Throughout history, peg legs and hook hands have been plentiful, though such antique prosthetics were crudely made and heavy, usually from wood, metal, and leather. Wearing them, a person became part tree, part animal. We’ll never know if kin regarded them as a hybrid, or if the wearers identified at all with the qualities of the species they harnessed in lieu of human muscle and bone.
How far we’ve come! Today we live in a completely prosthetic culture brimming with contact lenses, false teeth, hearing aids, artificial knees and hips, compasses, cameras, and many digital and wireless brain attachments. We’ve made such prosthetic strides since toes of leather and wood that it’s even hard to agree on a fair playing
field, since the ultimate Olympic athlete may be competing against a cyborg now. But is that fair?
Already a Paralympic gold medalist, Oscar Pistorius spent four years battling the Court of Arbitration for Sport for a chance to race against able-bodied athletes in the regular Olympics. Ultimately, after extensive testing of his blades, the court decided in his favor, declaring that the blades wouldn’t give him an unfair advantage. Yes, the springy blades were lighter, but also limited; they couldn’t return more force than Oscar generated striking the ground. In contrast, the elastic dynamo of a human foot and ankle can always pound with extra force and rebound with more velocity. So, at the moment, until the technology changes, able-bodied sprinters supposedly have an advantage over blade-wearing ones.
But doesn’t every gifted athlete have some unique physiological advantage? For the swimmer Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympic athlete of all time, it’s an unusually long torso and arms for his height. The debate will heat up even more as higher-tech blades are invented. In an ironic twist, when Pistorius was outpaced by a sprinter in the Paralympics, he lodged a formal complaint that the winner had had an unfair advantage because he wore better-crafted blades.
Pistorius was the first double amputee ever to compete against able-bodied runners in the Olympics, and his story is a sort of double haunting, in which our past and future ghost into view. He is visibly a cyborg, and yet completely at home in his body. As a child, he fused mentally with his artificial legs, and his brain pictured blades as the natural extension of thighs, and his body as agile and fleet-footed.
Pistorius isn’t the only famous cyborg. Wartime often leads to advances in technology, and as a result of all the young amputees returning from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the field of prosthetics has flourished, with high-tech materials and more natural-looking robotics. DARPA runs a Revolutionizing Prosthetics program, whose goal is an array of thought-controlled limbs that move with
the precision and ease of natural limbs, ready for FDA approval in the next few years.
On the evening of November 6, when all the votes were counted for the 2012 election, Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq War veteran who had lost both of her legs on the battlefield in 2004, strode to the podium to make her acceptance speech as the newly elected Democratic congresswoman from Illinois. She wore state-of-the-art prosthetic legs complete with robotic, computer-controlled ankle joints and a computer-powered knee.
Using a cane, she moved smoothly and looked understandably elated, comfortable in motion, which is remarkable since Duckworth didn’t grow up learning to balance her pelvis and spine over prostheses while she walked. As an infant she learned to walk fearlessly, as babies instinctively do, around the age of thirteen months, when balance and strength are keen enough, and some baby fat has yielded to muscle.
Although walking ultimately becomes unconscious, it’s a skill that requires us to tumble into and out of balance all the time. It takes countless hours of practice and encouragement, and a great many falls to do it expertly. Babies are like tiny petulant stilt-walkers. To walk, you step forward with one foot, which tilts you off balance, then you catch yourself before you fall too far, quickly rebalance, and fall in the opposite direction, catch yourself, and start falling again as you make a so-called straight line across the room or street. Walking is really a series of recovered falls. In time we learn to do it expertly, without noticing that it’s an evolutionary circus act. Over time, a lovely pendulum swing develops, as the hips roll out of balance and back in again, over and over, without the walker paying it any mind. Its rhythm is naturally iambic (a short unstressed syllable followed by a long stressed one), which could be why so many poets, from Shakespeare to Wordsworth, wrote poems in iambs; maybe they composed while strolling. Fortunately, the pelvis and backbone are engineered to make the skill (strolling, not composing poetry) relatively easy.
