a division with a major focus on human enhancement.

Grahn and his research partner, biologist Craig Heller, started working on the Glove at Stanford in the late 1990s as part of their research on improving physical performance. Even they were astounded at how well it seemed to work. Vinh Cao, their squat, barrel-chested lab technician, used to do almost 100 pull-ups every time he worked out. Then one day he cooled himself off between sets with an early prototype. The next round of pull-ups — his 11th — was as strong as his first. Within six weeks, Cao was doing 180 pull-ups a session. Six weeks after that, he went from 180 to more than 600. Soon, Stanford’s football trainers asked to borrow a few Gloves to cool down players in the weight room and to fight muscle cramps.

In 2001, Heller went to Darpa. The agency saw the potential of the Glove for training recruits; the Stanford researchers received their first funding in 2003 and got $3 million.

In trying to figure out why the Glove worked so well, its inventors ended up challenging conventional scientific wisdom on fatigue. Muscles don’t wear out because they use up stored sugars, the researchers said. Instead, muscles tire because they get too hot, and sweating is just a backup cooling system for the lattices of blood vessels in the hands and feet. The Glove, in other words, overclocks the heat exchange system. “It’s like giving a Honda the radiator of a Mack truck,” Heller says. After four months of using it himself, Heller did 1,000 push-ups on his 60th birthday in April 2003. Soon after, troops from Special Operations Command were trying out the Glove, too.

Darpa’s human-enhancement programs were looking promising. In February 2002, Darpa asked Congress for a new, $78 million-per-year push for research including “the development of biochemical materials for enhancement of performance.” That was on top of $90 million to explore how “biological systems … adapt to wide extremes.” The human being, a Darpa fact file proclaimed in April 2002, “is becoming the weakest link in Defense systems.” Strengthening that chain meant “sustaining and augmenting human performance,” as well as “enabling new human capabilities.” Darpa was going to figure out how to build a better soldier.

Mark Roth never expected his research to have military applications. He was a biochemist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, studying how chromosomes move during cell replication. Then, about a decade ago, his second daughter, Hannah Grace, died of heart failure at the age of 1. Her death sent him down a much stranger path. “I became interested in immortality,” he says.

Roth knew that some animals hibernate — slowing their metabolisms until environmental conditions improve. He also knew that some cells can enter a kind of dormancy and then spring back to life — essentially, they go into suspended animation. Roth wanted to better understand this “metabolic flexibility.” He started testing various chemicals that slowed metabolism, like heavy water and tetrodotoxin (puffer fish poison, used in Haiti to turn people into zombies). Nothing worked. But then Roth found a loophole in one of nature’s seemingly absolute rules: Animals need oxygen. But some creatures, like nematodes, fruit flies, and zebra fish, don’t die if oxygen levels drop. Instead the critters suspend. Their hearts stop beating for up to 24 hours. They don’t breathe. And they don’t die. Wounds stop bleeding; nearly any injury becomes survivable, and the brain shuts down without damage. “If you were shot, this is exactly what you would want,” Roth says.

It’s a timing issue: At oxygen concentrations below some critical level, animals kick off. But take the oxygen level even lower than that, fast, and they don’t. The problem was, Roth couldn’t figure out how to pull off his oxygen reduction trick in mammals, let alone humans. What would a battlefield medic do? Tie a plastic bag over a wounded soldier’s head?

A television show gave Roth the clue he needed. In October 2002, he was watching a PBS show about caving in Mexico. The host had to don a breathing mask because the cavern’s air was full of hydrogen sulfide, which binds to mitochondria and impedes the body’s ability to use oxygen. “Oh my gosh,” Roth thought. “We can de-animate people.”

Three weeks later, Roth was at a meeting at the Breckenridge Ski Resort in Colorado, organized by DSO’s Bielitzki, the ex-NASA veterinarian. The agency was looking for ways to extend the “golden hour,” the period of time within which massive-trauma victims need to get medical care. Bielitzki thought Roth had the best shot, and was prepared to fund further research.

But before the program could start, DSO’s performance-enhancement push ran into trouble in Washington. The President’s Council on Bioethics was publishing reports decrying body hacks. Some in Congress worried about being accused of funding a Frankenstein army.

In response to those critics, the agency already predisposed to clandestine research — decided to go underground. Program names were changed to dull their mad-scientist edge. Metabolic Dominance became Peak Soldier Performance. Augmented Cognition became Improving Warfighter Information Intake Under Stress. Researchers were told to keep their mouths shut; many current and former program managers still won’t talk on the record, requesting anonymity for this story. The Surviving Blood Loss program, meant to fund Roth’s work, was itself put into suspended animation.

At Darpa headquarters — a blandly menacing office tower of brown stone and curved black glass in suburban Virginia — the pall of that near-death experience still hangs over the program. Or maybe it’s just the pictures of Dick Cheney that stare down from the walls of director Tony Tether’s fluorescent-lit office.

DSO isn’t trying to create posthuman troops, Tether says. “You know the old Army saying, ‘Be all that you can be’? Well, that’s really what we’re doing.” In training, soldiers “become extraordinary in strength and endurance. But it’s not any better than their body can be. And what we try to do is come up with techniques that allow them to maintain that level.” Tether is also careful not to take too much credit for Darpa’s forays into biology. “Darpa started these kinds of programs in the ’90s,” he says. “The fact that we had small units meant that the medical ability wasn’t going to be there. So we went in and started developing things that would allow soldiers to take care of themselves. As time went on we found more things we could do.” Most of Darpa’s performance-enhancement projects will take years, even decades, to show up on battlefields, Tether notes. Many are still in petri dishes or lab rats.

That pace is just fine with Tether. Darpa, he says, needs to be extra cautious. During the mid–20th century, the US government did some pretty ugly things to people in the name of science: exposing soldiers to A-bomb blasts, psychologically abusing Harvard students (including a young Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski), letting hundreds of black men die of syphilis in Alabama.

Today, things are different. Organizations that conduct research on people use Institutional Review Boards to evaluate every proposal. Anyone who wants to study human beings with Darpa money has to further apply to a second, federal IRB. “When you’re dealing with things that eventually have to be tested on living things — animals and eventually humans — yeah, you’re much more cautious,” Tether says. “We spend a lot of money on creating IRBs.” Guys like Grahn and Heller hate the extra paperwork. “It’s an incredible pain in the ***,” Grahn moans. “It’s like, ‘Heart monitors may cause chafing. In such event, will discontinue use.’” Tether’s reply: “You can’t just take the gun out in the back and shoot it, you know? It does slow things up, but it’s a good check.”

Even as the research environment grew more restrictive, Mark Roth kept working. In his first tests, he lowered the oxygen content in his mouse enclosures to just 5 percent — and watched his lab mice drop dead in 15 minutes. He gave the second group a whiff of hydrogen sulfide first. They survived in the 5 percent oxygen environment for six hours — unconscious but alive. Roth was ecstatic. He even brought his kids to see the mice in stasis and took pictures of the rodents while they were out. “I’d never done that in 30 years of research,” he says. “But this is one of those once-in-a-lifetime chances to change the playing field.”

