THIS WAS THE FUTURE

New Scientist | 10 February, 2001

IN THE Woody Allen comedy Sleeper, a machine called an orgasmatron delivers an orgasm at the push of a button – without the hassle of sex. Now life is imitating art as scientists in the US have patented an implant that achieves the same effect for women whose lives have been blighted by an inability to achieve orgasms naturally.

Orgasmic dysfunction is not uncommon among women, says Julia Cole, a psychosexual therapist and consultant with Relate, the relationship counselling service. And a number of issues can cause it, says Jim Pfaus, who studies the neurobiology of sexual behaviour at Concordia University in Montreal. “Some women confuse what’s called sympathetic arousal, like increased heart rate, clammy hands, nerves and so on, with fear,” he explains. “That makes them want to get out of the situation.” Psychotherapy is a common treatment for the condition, although if anxiety is a factor, patients may also be prescribed valium. “But valium can actually delay orgasm,” says Pfaus.

Stuart Meloy, a surgeon at Piedmont Anesthesia and Pain Consultants in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, got the idea for an orgasm-producing device while performing a routine pain-relief operation on a woman’s spine. “We implant electrodes into the spine and use electrical pulses to modify the pain signals passing along the nerves,” he says. The patient remains conscious during the operation to help the surgeon find the best position for the electrodes. Meloy’s breakthrough came one day when he failed to hit the right spot. “I was placing the electrodes and suddenly the woman started exclaiming emphatically,” he says. “I asked her what was up and she said, `You’re going to have to teach my husband to do that’.”

Meloy expects clinical trials to begin later this year with Medtronic, a company based in Minneapolis. Meloy says the stimulating wires could connect to a signal generator smaller than a packet of cigarettes implanted under the skin of one of the patient’s buttocks. “Then you’d have a hand-held remote control to trigger it,” he says. “But it’s as invasive as a pacemaker, so this is only for extreme cases,” he says.

Meloy believes the device could help couples overcome problems caused by orgasmic dysfunction. “If you’ve got a couple who’ve been together for a while and it’s just not happening any more, maybe they’ll get through it a bit easier with this,” he says.

He’s quick to add that the device will be programmed to limit its use. “But whether it’s once a day, four times a week – who am I to say?”

But would women subject themselves to such invasive surgery? “If young women of 15 or so are having painful operations to enlarge their breasts when they don’t have to, are you kidding? Of course it’ll be used,” says Pfaus. Cole agrees that some women would try it if they felt the problem was severe enough. “I feel about this the way I feel about Viagra,” says Cole. “It may help some people, but they should also address the underlying reasons for the problem.”

Meloy has yet to test the device on men, but says there’s no reason it shouldn’t work in the same way.

Sorry to repeat myself but the man is on the money

From Greg Egan’s ‘Permutation City’:
(Simulated love scene between two scanned human copies)

Peer seemed to be making love with Kate, but he had his doubts. He lay on the soft dry grass of a boundless meadow, in mild sunshine. Kate’s hair was longer than usual, tickling his skin wherever she kissed him, brushing him with an erotic precision which seemed unlikely to be left to chance. Insect chirps and birdsong were heard. Peer could recall David Hawthorne screwing a long-suffering lover in a field, once. They’d been driving back to London from her father’s funeral in Yorkshire; it seemed like a good idea at the time. This was different. No twigs, no stones, no animal shit. No damp earth, no grass stains, no itching.

…

She lifted herself till they were almost apart. He closed his eyes and violated the geometry, licking the sweat from between her shoulder blades without moving a muscle. She responded by sticking her tongue in both of his ears simultaneously. He laughed and opened his eyes. The cloud above had darkened. Kate lowered herself onto him again, trembling slightly.
She said “Don’t you find it ironic?”
“What?”
“Transhumans taking pleasure by stimulating copies of the neural pathways which used to be responsible for the continuation of the species. Out of all the possibilities, we cling to that
Peer said, “No I don’t find it ironic. I had my irony glands removed. It was either that or castration.”