However, relearning to walk as an adult means unlearning old balancing tricks and mastering new ones, based on the current shape of your body, while
fully aware
that you could fall and badly injure yourself. Also, injuries aren’t always symmetrical—Duckworth’s were complex (right leg missing at the hip, left leg below the knee). Blades like Pistorius’s wouldn’t have suited her lifestyle, in which she needed to feel equally comfortable on airplanes, behind a desk, at a podium, or climbing stairs. Her revolutionary ankle joints and legs rely on robotic software—microprocessors, accelerometers, gyroscopes, and torque angle sensors—to mimic the delicate teamwork of muscles and tendons in the ankle when someone walks.
The day of the cyborg has certainly arrived, with goggles for skiers and snowboarders offering a dashboard display of data, GPS, camera, speedometer, altimeter, and Bluetooth phone; plus voice control and gaze control for cyclists. Will it be safe to ski or bike with data dancing before your eyes, or while posting photos on Facebook? Probably not. But safer than looking down at a smartphone and back up at the slopes, while dizzily jockeying between the sensory and tech worlds. The virtual reality that
Star Trek
promised us is starting to become commonplace. We can don a headset that stimulates all five senses simultaneously, and walk along a street in ancient Rome or Egypt, so immersed in the look, smell, and feel of the place that it seems real.
I’ve yet to meet anyone sporting Google Glass, the voice-controlled miniature screen in a flexible frame that hovers piratically above one eye, projecting e-mail and maps onto your visual field. But, whether or not it catches on as techno-fashion, it’s already a triumph in operating rooms around the world. The first surgeon who wore it simply videotaped an operation to share with colleagues. Since then, surgeons have been actively consulting Glass during operations to view X-rays or medical data without turning away to look. The cyborg doctor has eyes in the back of his head, and four or more hands. At the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), Dr. Brent Ponce, wearing a Google Glass, began a shoulder replacement surgery while
the built-in camera showed the surgical field to Dr. Phani Dantuluri, a veteran surgeon watching on his computer monitor in Atlanta. As the doctors discussed the case, Dantuluri could reach into the surgical field that Ponce saw on his heads-up display: ghostly hands floated over the body, pinpointed an anatomical feature or demonstrated how to reposition an instrument, as he consulted in real time. Invented by a UAB neurosurgeon, Barton Guthrie, who was frustrated by the limits of teleconferencing, VIPAAR (Virtual Interactive Presence in Augmented Reality) offers a safety net in diverse situations: teaching surgeons, guiding a resident’s hands, piloting difficult procedures in regional hospitals anywhere in the world, and also assisting emergency operations at an Antarctic base or in space.
A lively pair of glasses, even with all the digital trimmings, is still only an accessory. At the end of the day, you remove it and become mortal again. We yearn to supersize and supervise our powers with no intermediary, but intimately, naturally, without fuss, as if such marvels were our birthright. The next small step, a world closer, will be thought-controlled contact lenses floating on the eyes like high-tech continents. Will they cling invisibly, or twinkle like the glass eyes of a doll? The final step, who knows when, will be the silk of silicon sliding along our neurons. Then, without disappearing, only virtually visible, our computer worlds will fully mesh with us. Will we feel haunted sometimes, or merely worry about affording the latest update?
It’s a strange paradox to imagine, yet highly possible, maybe even inevitable, but by delegating more physical and mental tasks to robots and computers, we might also weaken various skills and aptitudes—math, musculature, memory—while perfecting new ones. We may soon have to master multitasking spatially, as we cross midtown streets while scrolling through and answering e-mails hovering in the air, which we’ve conjured up on our iGlasses, just by batting our eyelashes. In time, brain and body would adapt.
We’ve always crafted new technologies to help us live better or longer, but in the past few decades that’s accelerated dramatically.
We’ve stepped up the pace of our romance with machines, wedding them to our bodies as never before, and saturating our lives with techno-marvels, from genetic tests to organ transplants, satellite communications to genetic engineering, brain scans to mood enhancers. They’ve amused and nettled our lives to such an extent that a new branch of anthropology has arisen to study the phenomenon.
Amber Case practices “cyborg anthropology,” a field in which scientists study how both humans and robots interact with objects, and how that changes the culture in which we live. For example, the way cell phones affect human relationships, and how we now interact techno-socially instead of socially. Old-fashioned social relationships, in which one gets together with friends, are regarded as “analog.”