In March 2005, the money from Darpa finally came through. The agency was looking for techniques that would keep animals alive for three hours with 60 percent of their blood gone — a lethal wound. Roth tried his hydrogen sulfide approach: He knocked rats out with a blast of the gas and drained 60 percent of their blood. They lived for 10 hours or more. Now Roth is considering going to the IRBs for permission to suspend human beings.

Bioethical safeguards haven’t stopped dozens of other DSO-funded projects around the world: energy cocktails that shave seconds off the race times of world-class cyclists, magnetic waves beamed at people’s heads to detect alertness, EEGs to detect when satellite imagery analysts spot a target — even before the analysts realize it themselves, meaning they can work much faster.

In peacetime, this work might not have much urgency. But the US military is chest-deep in a pair of nasty counterinsurgencies. Fighting this kind of war requires huge numbers of troops, none more important than the so-called “strategic corporal” — the average infantryman on patrol. The Bush administration wants to increase the overall size of combat forces by 92,000 people over the next five years.

The problem is, the military is already struggling to meet current recruiting goals. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, Congress authorized a temporary, 30,000-troop increase in the Army; the service still has 7,000 slots left to fill. Up to 12 percent of the military’s recruits can now come from the lowest admissible pool of applicants, “Category IV.” (In the 1980s and 1990s, it was 2 percent.) The maximum age for new privates has been raised from 35 to 42. Last year, 8,000 recruits got waivers for past drug use and criminal histories. Drill sergeants have been told to back off the trainees — and even allow them to do push-ups on their knees.

Those same grunts will need to pull 24-hour patrols in Iraq’s Venutian heat. Intel officers must cope with a cascade of data from sensors, drones, and informants. Rangers go on weeklong chases in the bitterly cold Hindu Kush. Everyone, in other words, has to perform at their peak.

Which brings me back to Stanford. Heller and Grahn are developing a new version of the Glove: one that fits less like a coffeepot and more like, well, a glove. And it’ll have some added functionality. Those assemblies of radiator veins in our extremities don’t just release heat — they can collect it, too, and use it to warm the rest of the body. In a green and orange tent on a balcony outside their lab, I strip down to a bathing suit to test their theory.

Next to me is a gray tub filled with 150 gallons of water, into which Vinh Cao, the pull-up–happy lab technician, dumps 30 pounds of shaved ice. It’ll take just 10 minutes or so, he says, to get the water down to 60 degrees Fahrenheit. I wait, shivering slightly in the wind.

Then, eyelids squeezed tight, I step into the water. It stings, horribly. I yip in pain. My shoulder and neck muscles clench like fists and brace to fight the elements. I exhale once, twice. I lean on my forearms and lower myself in. Deep, low-toned breaths rush out from the deepest part of my lungs. Water splashes as my biceps and legs start to twitch. “Y’know, we can cut this short,” Grahn says. After seven minutes, my fingers have turned white, and the nails have settled into a dull purple. I touch my hands to my face. It’s like being caressed by a corpse. “You’ve shut off the blood flow to these vascular structures,” Grahn explains. “Standard suite of responses.”

That’s moderately comforting. So is the fact that I’m now totally numb. For the first time, I notice three little yellow duckies bobbing in my Arctic tub. Over the next 45 minutes, Grahn talks — about the scars on his nose and cheek that he got playing center in the old Western Hockey League, about his days driving Sno-Cats at Mount Hood Meadows Ski Resort in Oregon, about the Glove’s trials at the marines’ mountain warfare training center.

But his stories get harder and harder to follow. I’ve started shivering again — all across my legs and chest, muscles pulse to a manic rhythm. And then I start having tremors. My thighs jackknife to my chest, unbidden. I moan, and darkness closes in from the edges of my vision.

Then, just like on the treadmill, Grahn takes my wrist. He slips each of my hands into a modified Glove prototype. This time, the metal hemispheres inside are hot to the touch — 113 degrees. After two minutes, I can think again. The tent comes back into focus. “You can stay this way indefinitely now. You’re at a thermal equilibrium; the heat going into these two hands is equivalent to what’s going out of the rest of you,” Grahn says. “Now you’re uncomfortable again — merely uncomfortable. That’s a huge difference when you’re talking about survival.” The water is still bitter, of course. But now I can take it.


Posts got merged, sorry.

DARPA heads for robot-human hybrid: Are cyborgs on the way?

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DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, announced they are looking at developing a new generation of technologies combing biological and electronic systems. A new division of the military research and developer will experiment with technologies merging life with machines.

The Biological Technologies Office (BTO) will use biological organisms as the basis of new defense mechanisms. Research into those fields has already been pioneered by the offices of Defense Sciences (DSO) and Microsystems Technology (MTO).

"Biology is nature's ultimate innovator, and any agency that hangs its hat on innovation would be foolish not to look to this master of networked complexity for inspiration and solutions," Arati Prabhakar, director of DARPA, told [pdf] members of the U.S. House of Representatives on 26 March.

The BTO will focus on assisting those who have lost limbs, in addition to a wide variety of other projects merging humans and machines.
Hand Proprioception and Touch Interfaces (HAPTIX) is among the first technologies that will be explored by the group. This project has the goal of creating artificial limbs that will provide the sensation of touch to users.

Prabhakar told lawmakers that study of human/machine interfaces may make it possible to develop antibodies to new toxins in a month. That process can take decades using current technologies, she said. The director said such measures are needed to counter a growing threat of terrorists using biological and chemical weapons.

Technology developed by the BTO could be used to assist soldiers recovering from crippling injuries. It could also be used to enable the construction of super-soldiers, with powers far beyond human capabilities. Developments planned by the group include systems allowing soldiers to survive the loss of large quantities of blood.


"Recent progress in such diverse disciplines as neuroscience, sensor design, microsystems, computer science, and other longstanding areas of DARPA investment has begun to converge, revealing newly emergent potential ready to be realized," agency officials wrote in the press release announcing the formation of the Biological Technologies Office.

The Chronicle of Lineage Indicative of Origins (CLIO) program may cause some controversy. That goal of the BTO will include making "biological engineering safer by... prevent[ing] illegal acquisition or misuse of proprietary strains" of organisms, DARPA reports. Large food developers like Monsanto are involved in several conflicts with small growers over patented varieties of crops.

Geoff Ling will be the first director of the BTO. He is currently the deputy director of DARPA and is considered to be one of the most knowledgeable people in the Navy on the subject of traumatic brain injury (TBI).

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Again with the merging.

Military Funds Brain-Computer Interfaces to Control Feelings

A $70 million program will try to develop brain implants able to regulate emotions in the mentally ill.


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Researcher Jose Carmena has worked for years training macaque monkeys to move computer cursors and robotic limbs with their minds. He does so by implanting electrodes into their brains to monitor neural activity. Now, as part of a sweeping $70 million program funded by the U.S. military, Carmena has a new goal: to use brain implants to read, and then control, the emotions of mentally ill people.

This week the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, awarded two large contracts to Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of California, San Francisco, to create electrical brain implants capable of treating seven psychiatric conditions, including addiction, depression, and borderline personality disorder.

The project builds on expanding knowledge about how the brain works; the development of microlectronic systems that can fit in the body; and substantial evidence that thoughts and actions can be altered with well-placed electrical impulses to the brain.

