“I saw a pale scholar, a follower of the occult sciences, bending over the being that he was putting together. I saw a disgusting phantom in human form, and then, after turning on some powerful engine, it showed signs of life, its movements were constrained and devoid of strength.
It was a terrifying sight; and the consequences of any man's attempts to deceive the perfect mechanism of the Creator will be extremely terrifying”. Mary Godwin (Shelley)
ON LAKE GENEVA
Once, almost 200 years ago, a whole constellation of creative personalities gathered on the shores of Lake Geneva, including the outstanding British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley with his future wife Mary Godwin and the great Lord Byron.
Mary Godwin (Shelley)
In Cologna, Shelley rented a small house on the beach, and Byron rented a luxury villa. London bohemia spent time in endless creative debates.
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Once, having gathered by the evening fireplace in Byron's villa, writers began to discuss the experiments of the English physician, naturalist, inventor and poet Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802).
This prominent figure in the British Enlightenment was one of the founders of the Lunar Society, which included renowned scientists, industrialists and politicians. There were many legends about this “club of the elite”. According to one of them, Darwin, together with his famous American friend Benjamin Franklin, was engaged in the "galvanization of living and dead tissue" according to the method of Luigi Galvani.
This Italian physician, anatomist, physiologist and physicist was one of the first to experiment with the effects of static electricity. One day, his assistant accidentally touched a frog's paw with a scalpel that had accumulated an electrical discharge. The foot jerked convulsively, and a new field of research on "living electricity" opened up before Galvani.
Darwin and Franklin concluded that muscles are a kind of accumulators, which are controlled by the central nervous system through electrical signals. For a long time there were persistent rumors that, as a result of secret experiments, the leaders of the Lunar Society even managed to revive dead organs and tissues.
The gloomy atmosphere of a rainy evening prompted Byron to organize a "supernatural" story contest among those present. It is not known what the literary grandees offered the next evening, but Mary Godwin had (as she later claimed - in a nightmare) the idea of "Frankenstein".
Shelley enthusiastically supported his wife's creative impulse, and in 1818 the novel "Frankenstein, or Modern Prometheus" was published. It tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, who comprehends the secret of revival. Having "sewed" a monster from pieces of dead flesh and revived it, the scientist with horror renounced his creation, which began to haunt those around him.
The work of Mary Shelley is interesting and for the first time openly presented to the world the ideas of transplantation and revitalization of a dead organism.
FRANKENSTEIN XXI CENTURY
It is not known whether Sergio Canavero has read Mary Shelley's novel, but the laurels of Victor Frankenstein clearly haunt him. The fact is that the Italian surgeon dreams of performing the world's first human head transplant operation.
He even found a client for such a "dizzying operation." The Russian 30-year-old software engineer Valery Spiridonov, who is seriously ill with an incurable form of spinal atrophy, known as Werdnig-Hoffmann disease, is ready to risk his head and life.
Recently, Canavero, in the presence of Spiridonov, boldly announced at an international conference of neurosurgeons and orthopedic surgeons in Annapolis, Maryland, USA that he was ready to perform a unique operation in two, maximum three years.
However, the vast majority of doctors are extremely skeptical about the ambitious plans of the Italian surgeon, since he never demonstrated proven technologies for fastening the patient's head and donor's torso.
It is clear that the presence of a Russian engineer from Vladimir at a medical forum in the United States was far from accidental. When Spiridonov met Canavero on the Internet, they discussed the prospects of the operation for a long time and finally came to the conclusion that the main task would be to find a source of very considerable funding (at least $ 11 million).
Naturally, the most realistic option would be to turn to American sponsors who donate billions annually to charitable projects.
Spiridonov, on the other hand, confidently declared to leading transplant specialists that he was ready to undertake a risky procedure in order to "give himself a chance to live in a healthy body."
According to Valery, there were “experiments that led to relatively successful body transplants, but it was not possible to transmit any nervous activity to organs, to limbs, and in that form the operation did not make sense. And Canavero overcame this problem. He has technologies that will allow neurons to be spliced, it has been worked out, and we hope that it will eventually lead to success."
CYBORGONIZATION?
From the first serious difficulties of cybernetics at the end of the 20th century, a new approach was born - “cyborgonization”. It is based on the idea of a complete copying of the structure of the human brain onto some, as yet fantastic, information carrier. Then we would have the opportunity not only to study in detail the functioning of this greatest mystery of the Universe, but also to try to create a truly "thinking" cyber organism.
However, there are many research options here: from the introduction of individual visual and auditory blocks to the complete replacement of a damaged or senile body. The only pity is that at the present time cyber designers do not have suitable electronic media.
Cyborg from the movie "Robot Police"
Indeed, the memory of the most powerful modern computers is too small for any complete and detailed representation of the structure of the brain, and ultra-fast processors are too slow. Today, with titanic efforts, only the structure of individual tissues of living organisms can be copied.
For example, just modeling the activity of the "auditory" area of the cerebral cortex takes several days of calculations on the most modern supercomputer.
Nevertheless, many scientists recognize cyborgonization as a rather promising business, since the necessary computing power is a matter of the very near future. In addition, this method would allow the creation and research of artificial intelligence that can be easily combined with the human brain.
CYBORGES OR SIGOMAS?
The most striking popularization of the term "cyborg" is associated with the famous films by J. Cameron "The Terminator", as well as series of works about the robot policeman - Robocop and cyborgs - "universal soldiers".
An alternative to cyborgs in the future may be transgenes - genetically modified people or an artificial person - whitefish. In the works of science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, the so-called lobsters with an outer shell appear as alternative cyborgs, and wars go on between the "classic" mechanical cyborgs, transgenes and sigomas.
Martin Kaidin's fascinating science fiction novel "Cyborg" tells the story of a man whose damaged organs are gradually replaced by mechanical devices. Subsequently, based on Kaidin's novel, the television series "The Six Millionth Man" was staged, which made the terms "cyborg", "cybernetic organism" and "cybernetic man" popular among readers and viewers.
The baton of "cyborgonization" of public opinion was continued by Isaac Asimov's story "The Bicentennial Man". In it, from a scientific point of view, the concepts of the possible development of cybernetics of the human body are investigated.
The central character is a robot that modifies itself with biological components. His research leads to medical breakthroughs in the field of artificial organs and prostheses. By the end of the story, there are no significant differences between the robot and human body.
The increasing dependence of a person on mechanisms, as well as the replacement of organs with prostheses and implants, create conditions for the gradual transformation of a person into a cyborg. It can be noted that many household products are, in fact, a projection of a person: clothes are a projection of the skin, a hammer is a fist, a saucepan is an organ projection of the stomach.
In technology, a person, as it were, reflects many elements of his external and internal appearance, therefore, the joint evolution of man and technology into a cyborg can be considered an objective process of the future.
How to combine the ideas of human brain transplantation and cyborgonization? The answer has long been invented by science fiction writers. It is only necessary to "connect" the patient's head not to the donor body, which anyway looks like a super-complicated operation, but to the cybernetic system, just as it is shown in the movie "Robocop".
The alliance of transplant surgeons and neurocyberneticians promises an amazing breakthrough in medicine and cybernetics.
Oleg ARSENOV