In the next war, instead of a soldier going on a reconnaissance mission into enemy territory, consider this possibility: a cloud of “micro air vehicles,” flying cyborgs, with built-in cameras and microphones, that could be guided by remote control. What military commander wouldn’t want that?
DARPA, the research wing of the Department of Defense, has been on the case. A decade ago, they experimented with building synthetic drones. The Nano Hummingbird can stay aloft for eleven minutes; the DelFry Micro for just three. Then they realized that a far better type of flying machine already existed. In addition to being able to cover long distances while economizing energy, insects have a simple nervous system that was relatively easy to harness.
Scientists at the University of California Berkeley have discovered how to stimulate a beetle’s brain to make it start and stop flying. They poked a hole in the exoskeleton, threading in microscopically thin steel wire. A package of electronics mounted with beeswax on the beetle’s back carries the camera. When electricity is sent into the beetle’s optic lobe, the bug took flight. The lab experiment was a success.
The vignette appears midway through Frankenstein’s Cat, Emily Anthes’ fascinating book about our latest methods of transforming animal bodies. While the technology she describes is new, humans have been altering animals, in a sense, for hundreds of thousands of years. The first animal we started tailoring may have been ourselves, when a distant ancestor dried an animal skin and managed to wrap it around her torso such that it could hold a baby securely (as described in “We Built These Bodies” from the premier issue of Nautilus). This saved a lot of energy, freed up her arms to perform other tasks, and changed the course of our evolution, allowing babies’ brains to develop more outside the womb. With the advent of agriculture, humans became much more sophisticated about breeding animals and crossing varieties of plants. Shaping the living things around us emerged as a defining feature of our species. Now transgenic technology—tinkering more directly with an organism’s genome—is poised to again transform the bodies of animals around us. Yet our society is far from having clear conclusions or policies on what modifications we should allow ethically.
We don’t want shampoo being rubbed in Snuffy’s eyes to test the new no-tear formula, but if Snuffy were a pig whose organs could be genetically modified to assimilate easily into human tissue, polls say the majority of us are in favor. We nod our heads when Peter Singer calls the prioritization of human needs “speciesism,” but now what about those new pig lungs for your nephew with cystic fibrosis?
DARPA, the research wing of the Department of Defense, has been on the case. A decade ago, they experimented with building synthetic drones. The Nano Hummingbird can stay aloft for eleven minutes; the DelFry Micro for just three. Then they realized that a far better type of flying machine already existed. In addition to being able to cover long distances while economizing energy, insects have a simple nervous system that was relatively easy to harness.Scientists at the University of California Berkeley have discovered how to stimulate a beetle’s brain to make it start and stop flying. They poked a hole in the exoskeleton, threading in microscopically thin steel wire. A package of electronics mounted with beeswax on the beetle’s back carries the camera. When electricity is sent into the beetle’s optic lobe, the bug took flight. The lab experiment was a success.
The vignette appears midway through Frankenstein’s Cat, Emily Anthes’ fascinating book about our latest methods of transforming animal bodies. While the technology she describes is new, humans have been altering animals, in a sense, for hundreds of thousands of years. The first animal we started tailoring may have been ourselves, when a distant ancestor dried an animal skin and managed to wrap it around her torso such that it could hold a baby securely (as described in “We Built These Bodies” from the premier issue of Nautilus). This saved a lot of energy, freed up her arms to perform other tasks, and changed the course of our evolution, allowing babies’ brains to develop more outside the womb. With the advent of agriculture, humans became much more sophisticated about breeding animals and crossing varieties of plants. Shaping the living things around us emerged as a defining feature of our species. Now transgenic technology—tinkering more directly with an organism’s genome—is poised to again transform the bodies of animals around us. Yet our society is far from having clear conclusions or policies on what modifications we should allow ethically.
We don’t want shampoo being rubbed in Snuffy’s eyes to test the new no-tear formula, but if Snuffy were a pig whose organs could be genetically modified to assimilate easily into human tissue, polls say the majority of us are in favor. We nod our heads when Peter Singer calls the prioritization of human needs “speciesism,” but now what about those new pig lungs for your nephew with cystic fibrosis?
by Luba Ostashevsky, Nautilus | Read more:
Illustration by Diego Patino/SciAm/FSG