“Imagine if I have an addiction to alcohol and I have a craving,” says Carmena, who is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and involved in the UCSF-led project. “We could detect that feeling and then stimulate inside the brain to stop it from happening.”

The U.S. faces an epidemic of mental illness among veterans, including suicide rates three or four times that of the general public. But drugs and talk therapy are of limited use, which is why the military is turning to neurological devices, says Justin Sanchez, manager of the DARPA program, known as Subnets, for Systems-Based Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies.

“We want to understand the brain networks [in] neuropsychiatric illness, develop technology to measure them, and then do precision signaling to the brain,” says Sanchez. “It’s something completely different and new. These devices don’t yet exist.”

Under the contracts, which are the largest awards so far supporting President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative, the brain-mapping program launched by the White House last year, UCSF will receive as much as $26 million and Mass General up to $30 million. Companies including the medical device giant Medtronic and startup Cortera Neurotechnologies, a spin-out from UC Berkeley’s wireless laboratory, will supply technology for the effort. Initial research will be in animals, but DARPA hopes to reach human tests within two or three years.

The research builds on a small but quickly growing market for devices that work by stimulating nerves, both inside the brain and outside it. More than 110,000 Parkinson’s patients have received deep-brain stimulators built by Medtronic that control body tremors by sending electric pulses into the brain. More recently, doctors have used such stimulators to treat severe cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder (see “Brain Implants Can Reset Misfiring Circuits”). Last November, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration approved NeuroPace, the first implant that both records from the brain and stimulates it (see “Zapping Seizures Away”). It is used to watch for epileptic seizures and then stop them with electrical pulses. Altogether, U.S. doctors bill for about $2.6 billion worth of neural stimulation devices a year, according to industry estimates.

Researchers say they are making rapid improvements in electronics, including small, implantable computers. Under its program, Mass General will work with Draper Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to develop new types of stimulators. The UCSF team is being supported by microelectronics and wireless researchers at UC Berkeley, who have created several prototypes of miniaturized brain implants. Michel Maharbiz, a professor in Berkeley’s electrical engineering department, says the Obama brain initiative, and now the DARPA money, has created a “feeding frenzy” around new technology. “It’s a great time to do tech for the brain,” he says.

The new line of research has been dubbed “affective brain-computer interfaces” by some, meaning electronic devices that alter feelings, perhaps under direct control of a patient’s thoughts and wishes. “Basically, we’re trying to build the next generation of psychiatric brain stimulators,” says Alik Widge, a researcher on the Mass General team.

Darin Dougherty, a psychiatrist who directs Mass General’s division of neurotherapeutics, says one aim could be to extinguish fear in veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Fear is generated in the amygdala—a part of the brain involved in emotional memories. But it can be repressed by signals in another region, the ventromedial pre-frontal cortex. “The idea would be to decode a signal in the amygdala showing overactivity, then stimulate elsewhere to [suppress] that fear,” says Dougherty.

Such research isn’t without ominous overtones. In the 1970s, Yale University neuroscientist Jose Delgado showed he could cause people to feel emotions, like relaxation or anxiety, using implants he called “stimoceivers.” But Delgado, also funded by the military, left the U.S. after Congressional hearings in which he was accused of developing “totalitarian” mind-control devices. According to scientists funded by DARPA, the agency has been anxious about how the Subnets program could be perceived, and it has appointed an ethics panel to oversee the research.

Psychiatric implants would in fact control how mentally ill people act, although in many cases indirectly, by changing how they feel. For instance, a stimulator that stops a craving for cocaine would alter an addict’s behavior. “It’s to change what people feel and to change what they do. Those are intimately tied,” says Dougherty.

Dougherty says a brain implant would only be considered for patients truly debilitated by mental illness, and who can’t be helped with drugs and psychotherapy. “This is never going to be a first-line option: ‘Oh, you have PTSD, let’s do surgery,’ ” says Dougherty. “It’s going to be for people who don’t respond to the other treatments.”


And again.


In Pursuit of Human Augmentation
The journey toward making “normal” obsolete.

When you’re sick, it’s obvious that you and your doctor should work, if possible, to help you get better. Nobody would argue against a treatment that restores normal function to a sick or disabled individual. But the consequences of going further than that–going beyond “normal”–are not commonly studied, nor endorsed by many in medicine. Indeed, in any medical procedure, there is risk. If you are already normal, then conventional wisdom dictates that that’s enough. “Do no harm,” the old aphorism says–we should focus on altering the body and mind only when the risk of the alteration is justified, preferably by the hope of solving a deficit of vastly greater magnitude.

Science has endorsed something of a parallel attitude in its pursuit of biological and biomedical research. Namely, in biology, many key insights have emerged via study of the absence of the phenomenon of interest. For example, throughout the 20th century, many insights about the brain arose from the knocking out of specific genes, or the ablation of specific neurons in animals, or the examination of human patients who have suffered the loss of brain regions from conditions such as war or medically mandated surgery. In this way, we learned that patients without their hippocampi become unable to form new memories; humans and experimental animals with prefrontal-cortex damage make bad decisions and lack impulse control; subjects without dopamine-producing neurons exhibit symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. These studies are good at demonstrating the necessity of a specific neural circuit, or brain region, to the normal state. The idea that biomedical science is supposed to bring us up to normal is embedded, to a degree, in the very structure of the experiments we commonly do in the laboratory.

There is nothing wrong with this line of thought. This angle of research is fully consistent with our medical goal. It has brought us many of the triumphs of the last century, and it continues to yield insights into the vast range of diseases that plague us throughout life. When researchers leave this line of thought, though, they point toward the possibility that going beyond normal may change us in new and unprecedented ways, improving our lives in ways that are hard to even imagine. One fascinating line of research over the past few decades has revealed that life span, which long appeared to be solidly set in stone, can be lengthened through pharmacological and genetic manipulations–at least in worms, yeast, and, most recently, mice. This work may someday (quite possibly soon) lead to drugs that can extend human life span. Or note that this past summer, double amputee Oscar Pistorius won second place in a race against able-bodied runners, racing with his prosthetic carbon-fiber legs. Now he is hoping to take on the Olympics, which has led international athletic bodies to worry that augmented humans may be better at running than normal ones are. As a final example, cognitive-augmentation drugs such as modafinil, which enhances alertness even after long hours of wakefulness, are becoming widespread. (Broadly interpreted, good ole coffee might be considered the original neurotechnology, having augmented attention, alertness, and memory in tired humans for millennia.)

It’s arguably time for a discipline to emerge around the idea of human augmentation. At the MIT Media Lab, we are beginning to search for principles that govern the use of technology to augment human abilities–that make the idea of normal obsolete. As a codirector of the Center for Human Augmentation, I lead a lab, the Neuroengineering and Neuromedia Lab, that is developing devices that will hopefully eventually allow us to enhance memory, creativity, and happiness in humans. One interesting observation that has emerged is that it’s much easier to know when something is gone than it is to characterize it in its intact state. For example, it’s far easier to demonstrate that an animal can form no new memories than it is to characterize the trajectory that memories take as they are learned, consolidated, and forgotten throughout the lifetime of that animal. And whereas many measures of depression and sadness have been defined, a coherent description of happiness remains elusive. How can you augment something if you can’t define it? One of the first things we are doing is developing better, measurable definitions of such phenomena. Another issue is that radically new tools are needed to augment the mind. We are developing new kinds of neural stimulators, for example, that enable highly targeted manipulations of the brain. Some of our inventions, like the ability to turn specific sets of neurons on and off with brief pulses of blue and yellow light, may be used chiefly in animals for the next few years, but I think they will find many compelling uses in humans in the years to come, as their power becomes manifest through the efforts of a great many neuroscientists and engineers.

