[thechat] The Fashionable Borg?

[Madhu Menon]

(from The Harrow Technology Report
http://www.TheHarrowGroup.com)

The Fashionable Borg?

Speaking of the "revolutionary," no one (at least not most of us) wants
to look like the half human, half machine Star Trek "Borg."
[Image - The Borg -
http://www.startrek.com/content/PHOTO/voy/246R2117.jpg]
But according to the Nov. 24 Wired News
(http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,48572,00.html), brought to our
attention by reader Kenneth LaCrosse, scientists at the University of
Texas are working towards being able to graft a microelectronic circuit
directly onto a neuron! (Similar work is also taking place at the Max
Planck Institute
(http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/10/technology/10NECO.html) and at other
research labs.)
They're far from ready to "plug us in" -- they have many steps yet to go
before significant "direct connects" are feasible. But this line of
research is fascinating, and a pretty good hint of things to come, as
described by Brian Korgel,
"We can now take a semiconductor and position it where we want it on
a cell. We can interface microelectronic materials with cells."
They did run into an interesting roadblock in this process; current
semiconductor manufacturing techniques don't have the precision to align
an electronic quantum dot with just the right location on a neuron. So
Korgel and Christine Schmidt simply changed the rules -- they co-opted
peptides, a biomolecule, to connect with exactly the right protein on
the surface of the neuron!
If this process turns out to be successful, what might it eventually
mean to us? "Bio-prosthetics," for one thing, where artificial limbs
might work as naturally as real ones. But derivatives of this primary
research could be even more interesting, according to Korgel:
"On a more basic level than the actual brain, you may be able to
make a substrate, put nerve cells on those, grow them and then put
semiconductor dots on different nerve cells -- and then use those
nerve cells as a computer."
Shuning Nie, a quantum dot chemist at Indiana University, sums the
potential of this work up nicely:
"These are fairly far-out ideas. But we are talking about
interfacing semiconductor nanostructures and biology. It's a big
field."
Which would change a whole lot of rules.



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Madhu Menon
User Experience Consultant
e-mail: webguru at vsnl.net