Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts (20 page)

In 2011, Edward Boyden, a neuroscientist at MIT, used the tools of optogenetics to wirelessly direct mouse movements. Boyden’s team began with mice that had been modified to express opsins in certain neurons in the motor cortex; when exposed to light, these motor neurons would begin to fire. Then they constructed a mouse helmet—a headpiece that contained a radio antenna and an array of light-emitting diodes—and mounted it on one of their specially engineered mice. The scientists then sat back and used their wireless transmitter to flick the helmet’s lights on and off. When they turned all the lights on, a mouse that had been sitting calmly in its cage immediately began running around. (“It’s sort of turning up the volume knob of movement,” Boyden reports.) They also discovered that when they illuminated just one side of the helmet, a mouse would start spinning in that direction. (Unlike other optogenetics methods, the helmet is entirely noninvasive; the lights can activate neurons from the outside of the skull.)

Optogenetics gives us another way to bend animals to our will, but Boyden has no interest in using his wireless helmets to create a remote-controlled rodent army. To Boyden, the headset is an important breakthrough because it will expand the kinds of experiments that optogenetics researchers can do and pave the way for novel therapeutic devices. Many scientists in the field imagine implanting optical “prosthetics” in the human brain to treat neurological disorders with light. They dream of being able to selectively activate or deactivate neurons involved in Parkinson’s, epilepsy, sleep disorders, addiction, and more. Setting animal brains ablaze is the first step toward that goal.

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Even as scientists come up with fancy new methods for commandeering animal brains, Greg Gage and Tim Marzullo, a pair of former neuroscience postdocs, are taking these techniques and making them available to anyone with an Internet connection and a hundred dollars to spare. As graduate students at the University of Michigan, the friends volunteered at local public schools, teaching students about human and animal brains. They were frustrated by the high barrier of entry to neuroscience, finding it odd that while anyone can pick up a telescope and look at the Moon, only advanced college students get the opportunity to see a neuron fire.

In 2009, Gage and Marzullo established Backyard Brains, a company that sells low-cost kits that will turn any interested amateur into a neuroscientist, if only for a day or two. (The company’s motto, emblazoned on its custom-made circuit boards, is “Neuroscience for Everyone!”) Their first product was a little contraption known as the SpikerBox. On sale for $99.98, the device lets customers observe neural firing in a cockroach in real time. (A set of three roaches is $12 extra.) The procedure is simple: Just insert two needlelike electrodes into a cockroach’s leg, and the SpikerBox will do the rest, amplifying the electrical activity of the insect’s neurons and transmitting it to an attached computer or smartphone as that characteristic visual pattern of peaks and valleys. The SpikerBox put Backyard Brains on the map, and instructors in thirty-five high schools and a hundred universities have used the kits with their students.
*

For their second product, Gage and Marzullo decided to push the boundaries even further, to venture beyond brain observation and into brain control. Taking inspiration from the world of cyborg animals, they created a kit that provides their customers with all the tools they need to take over the nervous system of a living cockroach. In principle, the Backyard Brains RoboRoach is nearly indistinguishable from the beetles Maharbiz is making in a university lab—and that is precisely what is so remarkable about it. It means we can all experiment with bionic bugs in our own homes. Or, as it happens, in a crowded neighborhood coffee shop, which is precisely the plan when I meet Gage and Marzullo for breakfast in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

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The bespectacled pair greet me at a popular local café, and we find ourselves some seats on the outdoor patio. Marzullo pulls out a plastic box of cockroaches and plops it down on our table. If you’re new to the hobby of animal mind manipulation, the cockroach is an excellent place to start. Because a roach relies on its long, fluid-filled antennae for a host of sensory and navigational functions, its nervous system is stunningly easy to hack; all a wannabe roach-master has to do is thread a wire inside each antenna. (“It’s like
designed
to be a cyborg,” Marzullo says.)