Cognitive augmentation will require new technologies.

One argument in favor of going for optimality, and forgetting about normal, is that it’s becoming harder and harder to know what is normal. For example, it’s been demonstrated that two-thirds of all people have at least one copy of a DNA sequence that makes them more likely to become depressed after a stressful life event. The rest of all people, a minority of one-third, are more resilient to stress than the other two-thirds are. Thus, it could be argued that becoming depressed in response to stress is the normal state. As a neuroengineer, I think it’s easier just to develop neurotechnologies that will enable us to make people as happy and intelligent as possible, and perhaps to even go farther: taking on the questions that philosophy struggles with, such as how to find meaning in one’s life. (More on that last point in a future post.)

What is a problem, and what is a feature of the human condition? They are not necessarily distinct. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to find better ways to make life better. In that way, we’ll hopefully move, in the century to come, from “Do no harm” to “Do good.”

@SvenSvensonov ,

Japan has been already researching into HAL platforms , its practicality and applicability in military / defense forums?

Again, for those interested in our progress...

There is also the vast applicability and potential for its use in the Medical / Health industries.

Ganbare !

Be More Than You Can Be

Heat-resistant. Cold-proof. Tireless. Tomorrow’s soldiers are just like today’s — only better. Inside the Pentagon’s human enhancement project.

The lab is climate-controlled to 104 degrees Fahrenheit and 66 percent humidity. Sitting inside the cramped room, even for a few minutes, is an unpleasantly moist experience. I’ve spent the last 40 minutes on a treadmill angled at a 9 percent grade. My face is chili-red, my shirt soaked with sweat. My breath is coming in short, unsatisfactory gasps. The sushi and sake I had last night are in full revolt. The tiny speakers on the shelf blasting “Living on a Prayer” are definitely not helping.

Then Dennis Grahn, a lumpy Stanford University biologist and former minor-league hockey player, walks into the room. He nods in my direction and smiles at a technician. “Looks like he’s ready,” Grahn says.

Grahn takes my hand and slips it into a clear, coffeepot-looking contraption he calls the Glove. Inside is a hemisphere of metal, cool to the touch. He tightens a seal around my wrist; a vacuum begins pulling blood to the surface of my hand, and the cold metal chills my blood before it travels through my veins back to my core. After five minutes, I feel rejuvenated. Never mind the hangover. Never mind Bon Jovi. I keep going for another half hour.

The test isn’t about my endurance; it’s about the future of the American armed forces. Grahn and his colleagues developed the Glove for the military — specifically, for the Pentagon’s way-out science division, Darpa: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. For nearly 50 years, Darpa has engineered technological breakthroughs from the Internet to stealth jets. But in the early 1990s, as military strategists started worrying about how to defend against germ weapons, the agency began to get interested in biology. “The future was a scary place, the more we looked at it,” says Michael Goldblatt, former head of Darpa’s Defense Sciences Office. “We wanted to learn the capabilities of nature before others taught them to us.”

By 2001, military strategists had determined that the best way to deal with emerging transnational threats was with small groups of fast-moving soldiers, not hulking pieces of military hardware. But small groups rarely travel with medics — they have to be hardy enough to survive on their own. So what goes on in Grahn’s dank little lab at Stanford is part of a much larger push to radically improve the performance, mental capacity, and resilience of American troops — to let them run harder and longer, operate without sleep, overcome deadly injury, and tap the potential of their unconscious minds.

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The Advanced Research Projects Agency was founded in 1958 (the D was added in 1972) as a place to noodle around on ideas too big, or too far out, for the Cold War military-industrial complex. The results can sometimes be spectacular failures (nuclear hand grenade, anyone?). But Darpa has also pushed the development of some things that have become part of the fabric of military and civilian life: wearable computers, long-range drone aircraft, night vision, even the M16 rifle and the computer mouse.

But the agency had mostly avoided the life sciences. Darpa’s directors in 1980s and 1990s weren’t interested — and were happy to avoid the tangled ethical issues that often go along with research on human beings. Then, in June 2001, Tony Tether, an electrical engineer and Darpa veteran, left his job at the Sequoia Group, a venture capital firm, and returned to head the agency. Under his guidance, Darpa’s embryonic biology efforts began to multiply and expand. Research on biodefense led to research on the immune system, which led to more general research on the human body. “There was a sense before that Darpa wouldn’t get into human R&D. That was somewhere Frank Fernandez didn’t want to go,” one former program manager says, referring to Darpa’s director from 1998 to 2001. But Tether “had a more open attitude. He was more permissive about dealing with humans.”

The agency had already enlisted an unusual team of bioscience experts. One program manager had been a chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory working on biomimetics; soon he was funding research on artificial limbs. Another early member of the team, Joe Bielitzki, studied the effects of space travel on animals while he was NASA’s chief veterinary officer. To head the push, Darpa had turned to Michael Goldblatt, VP of science and technology at McDonald’s. He’d helped develop a self-sterilizing package and pitched Darpa on the material’s potential as a bandage, figuring that what was good for a Big Mac might be good for bullet wounds. The agency offered him a job... which he turned down. But two years later Darpa supersized the offer — Goldblatt was hired to head the Defense Sciences Office, a division with a major focus on human enhancement.

Grahn and his research partner, biologist Craig Heller, started working on the Glove at Stanford in the late 1990s as part of their research on improving physical performance. Even they were astounded at how well it seemed to work. Vinh Cao, their squat, barrel-chested lab technician, used to do almost 100 pull-ups every time he worked out. Then one day he cooled himself off between sets with an early prototype. The next round of pull-ups — his 11th — was as strong as his first. Within six weeks, Cao was doing 180 pull-ups a session. Six weeks after that, he went from 180 to more than 600. Soon, Stanford’s football trainers asked to borrow a few Gloves to cool down players in the weight room and to fight muscle cramps.

In 2001, Heller went to Darpa. The agency saw the potential of the Glove for training recruits; the Stanford researchers received their first funding in 2003 and got $3 million.

In trying to figure out why the Glove worked so well, its inventors ended up challenging conventional scientific wisdom on fatigue. Muscles don’t wear out because they use up stored sugars, the researchers said. Instead, muscles tire because they get too hot, and sweating is just a backup cooling system for the lattices of blood vessels in the hands and feet. The Glove, in other words, overclocks the heat exchange system. “It’s like giving a Honda the radiator of a Mack truck,” Heller says. After four months of using it himself, Heller did 1,000 push-ups on his 60th birthday in April 2003. Soon after, troops from Special Operations Command were trying out the Glove, too.