A Sex Chip? Targeting the Brain’s Pleasure Center with Electrodes

Scientific American | May, 2009

A fundamental goal of neuroscience has always been to deduce the brain systems that underlie such basic drives as hunger, thirst and sex. In 1956 the well-known physiologist James Olds wrote an article for Scientific American, called “Pleasure Centers in the Brain,” that described how a rat kept without food for a day was lured down a platform by a tasty meal. En route to dinner, it received a pleasurable electric shock. The rat never showed up for mealtime, instead choosing to delight in the arousal. With the optimism characteristic of that era, Olds concluded that stimulation experiments would lead to an understanding of neural functioning that would allow “one drug that will raise or lower thresholds in the hunger system, another for the sex-drive system, and so forth.”

Fifty years later the promise of Olds’s vision has yet to fully materialize. Better drugs are needed to suppress appetite and spark sexual desire. But fascination has grown in recent years with taking Olds’s more direct route of stimulating the central nervous system.

So far no one has created anything like the Orgasmatron, first seen in Woody Allen’s 1973 comedy Sleeper. Undaunted, one clinician—who has trademarked the name Orgasmatron—ran a small, FDA-reviewed pilot trial to test the possibility of applying electric current to the spine to reverse sexual dysfunction. Stuart Meloy, a North Carolina physician who specializes in implanting spinal electrodes to alleviate pain, found by chance that a slightly off-kilter placement in the lower spine caused one woman to exclaim: “You’re going to have to teach my husband to do that.”

In 2006 Meloy reported that 10 of 11 women who stopped having or never had orgasms experienced sexual arousal with the temporary implant and, of that group, four had their ability to experience orgasm restored. Meloy is seeking a medical device manufacturer to bring the costs down to $12,000 for a permanent implant, about the charge for breast enlargement.

Neural electrodes may eventually move up the spinal cord to what is often characterized as the body’s primary erogenous zone. Deep-brain stimulation, the placing of electrodes at strategic spots far underneath the skull, now treats a variety of ailments, including Parkinson’s disease and dystonia (uncontrollable twisting of a body part caused by involuntary muscle contractions). An occasional side effect is spontaneous sexual stimulation.

Tipu Aziz, a neurosurgeon at the University of Oxford, speculates that better knowledge of the brain’s pleasure centers—combined with improved surgical procedures and control of electrical pulses—may make a sex chip in the brain a reality. “Lack of sexual pleasure is a huge loss in one’s life, and if one could restore that, that would enhance someone’s quality of life enormously,” Aziz remarks.

Some neuroscientists are not so sure. Morten L. Kringelbach, a researcher at Oxford who sometimes collaborates with Aziz and wrote the book The Pleasure Center (Oxford University Press, 2008), cautions that hedonic experience may consist of an impulse corresponding to “wanting” and another that represents “liking.” To succeed as a therapy, a sex chip would have to address the challenge of switching on neural circuits that activate both impulses. In a 2008 paper in Psycho­phar­ma­col­ogy with University of Michigan at Ann Arbor psychologist Kent Berridge, Kringelbach illustrated the distinction between the two by citing an infamous case from the 1960s, in which psychiatrist Robert Heath placed “pleasure electrodes” in the brain of a gay man code-named B-19, in part, as an attempt to “cure” his homosexuality.

The patient pressed a button compulsively to turn on an electrode that induced a desire for sex, but whether he actually enjoyed the sensation was unclear. The stimulation alone did not induce orgasm, and B-19 never expressed any real contentment while hitting the button. Kringelbach warns against similar misuses of contemporary deep-brain stimulation. “It’s important that we not get carried away by this technology,” he says. “It’s important that we not end up in another era of psychosurgeries,” referring to the mid-20th century popularity of lobotomies to treat psychiatric disorders.

In the end, a sex chip may serve as a prop for moviemakers, but turning on the current may never become a truly practical means of adding the buzz back in your love life.

Scientific American | May, 2009

By Thomas E. Mallouk and Ayusman Sen

Imagine that we could make cars, aircraft and submarines as small as bacteria or molecules. Microscopic robotic surgeons, injected in the body, could locate and neutralize the causes of disease—for example, the plaque inside arteries or the protein deposits that may cause Alzheimer’s disease. And nanomachines—robots having features and components at the nanometer scale—could penetrate the steel beams of bridges or the wings of airplanes, fixing invisible cracks before they propagate and cause catastrophic failures.