“So, for instance,” Case explains, “we have these things in our pockets that cry, and we have to pick them up and soothe them back to sleep, and then we have to feed them every night by plugging them into the wall, right? And at no other time in history have we had these really strange nonhuman devices that we take care of as if they are real.”
Cyborgs may be growing plentiful, but even more of us are chimeras—DNA (and sometimes body parts) from two or more creatures lodged inside one body. The ease with which mythic humans and animals breed and swap bodies speaks to our prior intimacy with the rest of nature, acknowledging animals as part of our extended family. We’ve adopted the term “chimera” from the Greek monstrosity Homer sang of in the
Iliad
, a savage sky-beast said to be part lion, goat, and serpent, that blasted fire from her mouth and terrorized the land until a hero named Bellerophon chased her on his winged horse, Pegasus, and rose above her fiery blasts to kill her. It’s the sort of fiend that haunts many cultures, all claiming that some unholy union of different species—a lion, snake, and eagle, for instance—has produced a dragon, a sphinx, a griffin, a medusa. In Greek mythology we find satyrs, overly lustful woodland goat-men, and the perfumed and tuneful sirens, bird-women who lured
men to their doom. There are Chinese tales of families that descend from the marriage of a shape-shifting dragon and a human. Siberian shamans owe their magical power to the marriage of men and swans. Native American lore declares that the first people of the Earth were part animal. In fairy tales brides and grooms marry animals. Often the chimeras (mermaids, for instance) exist at the limits of the known world, where heroes and explorers go to prove their courage. Despite the countless children’s books filled with delightful thinking, talking, personality-ridden animals, the idea of a real-life part-human being trapped in the body of another animal seems diabolical to most people, so horrifying that it was the Greek gods’ favorite way of punishing humans.
As exotic as it sounds, we already have a great many natural chimeras among us, including all the people who secretly harbor Neanderthal and Denisovan genes. We absorb other people all the time. When we pass along a cold sore or flu, the virus carries some of our protein and releases it inside the other person, where the immune system stows it for future reference. HIV and other retroviruses are especially good at installing pieces of one person’s DNA inside another person’s chromosomes. By exchanging body fluids we even swap gene fragments with our partner, and become a chimera as our self starts including bits of their immune system. We don’t just get under a mate’s skin, we absorb him or her. As the immunologist Gerald N. Callahan explains, we’re probably swapping gene fragments with other people “a lot more often than we realize. Infection becomes communication, memorization, chimerization. Over the course of an intimate relationship, we collect a lot of pieces of someone else. Until one day what remains is truly and thoroughly a mosaic, a chimera—part man, part woman, part someone, part someone else.”
However the affair turns out, we’re invisibly changed for having known each other. This may not be a pleasant thought if the DNA belongs to an old flame you never want to see again as long as you live and can’t bear the thought of hauling around in your car, let
alone your cells. Best not to dwell on that. Think instead of Mom’s DNA, or a sweetheart’s, still alive inside you as a miniature portrait.
The human chimeras known as twins provide a glimpse of how confusing a world full of clones might be, but twins are too numerous to regard as oddities. At the end of her life, my mother needed regular bone marrow transplants, through which she had donor cells in her bloodstream. By that time, she was already a chimera, because moms retain cells from their fetuses. She would also have stored cells from my father, who stored her cells, too. But, to the best of my knowledge, he didn’t contain cells from pig valves, cat gut, or monkey glands—though the last might have been a temptation, since it was in high vogue when he was a young man.
In the pre-Viagra 1920s, men hoping to improve their virility flocked to the French surgeon Serge Voronoff, who grafted thin slices of monkey testicles onto their scrotums. Later he transplanted monkey ovaries into women, including, allegedly, the U.S. coloratura soprano Lily Pons, who was a frequent guest at his monkey farm on the Italian Riviera. Over five hundred such operations brought Voronoff fame and great wealth, until, in time, he was denounced as nothing more than a witch or magician. But people didn’t fret about hitching their testicles and ovaries to monkey glands.