Darpa’s human-enhancement programs were looking promising. In February 2002, Darpa asked Congress for a new, $78 million-per-year push for research including “the development of biochemical materials for enhancement of performance.” That was on top of $90 million to explore how “biological systems … adapt to wide extremes.” The human being, a Darpa fact file proclaimed in April 2002, “is becoming the weakest link in Defense systems.” Strengthening that chain meant “sustaining and augmenting human performance,” as well as “enabling new human capabilities.” Darpa was going to figure out how to build a better soldier.

Mark Roth never expected his research to have military applications. He was a biochemist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, studying how chromosomes move during cell replication. Then, about a decade ago, his second daughter, Hannah Grace, died of heart failure at the age of 1. Her death sent him down a much stranger path. “I became interested in immortality,” he says.

Roth knew that some animals hibernate — slowing their metabolisms until environmental conditions improve. He also knew that some cells can enter a kind of dormancy and then spring back to life — essentially, they go into suspended animation. Roth wanted to better understand this “metabolic flexibility.” He started testing various chemicals that slowed metabolism, like heavy water and tetrodotoxin (puffer fish poison, used in Haiti to turn people into zombies). Nothing worked. But then Roth found a loophole in one of nature’s seemingly absolute rules: Animals need oxygen. But some creatures, like nematodes, fruit flies, and zebra fish, don’t die if oxygen levels drop. Instead the critters suspend. Their hearts stop beating for up to 24 hours. They don’t breathe. And they don’t die. Wounds stop bleeding; nearly any injury becomes survivable, and the brain shuts down without damage. “If you were shot, this is exactly what you would want,” Roth says.

It’s a timing issue: At oxygen concentrations below some critical level, animals kick off. But take the oxygen level even lower than that, fast, and they don’t. The problem was, Roth couldn’t figure out how to pull off his oxygen reduction trick in mammals, let alone humans. What would a battlefield medic do? Tie a plastic bag over a wounded soldier’s head?

A television show gave Roth the clue he needed. In October 2002, he was watching a PBS show about caving in Mexico. The host had to don a breathing mask because the cavern’s air was full of hydrogen sulfide, which binds to mitochondria and impedes the body’s ability to use oxygen. “Oh my gosh,” Roth thought. “We can de-animate people.”

Three weeks later, Roth was at a meeting at the Breckenridge Ski Resort in Colorado, organized by DSO’s Bielitzki, the ex-NASA veterinarian. The agency was looking for ways to extend the “golden hour,” the period of time within which massive-trauma victims need to get medical care. Bielitzki thought Roth had the best shot, and was prepared to fund further research.

But before the program could start, DSO’s performance-enhancement push ran into trouble in Washington. The President’s Council on Bioethics was publishing reports decrying body hacks. Some in Congress worried about being accused of funding a Frankenstein army.

In response to those critics, the agency already predisposed to clandestine research — decided to go underground. Program names were changed to dull their mad-scientist edge. Metabolic Dominance became Peak Soldier Performance. Augmented Cognition became Improving Warfighter Information Intake Under Stress. Researchers were told to keep their mouths shut; many current and former program managers still won’t talk on the record, requesting anonymity for this story. The Surviving Blood Loss program, meant to fund Roth’s work, was itself put into suspended animation.

At Darpa headquarters — a blandly menacing office tower of brown stone and curved black glass in suburban Virginia — the pall of that near-death experience still hangs over the program. Or maybe it’s just the pictures of Dick Cheney that stare down from the walls of director Tony Tether’s fluorescent-lit office.

DSO isn’t trying to create posthuman troops, Tether says. “You know the old Army saying, ‘Be all that you can be’? Well, that’s really what we’re doing.” In training, soldiers “become extraordinary in strength and endurance. But it’s not any better than their body can be. And what we try to do is come up with techniques that allow them to maintain that level.” Tether is also careful not to take too much credit for Darpa’s forays into biology. “Darpa started these kinds of programs in the ’90s,” he says. “The fact that we had small units meant that the medical ability wasn’t going to be there. So we went in and started developing things that would allow soldiers to take care of themselves. As time went on we found more things we could do.” Most of Darpa’s performance-enhancement projects will take years, even decades, to show up on battlefields, Tether notes. Many are still in petri dishes or lab rats.

That pace is just fine with Tether. Darpa, he says, needs to be extra cautious. During the mid–20th century, the US government did some pretty ugly things to people in the name of science: exposing soldiers to A-bomb blasts, psychologically abusing Harvard students (including a young Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski), letting hundreds of black men die of syphilis in Alabama.

Today, things are different. Organizations that conduct research on people use Institutional Review Boards to evaluate every proposal. Anyone who wants to study human beings with Darpa money has to further apply to a second, federal IRB. “When you’re dealing with things that eventually have to be tested on living things — animals and eventually humans — yeah, you’re much more cautious,” Tether says. “We spend a lot of money on creating IRBs.” Guys like Grahn and Heller hate the extra paperwork. “It’s an incredible pain in the ***,” Grahn moans. “It’s like, ‘Heart monitors may cause chafing. In such event, will discontinue use.’” Tether’s reply: “You can’t just take the gun out in the back and shoot it, you know? It does slow things up, but it’s a good check.”

Even as the research environment grew more restrictive, Mark Roth kept working. In his first tests, he lowered the oxygen content in his mouse enclosures to just 5 percent — and watched his lab mice drop dead in 15 minutes. He gave the second group a whiff of hydrogen sulfide first. They survived in the 5 percent oxygen environment for six hours — unconscious but alive. Roth was ecstatic. He even brought his kids to see the mice in stasis and took pictures of the rodents while they were out. “I’d never done that in 30 years of research,” he says. “But this is one of those once-in-a-lifetime chances to change the playing field.”

In March 2005, the money from Darpa finally came through. The agency was looking for techniques that would keep animals alive for three hours with 60 percent of their blood gone — a lethal wound. Roth tried his hydrogen sulfide approach: He knocked rats out with a blast of the gas and drained 60 percent of their blood. They lived for 10 hours or more. Now Roth is considering going to the IRBs for permission to suspend human beings.

Bioethical safeguards haven’t stopped dozens of other DSO-funded projects around the world: energy cocktails that shave seconds off the race times of world-class cyclists, magnetic waves beamed at people’s heads to detect alertness, EEGs to detect when satellite imagery analysts spot a target — even before the analysts realize it themselves, meaning they can work much faster.

In peacetime, this work might not have much urgency. But the US military is chest-deep in a pair of nasty counterinsurgencies. Fighting this kind of war requires huge numbers of troops, none more important than the so-called “strategic corporal” — the average infantryman on patrol. The Bush administration wants to increase the overall size of combat forces by 92,000 people over the next five years.

The problem is, the military is already struggling to meet current recruiting goals. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, Congress authorized a temporary, 30,000-troop increase in the Army; the service still has 7,000 slots left to fill. Up to 12 percent of the military’s recruits can now come from the lowest admissible pool of applicants, “Category IV.” (In the 1980s and 1990s, it was 2 percent.) The maximum age for new privates has been raised from 35 to 42. Last year, 8,000 recruits got waivers for past drug use and criminal histories. Drill sergeants have been told to back off the trainees — and even allow them to do push-ups on their knees.