Marzullo has spent the morning prepping two roaches for their remote-controlled destiny. Several hours ago, he dropped the cockroaches into a miniature cooler of ice water—the preferred method, apparently, for anesthetizing insects. Then he pulled the roaches out of the cooler, their bodies motionless, their sensations dulled. (“We actually don’t know if insects feel pain,” Marzullo and Gage write on the Backyard Brains website, “but we do make the assumption that they do, which is why we anesthetize them in the first place.”) With a pair of everyday household scissors, Marzullo snipped the ends off each antenna. Then he slipped a thin silver wire inside. Thereafter, any electrical signals sent down the wires would be transferred directly to the roach’s nervous system.

Steering the roach simply requires taking advantage of a natural cockroach instinct: When one of the cockroach’s antennae detects an obstacle, the bug turns in the other direction. Zap the right antenna and the insect, convinced it’s about to bump into a wall on the right side of its body, will turn to the left. And vice versa. (The SUNY researchers had tapped into the same instinct in training their cyborg rats to turn away from perceived obstacles. But unlike the robo-rats, the cyborg cockroaches needed no special training or reinforcement to follow directional commands.)

Marzullo opens his bug box and removes one of the roaches. The wires run out of its antennae and into a small black box that Marzullo has glued onto its head. Marzullo plugs this “connector” into the cockroach backpack, a red-and-green assemblage of circuit boards. The electronics are slightly modified versions of circuit boards that come from a widely available toy: a plastic, remote-controlled inchworm called the HexBug that retails for twelve dollars at Toys“R”Us. When these circuit boards are linked to the head-mounted connector, Marzullo and Gage can use the remote control that comes with the toy to deliver pulses of electricity to the roach.

As Marzullo fiddles with the cockroach, he notices a family of three sitting at the table next to us. They’re all staring.

“What is it?” the father asks.

“The world’s first commercially available cyborg,” Marzullo says. “You want to do it, young lady?” he asks, handing the remote to the man’s ten-year-old daughter. He shows the girl which buttons to press.

We all head out to the sidewalk. The bug goes down. The little girl starts hitting buttons on the remote, steering the roach all around the sidewalk, while her father advises: “Don’t let it go into the street … Turn him into the shade.” The girl’s power to control the roach is, admittedly, crude. She can’t make the insect start or stop moving, and there’s no way to force it to simply move forward in a straight line. All she can do is let the roach do its roach thing, taking off in whatever direction its little invertebrate heart desires, and then overlay her own “left” or “right” commands, forcing the bug to turn and start moving in a different direction.

But even that small power is impressive, and a crowd forms. People watch and smile, and Gage and Marzullo laugh and joke with the assembled audience. “There you go,” Marzullo says, “neuroscience for the people.”

“It looks so real!” a passing woman exclaims.

“It
is
real,” Gage says. “We’re selling these for ninety-nine bucks.” The kit comes with all that customers need to make the cyborgs themselves—the circuit boards, the controller, the remote, and detailed instructions for performing the insect surgery.

Then it’s my turn. I return to our table and pick up the second roach, which Marzullo has kindly prepared for me. Its sticky legs tickle my palm as I carry it out to the sidewalk. I place it down gingerly, and it begins to scuttle off. I fumble with the remote before finding the “L” button. I hit it, and the roach abruptly spins to the left. The effect is less dramatic after that, but convincing.

“It’s such a compelling demonstration,” Marzullo says. “We go to classrooms all the time and even the most jaded, problem kid in the room is going to pay attention to this. It doesn’t take very much time to break down their veneer when we bring out … remote-controlled bugs.”