In recent years chemists have created an array of remarkable molecular-scale structures that could become parts of minute machines. James Tour and his co-workers at Rice University, for instance, have synthesized a molecular-scale car that features as wheels four buckyballs (carbon molecules shaped like soccer balls), 5,000 times as small as a human cell.

But look under the hood of the nanocar, and you will not find an engine. Tour’s nanocars so far move only insofar as they are jostled by random collisions with the molecules around them, a process known as Brownian motion. This is the biggest current problem with molecular machines: we know how to build them, but we still do not know how to power them.

At the scales of living cells or smaller, that task poses some unique challenges. Air and water feel as thick as molasses, and Brownian motion militates against forcing molecules to move in precise ways. In such conditions, nanoscale versions of motors such as those that power cars or hair dryers—assuming that we knew how to build them that small—could never even start.

Nature, in contrast, provides many examples of nanomotors. To see the things they can do, one need only look at a living cell. The cell uses nanoengines to change its shape, push apart its chromosomes as it divides, construct proteins, engulf nutrients, shuttle chemicals around, and so on. All these motors, as well as those that power muscle contractions and the corkscrew motion of bacterial flagella, are based on the same principle: they convert chemical energy—usually stored as adenosine triphosphate, or ATP—into mechanical energy. And all exploit catalysts, compounds able to facilitate chemical reactions such as the breakdown of ATP. Researchers are now making exciting progress toward building arti­ficial nanomotors by applying similar principles.

In 2004 we were part of a team at Pennsylvania State University that developed simple nanomotors that catalytically convert the energy stored in fuel molecules into motion. We took inspiration from a considerably larger catalytic motor reported in 2002 by Rustem Ismagilov and George Whitesides, both at Harvard University. The Harvard team had found that centimeter-scale “boats” with catalytic platinum strips on their stern would spontaneously move on the surface of a tank of water and hydrogen peroxide ( H₂O₂). The platinum promoted the breakup of H₂O₂ into oxygen and water, and bubbles of oxygen formed that seemed to push the boats ahead by recoil, the way the exhaust coming out the back of a rocket gives it forward thrust.

…

Scientists (and science-fiction writers) have contemplated nanomachines at least since 1959, when physicist Richard Feynman considered the limits of scale for machines and information storage systems in a forward-looking lecture entitled “Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” He pointed out that the laws of physics are valid down to the length scale of molecules. There is, therefore, no reason, apart from the obvious challenges of making them, that one should be prohibited from constructing vehicles or even the factories to mass-produce nanomachines from atomically precise molecular parts.

In the intervening decades, Feynman’s lecture has continued to inspire research in nanotechnology. Meanwhile the prevailing view of the living cell has shifted from a soup pot of enzymes carrying out metabolic reactions to a ticking Swiss watch of mechanically linked nanomotors. Thus, in many ways, cells are the molecular factories that Feynman envisioned.

Investigators have learned a good deal about how to make nonbiological motors inspired by those of biology, but there is still much to learn about the principles of catalyzed movement on this length scale. No doubt future work will find as yet unimagined ways to exploit such knowledge in biomedicine, energy conversion, chemical synthesis and other fields. 

Full Article

From Greg Egan’s ‘Permutation City
(A love scene between two scanned copies of humans)

She said, ‘Don’t you find it ironic?
‘What?’
‘Transhumans taking pleasure by stimulating copies of the neural pathways which used to be responsible for the continuation of the species. Out of all the possibilities, we cling to that.’
Peer said, ‘No, I don’t find it ironic. I had my irony glands removed. It was either that or castration.’

Death special: The plan for eternal life

New Scientist | 13 October, 2007

I’M SITTING in a darkened hall listening to neuroscientist Anders Sandberg describe how to scan ultra-thin sections of brain. First, embed the brain in plastic, then use a camera combined with laser beam and diamond blade to capture images of the tissue as it is sliced.

The method is being developed (in mice, so far) to better understand the architecture of the brain. But Sandberg, who is based at the University of Oxford, has a rather more ambitious aim in mind. For him, this work is merely the first step towards uploading the contents of human brains – memories, emotions and all – onto a computer.

