TWENTY
Brain Implants
“To do things right, first you need love, then technique.”
—Antoni Gaudí“Neither physiochemical concepts of the body machine nor
hopes for technological breakthroughs are of use in defining the
ideal man or the proper environment unless they take into
consideration the elements of the past that have become
progressively incarnated in human nature and in human
societies, and that determine the limitations and the
potentialities of human life. The past is not dead history; it is the
living material out of which man makes and builds the future.”
—René Dubos, So Human an Animal (1968)With my head titled heavenwards, I am mesmerized by the carved wooden
figures adorning the ceiling overhead. Standing in one of the oldest
academic buildings in the world, completely encircled by spruce wood—
the floors, walls and ceilings are lined with honey-stained planks—it is the
central carving above me that commands the room. The University of
Bologna is the Alma Mater Studiorum to every school in the Western
world, claiming 1088 as its founding year, but it is this four-hundred-year-
old anatomy theater that has drawn me to this central Italian mecca.
Intricately hand-tooled panels overhead exhibit fourteen representations
of the constellations and signs of the zodiac; a cursory study of the
symbols reveals Leo, Virgo, the Gemini, and all the others. But the fully