necessary, since the gametes would share similarly purified genes. Babies
will be born with “normal” chromosomes, free from the threat of auto-
immune disease, food sensitivities, mental illness, cancer, and heart
disease. With illness whipped, attention will turn to enhanced and
augmented physical, mental, and social realities. And I believe that that
will still necessitate the use of implants—brain-machine interfaces.
This is why I would place my one-hundred-year wager on bioelectric
implant companies.
While today’s FDA-approved brain implants merely generate an
electrical field within a specifically identified location, BMIs will record
and stimulate individual neurons. As Edward Evarts pioneered the ability
to perform “single unit testing” in lab animals, scientists today are
trailblazing the path of recording single units in humans, with the goal of
transmitting neurons’ signals to a machine.
At present, there are few BMIs. The cochlear implant (with its external
sensing device that looks like a beefy hearing aid, and an internal wire
deep in the cochlear part of the inner ear) is a BMI, functioning as a
receiving device and communicating the sound wave information as
electronic signals to the cochlear portion of the auditory nerve. The
artificial eye (in early development), will conceptually function like the
cochlear implant, with an artificial sensing device that electronically
interfaces with the nerves that process the sensory information.
As opposed to the cochlear implant and retinal implants, where there is
replacement of a sensory organ, the (even) more advanced implants of the
future will be “neural interface” devices, where electronic communication
is both afferent (sensory) and efferent (outgoing signals). Efferent
communications will one day come from micro-specific parts of the brain,
and neural interface technology will provide bi-directional information
flow.
When you consider that the spinal cord is a conduit of microscopic
transmission lines with one billion neurons,^3 is it any wonder that spinal
cord injuries have been impossible to repair? As a resident on call for the
hand service, I faced the daunting challenge of reconnecting the structures
of the wrist following suicide attempts where the desperate patient had
slashed her wrist with a knife, severing all nine tendons, two arteries, and
the median nerve. This so-called “spaghetti wrist” is challenging because
it is difficult to match the tendons that connect the finger muscles (that are