Those same grunts will need to pull 24-hour patrols in Iraq’s Venutian heat. Intel officers must cope with a cascade of data from sensors, drones, and informants. Rangers go on weeklong chases in the bitterly cold Hindu Kush. Everyone, in other words, has to perform at their peak.

Which brings me back to Stanford. Heller and Grahn are developing a new version of the Glove: one that fits less like a coffeepot and more like, well, a glove. And it’ll have some added functionality. Those assemblies of radiator veins in our extremities don’t just release heat — they can collect it, too, and use it to warm the rest of the body. In a green and orange tent on a balcony outside their lab, I strip down to a bathing suit to test their theory.

Next to me is a gray tub filled with 150 gallons of water, into which Vinh Cao, the pull-up–happy lab technician, dumps 30 pounds of shaved ice. It’ll take just 10 minutes or so, he says, to get the water down to 60 degrees Fahrenheit. I wait, shivering slightly in the wind.

Then, eyelids squeezed tight, I step into the water. It stings, horribly. I yip in pain. My shoulder and neck muscles clench like fists and brace to fight the elements. I exhale once, twice. I lean on my forearms and lower myself in. Deep, low-toned breaths rush out from the deepest part of my lungs. Water splashes as my biceps and legs start to twitch. “Y’know, we can cut this short,” Grahn says. After seven minutes, my fingers have turned white, and the nails have settled into a dull purple. I touch my hands to my face. It’s like being caressed by a corpse. “You’ve shut off the blood flow to these vascular structures,” Grahn explains. “Standard suite of responses.”

That’s moderately comforting. So is the fact that I’m now totally numb. For the first time, I notice three little yellow duckies bobbing in my Arctic tub. Over the next 45 minutes, Grahn talks — about the scars on his nose and cheek that he got playing center in the old Western Hockey League, about his days driving Sno-Cats at Mount Hood Meadows Ski Resort in Oregon, about the Glove’s trials at the marines’ mountain warfare training center.

But his stories get harder and harder to follow. I’ve started shivering again — all across my legs and chest, muscles pulse to a manic rhythm. And then I start having tremors. My thighs jackknife to my chest, unbidden. I moan, and darkness closes in from the edges of my vision.

Then, just like on the treadmill, Grahn takes my wrist. He slips each of my hands into a modified Glove prototype. This time, the metal hemispheres inside are hot to the touch — 113 degrees. After two minutes, I can think again. The tent comes back into focus. “You can stay this way indefinitely now. You’re at a thermal equilibrium; the heat going into these two hands is equivalent to what’s going out of the rest of you,” Grahn says. “Now you’re uncomfortable again — merely uncomfortable. That’s a huge difference when you’re talking about survival.” The water is still bitter, of course. But now I can take it.


Posts got merged, sorry.

DARPA heads for robot-human hybrid: Are cyborgs on the way?

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DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, announced they are looking at developing a new generation of technologies combing biological and electronic systems. A new division of the military research and developer will experiment with technologies merging life with machines.

The Biological Technologies Office (BTO) will use biological organisms as the basis of new defense mechanisms. Research into those fields has already been pioneered by the offices of Defense Sciences (DSO) and Microsystems Technology (MTO).

"Biology is nature's ultimate innovator, and any agency that hangs its hat on innovation would be foolish not to look to this master of networked complexity for inspiration and solutions," Arati Prabhakar, director of DARPA, told [pdf] members of the U.S. House of Representatives on 26 March.

The BTO will focus on assisting those who have lost limbs, in addition to a wide variety of other projects merging humans and machines.
Hand Proprioception and Touch Interfaces (HAPTIX) is among the first technologies that will be explored by the group. This project has the goal of creating artificial limbs that will provide the sensation of touch to users.

Prabhakar told lawmakers that study of human/machine interfaces may make it possible to develop antibodies to new toxins in a month. That process can take decades using current technologies, she said. The director said such measures are needed to counter a growing threat of terrorists using biological and chemical weapons.

Technology developed by the BTO could be used to assist soldiers recovering from crippling injuries. It could also be used to enable the construction of super-soldiers, with powers far beyond human capabilities. Developments planned by the group include systems allowing soldiers to survive the loss of large quantities of blood.


"Recent progress in such diverse disciplines as neuroscience, sensor design, microsystems, computer science, and other longstanding areas of DARPA investment has begun to converge, revealing newly emergent potential ready to be realized," agency officials wrote in the press release announcing the formation of the Biological Technologies Office.

The Chronicle of Lineage Indicative of Origins (CLIO) program may cause some controversy. That goal of the BTO will include making "biological engineering safer by... prevent[ing] illegal acquisition or misuse of proprietary strains" of organisms, DARPA reports. Large food developers like Monsanto are involved in several conflicts with small growers over patented varieties of crops.

Geoff Ling will be the first director of the BTO. He is currently the deputy director of DARPA and is considered to be one of the most knowledgeable people in the Navy on the subject of traumatic brain injury (TBI).

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Again with the merging.

Military Funds Brain-Computer Interfaces to Control Feelings

A $70 million program will try to develop brain implants able to regulate emotions in the mentally ill.


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Researcher Jose Carmena has worked for years training macaque monkeys to move computer cursors and robotic limbs with their minds. He does so by implanting electrodes into their brains to monitor neural activity. Now, as part of a sweeping $70 million program funded by the U.S. military, Carmena has a new goal: to use brain implants to read, and then control, the emotions of mentally ill people.

This week the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, awarded two large contracts to Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of California, San Francisco, to create electrical brain implants capable of treating seven psychiatric conditions, including addiction, depression, and borderline personality disorder.

The project builds on expanding knowledge about how the brain works; the development of microlectronic systems that can fit in the body; and substantial evidence that thoughts and actions can be altered with well-placed electrical impulses to the brain.

“Imagine if I have an addiction to alcohol and I have a craving,” says Carmena, who is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and involved in the UCSF-led project. “We could detect that feeling and then stimulate inside the brain to stop it from happening.”

The U.S. faces an epidemic of mental illness among veterans, including suicide rates three or four times that of the general public. But drugs and talk therapy are of limited use, which is why the military is turning to neurological devices, says Justin Sanchez, manager of the DARPA program, known as Subnets, for Systems-Based Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies.

“We want to understand the brain networks [in] neuropsychiatric illness, develop technology to measure them, and then do precision signaling to the brain,” says Sanchez. “It’s something completely different and new. These devices don’t yet exist.”

Under the contracts, which are the largest awards so far supporting President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative, the brain-mapping program launched by the White House last year, UCSF will receive as much as $26 million and Mass General up to $30 million. Companies including the medical device giant Medtronic and startup Cortera Neurotechnologies, a spin-out from UC Berkeley’s wireless laboratory, will supply technology for the effort. Initial research will be in animals, but DARPA hopes to reach human tests within two or three years.

The research builds on a small but quickly growing market for devices that work by stimulating nerves, both inside the brain and outside it. More than 110,000 Parkinson’s patients have received deep-brain stimulators built by Medtronic that control body tremors by sending electric pulses into the brain. More recently, doctors have used such stimulators to treat severe cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder (see “Brain Implants Can Reset Misfiring Circuits”). Last November, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration approved NeuroPace, the first implant that both records from the brain and stimulates it (see “Zapping Seizures Away”). It is used to watch for epileptic seizures and then stop them with electrical pulses. Altogether, U.S. doctors bill for about $2.6 billion worth of neural stimulation devices a year, according to industry estimates.