Nevertheless, the RoboRoach has not been nearly as brisk a seller as Gage and Marzullo had hoped; as of June 2012, they’d squeaked out fifty-one sales. Perhaps that’s because it takes a special kind of customer to want to hijack another creature’s mind. “It’s kind of edgy,” Marzullo says. “It taps into human fears of puppet masters, that we are somehow evil scientists that don’t respect the natural order of things.” Gage and Marzullo have heard the same objections as other cyborg-animal scientists—that what they’re doing to animals is inhumane, disgusting, and just plain wrong. They say they inspire more vitriol than scientists like Maharbiz, who are doing their research in official university laboratories. “We’re doing all this stuff on the fringe,” Marzullo says. “We’re not affiliated with any university, and we go out in public, and we’re pretty flamboyant about what we do.”
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Gage and Marzullo attract controversy for the same reason that Alan Blake did as he prepared to bring GloFish to market—because they are taking biotechnology out of the lab and putting it into the hands of the public. And just like Blake, they are criticized for meddling with animal bodies for “trivial” purposes. Most people, Marzullo explains, have accepted the use of animals for scientific research, defense, or food. “But if you exploit animals for education,” he says, “people aren’t cool with that.” (“From my perspective,” he adds, “that’s the best use of animals. It’s an investment in the future.”)
^†

Is educating students about the nervous system—and potentially encouraging a new generation of neuroscientists—a less-justifiable use of animals than hunting out mines or earthquake survivors? It’s time to start thinking through these issues, because now that the tools of brain control have been liberated from the lab, there’s no telling how they’ll be used.

Indeed, there is a growing community of “biohackers,” science enthusiasts who are experimenting with genes, brains, and bodies outside the confines of traditional laboratories, working on shoestring budgets in their garages and attics, or joining the community labs that are springing up around the country. Some of these resourceful do-it-yourselfers are even building their own versions of high-tech laboratory equipment that normally costs thousands of dollars.

Backyard Brains is tapping into this movement, giving amateurs access to some of science’s most sophisticated tools and techniques. (As it happens, their most recent product is a kit that allows customers to play around in the world of optogenetics, using blue light to make the muscles of transgenic fruit flies twitch.) And their customers are surprising them, in the best possible way, by coming up with ideas and discoveries of their own. A class of New York high school students working with the RoboRoach pinpointed a nerve that they could stimulate to make the insect walk straight ahead. Another customer—a Microsoft programmer—bought an EEG cap and tried to use his own brain waves to steer the roach. (It didn’t work, but he gets points for creativity.)

If these unprompted experiments are any indication, there are plenty of amateurs with an appetite for independent investigation and their own ideas for reengineering animals. Future generations are going to grow up tinkering not with computers, but with life itself. We already have the annual International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, in which high school and college students use standard genetic parts—easily available bits of DNA—to create cells with novel properties. In past years, teams have created bacteria that can clean heavy metal from polluted water, glow in a rainbow of colors, or give off the pleasant odor of banana or mint. We may one day have a similar competition that asks youngsters to engineer new kinds of animal-machine hybrids. Perhaps DARPA will even invite enthusiastic amateurs to respond to its scientific calls or look to the public for solutions to its most pressing problems.

The latest, greatest cyborg critters may come not from state-of-the-art labs, but the minds of curious kids and individual hobbyists. Though scientists will continue to build their cyborg animals, Maharbiz says he fully expects that “kids will be able to hack these things, like they wrote code in the Commodore 64 days.” We are heading toward a world in which anyone with a little time, money, and imagination can commandeer an animal’s brain. That’s as good a reason as any to start thinking about where we’d draw our ethical lines. The animal cyborgs are here, and we’ll each have to decide whether we want a turn at the controls.

8. Beauty in the Beasts

Over the last few decades, animals have gained status in the Western world. We increasingly treat other species as worthy of moral consideration, and livestock, pets, and research animals enjoy far more protections than they once did. For instance, there is a movement under way to grant great apes legal (or even human) rights, and many governments have severely curtailed research on primates. In December 2011, the National Institutes of Health announced that it was indefinitely suspending the funding of new research on chimpanzees, pending further review, and a bill currently before Congress would outlaw invasive research on all great apes. A number of other nations—including the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Sweden—have similar laws in place, and in 2010, the EU passed a ban on most research on great apes, to take effect in 2013.

We’re elevating the standing of pets, too. Some American cities have passed laws that say humans aren’t owners of their animal companions—instead, they are guardians of them. Seventy percent of dog owners in the United States now consider their animals to be legitimate members of the family, and Americans spend $48 billion a year on their pets.