This is the opening session of the ninth annual meeting of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA) in Chicago. Sandberg and his fellow transhumanists plan to bypass death by using technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), genetic engineering and nanotechnology to radically accelerate human evolution, eventually merging people with machines to make us immortal. This may not be possible yet, the transhumanists reason, but as long as they live long enough – a few decades perhaps – the technology will surely catch up.

To many, these ideas sound seriously scary, and transhumanists have been attacked for jeopardising the future of humanity. What if they ended up creating a race of elite superhumans bent on enslaving the unmodified masses, or unwittingly programmed an army of self-replicating nanobots that would turn us all into grey goo? In 2004, political scientist Francis Fukuyama singled out transhumanism as the world’s “most dangerous idea”.

Now this small-scale movement aims to go mainstream. WTA membership has risen from 2000 to almost 5000 in the past seven years, and transhumanist student groups have sprung up at university campuses from California to Nairobi. It has attracted a series of wealthy backers, including Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, who recently donated $4 million to the cause, and music producer Charlie Kam, who paid for the Chicago conference. For the first time the organisation has recruited celebrity speakers, such as actor-environmentalist Ed Begley Jr and Star Trek veteran William Shatner.

Other well-known speakers are also on the roster, including AI developer Ben Goertzel, longevity biologist Aubrey de Grey and futurist Ray Kurzweil, the group’s unofficial prophet. Kurzweil has recently caused a stir with his best-selling book The Singularity is Near, which explores what happens when our technologies become smarter than us. With transhumanists looking to woo the masses to their cause, I’ve come to Chicago to find out whether they deserve their dangerous reputation.

Saving humanity

They don’t look very threatening, though perhaps not very diverse either. Most WTA members are white, middle-aged men, but WTA secretary and former Buddhist monk James Hughes (see “Essay: The end of death?”) hopes to attract a wider range of people by highlighting the organisation’s democratic aims. The WTA insists that any new technology is used in a fair and ethical way, he says, with global treaties set up to regulate progress. Some transhumanists campaign for equal access to healthcare and for safeguards on new technology.

AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky also believes the movement is driven by an ethical imperative. He sees creating a superhuman AI as humanity’s best chance of solving its problems: “Saying AI will save the world or cure cancer sounds better than saying ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen’.” Yudkowsky thinks it is crucial to create a “friendly” super-intelligence before someone creates a malevolent one, purposefully or otherwise. “Sooner or later someone is going to create these technologies,” he says. “If a self-improving AI is thrown together in a slapdash fashion, we could be in for big trouble.”

The theme of saving humanity continues with presentations on cyborgs, cryonics and raising baby AIs in the virtual world of Second Life, as well as surveillance tactics for weeding out techno-terrorists and a suggested solution for the population explosion: uploading 10 million people onto a 50-cent computer chip. More immediate issues facing humanity, such as poverty, pollution and the devastation of war, tend to get ignored.

I discover the less egalitarian side to the transhumanist community when I meet Marvin Minsky, the 80-year-old originator of artificial neural networks and co-founder of the AI lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Ordinary citizens wouldn’t know what to do with eternal life,” says Minsky. “The masses don’t have any clear-cut goals or purpose.” Only scientists, who work on problems that might take decades to solve appreciate the need for extended lifespans, he argues.

He is also staunchly against regulating the development of new technologies. “Scientists shouldn’t have ethical responsibility for their inventions, they should be able to do what they want,” he says. “You shouldn’t ask them to have the same values as other people.”

The transhumanist movement has been struggling in recent years with bitter arguments between democrats like Hughes and libertarians like Minsky. Can Kurzweil’s keynote speech unite the opposing factions? On the final day of the meeting, the diminutive 59-year-old takes the podium, complete with horn-rimmed glasses, utilitarian blue suit and Mickey Mouse watch. Kurzweil offers a few possible solutions to today’s global dilemmas, such as nano-engineered solar panels to free the world from its addiction to fossil fuels. But he is opposed to taxpayer-funded programmes such as universal healthcare as well as any regulation of new technology, and believes that even outright bans will be powerless to control or delay the end of humanity as we know it.

“People sometimes say, ‘Are we going to allow transhumanism and artificial intelligence to occur?’” he tells the audience. “Well, I don’t recall when we voted that there would be an internet.”

By Danielle Egan