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In August 1998, Professor Kevin Warwick inadvertently ushered in an era of “biohacking” when he had a small cylindrical chip implanted in his arm.
The length of a 2 cent coin, he could open doors and turn on lights with a casual swing as he walked around the University of Reading’s cybernetics department.
Today he is called “Captain Cyborg” and is considered the first “biohacker” – someone who uses technology to make changes in the body to make life easier.
The 69-year-old, now the vice-chancellor at Coventry University, looks back on the experiment from a quarter of a century ago as “really cool” and “fun”.
“Nobody had done anything like that at the time,” he told MailOnline. ‘That pushed the technology forward at the time.
Pictured here in 1998, cybernetics professor Kevin Warwick has a silicon chip implanted in his arm, said to be the world’s first such medical experiment at the time
The small cylindrical implant, about the same length as a 2 p.m. coin, was implanted by his family doctor
“Obviously people had implants for pacemakers and things like that, but to somehow do it as an improvement was another thing.
“I could be watched moving around the building — when I went to the lab the door opened, when I came down the corridor the lights came on,” he said.
For the procedure, his GP gave him a local anesthetic and used a ‘corkscrew’ device to make a small hole – and he ‘just stitched it in place’.
The chip was an RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) device, the type used today in passports and contactless cards like Oyster.
A unique identification signal sent out by the chip allowed a computer to track Professor Warwick as he walked through the ward, and an automated voice even welcomed him when he arrived.
The chip was only in Professor Warwick’s arm for a few weeks before it was removed, just to demonstrate that the concept worked.
That was a good thing, he said, because the small parts were encased in brittle glass that could easily have shattered.
At the time, the publicized event raised ethical questions such as whether you should put chips in prisoners or even children to track their whereabouts, which predates an episode of Black Mirror by 20 years.
“Most importantly, it opened up all sorts of other possibilities and philosophically opened people’s minds what the possibilities could be,” he said.
The tiny chip, held here between a robot’s fingers, was encased in ‘brittle’ glass that could have easily broken while it was in its arm
In 1998, Professor Warwick had a chip implanted in his arm that allowed him to open doors and turn on lights with a wave of his arm. He is pictured here during his time in the Cybernetics Department at the University of Reading
In March 2002, he took his cyborg aspirations a step further with his second implant: a square silicon sensor called “BrainGate,” about 0.1 inch wide.
Implanted in the nerves of his wrist for three months, it connected his nervous system to a computer and allowed him to control a robotic hand using his thoughts over the Internet.
That same year, his wife Irena had a similar chip implanted in her arm that allowed the couple to communicate in incredible ways.
“Because we were connected electronically, nervous system to nervous system, my brain got a pulse when she closed her hand,” he said.
“It was a very basic form of telegraphic communication.”
It was also a precursor of Elon Musk’s Neuralink company, which aims to implant chips into people’s brains that process signals sent to a computer or a phone.
Like Neuralink, Professor Warwick was interested in curing neurological disorders that have stripped away the functional connections between the brain and limbs, allowing paralyzed people to walk again.
“It pushed the boundaries of what had been done with the human nervous system – and we weren’t experts in that regard,” Professor Warwick said.
“Part of what I was doing was looking at how this could be used in the medical field in some way.”
Four years later, he got his second implant: a square silicon sensor about 0.1 inch wide (pictured)
Professor Warwick implanted the BrainGate sensor in his arm at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, 2002. This sensor was in him for longer (three months) before being removed
Today, a whole community of so-called “biohackers” who make improvements to their bodies exists online and often meet at conventions to admire each other’s implants.
An astonishing example is Neil Harbisson of Spain who has an implanted antenna above his face that allows him to “hear” colors as different musical frequencies.
Meanwhile, a US YouTuber removed the RFID chip from her Tesla car key and had it implanted in her arm to make unlocking the vehicle faster.
But many more patients perform implant surgeries without proper medical attention, leading to complications such as nerve damage.
As the original biohacker, does he feel partly responsible for spawning such a subculture?
“It worries me when I hear what people are doing, they’re taking an awful lot of risks because they’re not too concerned about the possibilities of infection,” he said.
“But I don’t know if I feel responsible—I did it as a science experiment.”
Professor Warwick with his wife Irena, who wears a necklace connected to his nervous system
The second implant connected his nervous system to a computer and allowed him to control a robotic hand with his thoughts over the internet
Now the academic is rid of all implants and has no intention of doing any more, although he is interested in ‘brain-to-brain communication’.
In the future, pulses in the brain as if “touched” could act as a form of communication between two people, just as the experiments with his wife showed.
While Professor Warwick isn’t sure exactly what the technology might look like, he can vouch for what these brain pulses feel like – and he thinks they could somehow replace the cell phone.
“If you touch your finger, it’s not painful, but your brain understands that your finger is being touched,” he said.
“It was kind of like – like something is touching you, but it wasn’t really touching, it was just an electrical pulse in my nervous system, so my brain learned to recognize that.”
‘If you look at what a brain cell does, it’s just communicating, sending signals from one place to another.
“Kids like forms of communication these days, so I really believe that if our brains are allowed to communicate directly, they will go for it.”