Researchers say they are making rapid improvements in electronics, including small, implantable computers. Under its program, Mass General will work with Draper Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to develop new types of stimulators. The UCSF team is being supported by microelectronics and wireless researchers at UC Berkeley, who have created several prototypes of miniaturized brain implants. Michel Maharbiz, a professor in Berkeley’s electrical engineering department, says the Obama brain initiative, and now the DARPA money, has created a “feeding frenzy” around new technology. “It’s a great time to do tech for the brain,” he says.

The new line of research has been dubbed “affective brain-computer interfaces” by some, meaning electronic devices that alter feelings, perhaps under direct control of a patient’s thoughts and wishes. “Basically, we’re trying to build the next generation of psychiatric brain stimulators,” says Alik Widge, a researcher on the Mass General team.

Darin Dougherty, a psychiatrist who directs Mass General’s division of neurotherapeutics, says one aim could be to extinguish fear in veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Fear is generated in the amygdala—a part of the brain involved in emotional memories. But it can be repressed by signals in another region, the ventromedial pre-frontal cortex. “The idea would be to decode a signal in the amygdala showing overactivity, then stimulate elsewhere to [suppress] that fear,” says Dougherty.

Such research isn’t without ominous overtones. In the 1970s, Yale University neuroscientist Jose Delgado showed he could cause people to feel emotions, like relaxation or anxiety, using implants he called “stimoceivers.” But Delgado, also funded by the military, left the U.S. after Congressional hearings in which he was accused of developing “totalitarian” mind-control devices. According to scientists funded by DARPA, the agency has been anxious about how the Subnets program could be perceived, and it has appointed an ethics panel to oversee the research.

Psychiatric implants would in fact control how mentally ill people act, although in many cases indirectly, by changing how they feel. For instance, a stimulator that stops a craving for cocaine would alter an addict’s behavior. “It’s to change what people feel and to change what they do. Those are intimately tied,” says Dougherty.

Dougherty says a brain implant would only be considered for patients truly debilitated by mental illness, and who can’t be helped with drugs and psychotherapy. “This is never going to be a first-line option: ‘Oh, you have PTSD, let’s do surgery,’ ” says Dougherty. “It’s going to be for people who don’t respond to the other treatments.”


And again.


In Pursuit of Human Augmentation
The journey toward making “normal” obsolete.

When you’re sick, it’s obvious that you and your doctor should work, if possible, to help you get better. Nobody would argue against a treatment that restores normal function to a sick or disabled individual. But the consequences of going further than that–going beyond “normal”–are not commonly studied, nor endorsed by many in medicine. Indeed, in any medical procedure, there is risk. If you are already normal, then conventional wisdom dictates that that’s enough. “Do no harm,” the old aphorism says–we should focus on altering the body and mind only when the risk of the alteration is justified, preferably by the hope of solving a deficit of vastly greater magnitude.

Science has endorsed something of a parallel attitude in its pursuit of biological and biomedical research. Namely, in biology, many key insights have emerged via study of the absence of the phenomenon of interest. For example, throughout the 20th century, many insights about the brain arose from the knocking out of specific genes, or the ablation of specific neurons in animals, or the examination of human patients who have suffered the loss of brain regions from conditions such as war or medically mandated surgery. In this way, we learned that patients without their hippocampi become unable to form new memories; humans and experimental animals with prefrontal-cortex damage make bad decisions and lack impulse control; subjects without dopamine-producing neurons exhibit symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. These studies are good at demonstrating the necessity of a specific neural circuit, or brain region, to the normal state. The idea that biomedical science is supposed to bring us up to normal is embedded, to a degree, in the very structure of the experiments we commonly do in the laboratory.

There is nothing wrong with this line of thought. This angle of research is fully consistent with our medical goal. It has brought us many of the triumphs of the last century, and it continues to yield insights into the vast range of diseases that plague us throughout life. When researchers leave this line of thought, though, they point toward the possibility that going beyond normal may change us in new and unprecedented ways, improving our lives in ways that are hard to even imagine. One fascinating line of research over the past few decades has revealed that life span, which long appeared to be solidly set in stone, can be lengthened through pharmacological and genetic manipulations–at least in worms, yeast, and, most recently, mice. This work may someday (quite possibly soon) lead to drugs that can extend human life span. Or note that this past summer, double amputee Oscar Pistorius won second place in a race against able-bodied runners, racing with his prosthetic carbon-fiber legs. Now he is hoping to take on the Olympics, which has led international athletic bodies to worry that augmented humans may be better at running than normal ones are. As a final example, cognitive-augmentation drugs such as modafinil, which enhances alertness even after long hours of wakefulness, are becoming widespread. (Broadly interpreted, good ole coffee might be considered the original neurotechnology, having augmented attention, alertness, and memory in tired humans for millennia.)

It’s arguably time for a discipline to emerge around the idea of human augmentation. At the MIT Media Lab, we are beginning to search for principles that govern the use of technology to augment human abilities–that make the idea of normal obsolete. As a codirector of the Center for Human Augmentation, I lead a lab, the Neuroengineering and Neuromedia Lab, that is developing devices that will hopefully eventually allow us to enhance memory, creativity, and happiness in humans. One interesting observation that has emerged is that it’s much easier to know when something is gone than it is to characterize it in its intact state. For example, it’s far easier to demonstrate that an animal can form no new memories than it is to characterize the trajectory that memories take as they are learned, consolidated, and forgotten throughout the lifetime of that animal. And whereas many measures of depression and sadness have been defined, a coherent description of happiness remains elusive. How can you augment something if you can’t define it? One of the first things we are doing is developing better, measurable definitions of such phenomena. Another issue is that radically new tools are needed to augment the mind. We are developing new kinds of neural stimulators, for example, that enable highly targeted manipulations of the brain. Some of our inventions, like the ability to turn specific sets of neurons on and off with brief pulses of blue and yellow light, may be used chiefly in animals for the next few years, but I think they will find many compelling uses in humans in the years to come, as their power becomes manifest through the efforts of a great many neuroscientists and engineers.

Cognitive augmentation will require new technologies.

One argument in favor of going for optimality, and forgetting about normal, is that it’s becoming harder and harder to know what is normal. For example, it’s been demonstrated that two-thirds of all people have at least one copy of a DNA sequence that makes them more likely to become depressed after a stressful life event. The rest of all people, a minority of one-third, are more resilient to stress than the other two-thirds are. Thus, it could be argued that becoming depressed in response to stress is the normal state. As a neuroengineer, I think it’s easier just to develop neurotechnologies that will enable us to make people as happy and intelligent as possible, and perhaps to even go farther: taking on the questions that philosophy struggles with, such as how to find meaning in one’s life. (More on that last point in a future post.)

What is a problem, and what is a feature of the human condition? They are not necessarily distinct. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to find better ways to make life better. In that way, we’ll hopefully move, in the century to come, from “Do no harm” to “Do good.”

Such an impressive read !! There are so much potential in the field of biomedical engineering nowadays, especially now with regards to the implementation of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, the surge in health-related research through federal research grants is just utterly indispensable.

