A HUSBAND and wife were billed as the UK’s first cyborg couple after they had electronic chips put in them – before it ended in disaster.
Professor Kevin Warwick had a small cylindrical chip implanted in his arm in August 1988.
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The device, around the length of a 2p coin allowed him to open doors and switch on lights simply by waving his arm about while he walked around the cybernetics department at Reading university.
Nowadays, he is referred to as “Captain Cyborg” and considered to be the first “biohacker” – someone who makes alterations to the body with technology in order to make life easier.
Then, in 2002, he had a second implant put in which took his cyborg aspirations a stage further.
The professor had a square silicon sensor called BrainGate implanted which was around 0.1 of an inch wide.
It was implanted in the nerves of his wrist for three months, which linked up his nervous system to a computer which in turn allowed him to control a robot hand via the internet using his thoughts.
The same year, his wife Irena also had a similar chip implanted in her arm which allowed the couple to communicate in astounding ways.
He said: “Because we were electronically connected, nervous system to nervous system, when she closed her hand my brain received a pulse.”
Professor Warwick – the Vice-Chancellor at Coventry University – described it as a “basic form of telegraphic communication”.
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Now, the 69-year-old who is the Vice-Chancellor at Coventry university looks back on that time as being “quite cool” and “good fun” – even if it did end in disaster.
He told MailOnline: “At the time nobody had done anything like that. That was pushing the technology at the time.
“People obviously had implants for pacemakers and things like that, but to do it as an enhancement in some way was the different thing.
“I could be monitored as I moved around the building – as I went to the laboratory the door opened, as I came down the corridor the lights came on.”
To get the device put in him, his GP gave him a local anaesthetic and used a “corkscrew” device to create a little hole and then simply “stitched it in place”.
But was only in the professor’s arm for a couple of weeks before it was removed though, just long enough to show that the idea actually worked.
He said this was a good thing because the small components were encased in a brittle glass that could have easily smashed into pieces.
At the time, the experiment threw up a number of ethical questions, such as should it be put into prisoners or even children so their whereabouts can be tracked.
Professor Warwick said though it opened up people’s minds as to what the possibilities could be in the future.
In some ways, it was a forerunner to Elon Musk’s company Neuralink, which aims to implant chips in people’s brains that process signals transmitted to a computer or phone.
Both Professor Warwick’s actions and Neuralink, are keen to find a cure for neurological ailments, that take away functional connections between the brain and the limbs which could, ultimately, allow paralysed people to walk again.
The pioneering work done by Professor Warwick has spawned a community of “biohackers” online who also meet up at conventions to talk about their own implants.
One such example is Neil Harbisson from Spain who has an implanted antenna hanging over his face that allows him to “hear” colours as different musical frequencies.
However, without consulting proper medical advice, performing implant operations can lead to some significant complications, such as nerve damage or infections.
Professor Warwick said: “It worries me when I hear what people are doing, they do take an awful lot of risks as they don’t bother too much with the possibilities of infection.
“But I don’t know if I feel responsible – I was doing it as a scientific experiment.”
While the professor doesn’t have any implants in him and doesn’t plan on having any more, he remains interested in “brain to brain communication”.
As the experiments with his wife indicated, in the future, pulses on the brain as if it is “being touched” could act as some form of communication between two people.
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