The Brains of Rats During the peak years of the GWOT I had the opportunity to visit the offices of an independent non-profit…
The Brains of Rats
During the peak years of the GWOT I had the opportunity to visit the offices of an independent non-profit research facility here in Texas that concentrates on cutting-edge projects for the Department of Defense. It was equal parts X-Files and American Kafka, full of atemporal cues like the 1950s sedan that came cruising down the drive as we entered the facility and the perfectly preserved 1960s transistor radios that decorated every room.
During the meeting, our host told us about some of the center’s great success stories. Then he looked over his horn-rims, smiled, and asked an unusual question:
“Have you ever driven a rat with a joystick?”
The answer was no, but the possibility was yes, he explained—in a nearby lab, enabled by brain implants, not far from the inflatable dome in which they were training honeybees to locate explosives.
The purpose of remote-controlled rats, our host advised, was for disaster recovery and the like—finding people in rubble and such. In the car afterwards, my colleague and I couldn’t help but thinking more along the lines of Universal Soldier—battlefield applications of such technology in human brains.
Today’s feed brings news of the next generation of government-funded mind control: the NIH announced its funding (together with DOD, of course) of the successful development of a brain implant a tenth the width of a human hair that allows the remote control of the brains of mice using light or pharmaceuticals. For the technically inclined, here’s the abstract from the official paper in Cell (see also the last two graphics above), “ Wireless Optofluidic Systems for Programmable In Vivo Pharmacology and Optogenetics”:
In vivo pharmacology and optogenetics hold tremendous promise for dissection of neural circuits, cellular signaling, and manipulating neurophysiological systems in awake, behaving animals. Existing neural interface technologies, such as metal cannulas connected to external drug supplies for pharmacological infusions and tethered fiber optics for optogenetics, are not ideal for minimally invasive, untethered studies on freely behaving animals. Here, we introduce wireless optofluidic neural probes that combine ultrathin, soft microfluidic drug delivery with cellular-scale inorganic light-emitting diode (μ-ILED) arrays. These probes are orders of magnitude smaller than cannulas and allow wireless, programmed spatiotemporal control of fluid delivery and photostimulation. We demonstrate these devices in freely moving animals to modify gene expression, deliver peptide ligands, and provide concurrent photostimulation with antagonist drug delivery to manipulate mesoaccumbens reward-related behavior. The minimally invasive operation of these probes forecasts utility in other organ systems and species, with potential for broad application in biomedical science, engineering, and medicine.
(emphasis added)
NIH provides some morelay-friendly examples of what this means:
In other experiments, they made mice walk in circles by injecting a drug that mimics morphine into the ventral tegmental area (VTA), a region that controls motivation and addiction. The researchers also tested the device’s combined light and drug delivery potential when they made mice that have light-sensitive VTA neurons stay on one side of a cage by commanding the implant to shine laser pulses on the cells. The mice lost the preference when the scientists directed the device to simultaneously inject a drug that blocks neuronal communication.
It doesn’t take much imagination to envision the potential human applications of such technology, much of it presumably of great benefit—why else would NIH fund it? It’s even easier to imagine the dystopian applications. I had read of earlier iterations of this kind of light-based neural control in MIT Technology Review, a variation on which I put in the hands of a mischievous spy in my story for last year’s TR sf anthology, Twelve Tomorrows 2014. But this version has a lot more immediate reality to it. As NIH notes, “[i]n the study, the scientists provide detailed instructions for manufacturing the implant”—hoping to promote crowdsourcing of further advances.
Don’t try this at home? Bioethics in a multi-jurisdictional world is hard to enforce, and it will be very interesting (and potentially scary) to see how this plays out.
[If this puts you in the mood for some biopunk extrapolation, you might check out Michael Blumlein’s amazing collection The Brains of Rats, now reissued in a nice edition from Valancourt.]