 

[SvenSvensonov]

Military augmentation ! So it is , indeed, possible ! One step closer in creating a real life Master Chief !




@SvenSvensonov !! There are so much potential in the field of bio-medical engineering nowadays, especially now with regards to the implementation of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, the surge in health-related research through federal research grants is just utterly indispensable.

- yeah... I can't see the ACA covering enhanced optics or super-sensitive hearing, people aren't really ready for cyborgs quite yet, Congress would have a heart-attack due to the cost of these systems. But the increase in grant and research money has been a boon for us.

This is absolutely possible and research has been ongoing, I'm hardly the first person, this has been going on for decades and real progress has been made. The biggest impediment to date, baring the lack of public information due to some of these being military programs, is the moratorium on human-experimentation, at least voluntarily (even attracting volunteers is a problem), but we've a glut of wounded soldiers and some of them have been willing to partake in some of our research to better their condition. I suppose this is one benefit of war... as if there ever were any.

I'm back in the military's research arm, though not actually part of the military, and I'm damn happy about it.

This was me when I heard I was being transferred to military research . The pay increase was only added motivation, as if I was going to say "no" in the first place!

Is Japan research the military application of human-robot interface? I know about their exoskeleton program, but do they have a neural, optical or aural augmentation program too?

 

[Aepsilons]

- yeah... I can't see the ACA covering enhanced optics or super-sensitive hearing, people aren't really ready for cyborgs quite yet, Congress would have a heart-attack due to the cost of these systems.

But this is absolutely possible and research has been ongoing, I'm hardly the first person, this has been going on for decades and real progress has been made. The biggest impediment to date, baring the lack of public information, is the moratorium on human-experimentation, at least voluntarily (even attracting volunteers is a problem), but we've a glut of wounded soldier and some of them have been willing to partake in some of our research.

I'm back in the military's research arm, though not actually part of the military, and I'm damn happy about it.

This was me when I heard I was being transferred to military research

Is Japan research the military application of human-robot interface? I know about their exoskeleton program, but do they have a neural, optical or aural augmentation program too?

Excellent ! And welcome back to the military research arm ! This topic of biomedical research is a side interest of mine and I'm actually helping a friend do some stats work on his sampling and some regression analysis on his data set(s). His work is on new SA (sinoatrial ) nodular transplants ! There's really so much going on in the biomedical engineering field !

As for the topic of robotic prosthesis -- this is already slowly being seen in Rehabilitation industry -- per se in physical therapy and occupational therapy fields. Its just unbelievable how much research and foray is being conducted now.

PS. Health Field is going to go booming....lol !

PPS. I should have gone into Medicine? LOL

Is Japan research the military application of human-robot interface? I know about their exoskeleton program, but do they have a neural, optical or aural augmentation program too?

Neural interface is already observed. I'm not sure if there is already current research on optical augmentation and other variants.

Here's a good journal article on some recent data:
Retrieved from NCBI:
NeuroRex: A Clinical Neural Interface Roadmap for EEG-based Brain Machine Interfaces to a Lower Body Robotic Exoskeleton

 

[SvenSvensonov]

PS. Health Field is going to go booming....lol !

PPS. I should have gone into Medicine? LOL

Health care is one the fast growing industries in the US. My sister (not the oldest of my younger sisters, but one of the other three) just got licensed to be a dental hygienist... a 33% growth industry!!! Healthcare is the future, tech too, and their integration is all but assured.

And yes, you should have gone medical... or electronics. My bio-chem studies really don't help me anymore, though they are ongoing, due to my not being in pharmaceutical research right now, but my experience with electrical engineering in the Navy is probably the reason I'm employed in the sector I am.

There's always hope, do you have other experience besides psych? Even if you don't, we always need people to analyse the thoughts and feelings of people adjusting to their prosthetic limbs and robotic parts.

We already see increased depression in amputees and prosthetic limb recipients, adding robotic parts to the mix will be a field of further study. Especially due to the ethical questions of "what is humanity", as related to human-robotics. Applying for a military position is hard though as most of these jobs are internally recruited and hardly ever advertised.

CTech Prosthetics Blog -

Make sure you help your friends as much as possible!!!

Neural interface is already observed. I'm not sure if there is already current research on optical augmentation and other variants.

Here's a good journal article on some recent data:
Retrieved from NCBI:

NeuroRex: A Clinical Neural Interface Roadmap for EEG-based Brain Machine Interfaces to a Lower Body Robotic Exoskeleton

This is awesome! I'm sure, with their fascination of robotics and technology, that Japanese military scientists are already one step ahead of us in the human-robotics sector. That there's little publicly available shouldn't impede our hope.

 

[Aepsilons]

This is awesome! I'm sure, with their fascination of robotics and technology, that Japanese military scientists are already one step ahead of us in the human-robotics sector. That there's little publicly available shouldn't impede our hope.

He he he, there's actually a lot of coordination between American and Japanese neuroscientists in this sub-specialty. Given the emphasis of IP rights, Japanese are very, very selective in comparative analysis....

Health care is one the fast growing industries in the US. My sister (not the oldest of my younger sisters, but one of the other three) just got licensed to be a dental hygienist... a 33% growth industry!!! Healthcare is the future, tech too, and their integration is all but assured.

And yes, you should have gone medical... or electronics. My bio-chem studies really don't help me anymore, though they are ongoing, due to my not being in pharmaceutical research right now, but my experience with electrical engineering in the Navy is probably the reason I'm employed in the sector I am.

There's always hope, do you have other experience besides psych? Even if you don't, we always need people to analyse the thoughts and feelings of people adjusting to their prosthetic limbs and robotic parts.

We already see increased depression in amputees and prosthetic limb recipients, adding robotic parts to the mix will be a field of further study. Applying for a military position is hard though as most of these jobs are internally recruited and hardly ever advertised.

There's so much opportunity in this field (and well paying , too!!). I mean, Im finding out from a friend of mine (he's an R.N.) whose currently working (part time studying) on his Master's in Science -- Nursing Practitioner --- apparently RNP (Registered Nurse Practitioners) are starting $96,000 a year ? And that's just one job. There's the potential to go up 150+ with a 2nd job (part time).

Seriously! Health field...is the way to go...

We already see increased depression in amputees and prosthetic limb recipients, adding robotic parts to the mix will be a field of further study. Especially due to the ethical questions of "what is humanity", as related to human-robotics. Applying for a military position is hard though as most of these jobs are internally recruited and hardly ever advertised.

CTech Prosthetics Blog -

Make sure you help your friends as much as possible!!!

Absolutely !

 

[Armstrong]

Health.....there's little publicly available shouldn't impede our hope.

Stop filling @Nihonjin1051 's head with these crazy thoughts hes already infatuated with the idea of becoming Sigmund Yammamotto Freud !

I keep telling him that Finance is the way forward and that he ought to follow me to the Wall Street where we'd make sh*t loadz of money and spend all our bonuses away in a single night at Vegas but @Nihonjin1051 has his heart set on a farm in Kansas where he'd settle down with his very own Country girl and teach at a Community College in the mornings while conduct Nobel winning research in the wee hours of the night !

Ahhh the idealism of these young ones !