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Topic: Call Them Mouse-Controlled Rats (Read 793 times) |
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Hermit
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Call Them Mouse-Controlled Rats
« on: 2002-05-02 18:16:39 » |
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Call Them Mouse-Controlled Rats
Source: Wired
Authors: Associated Press
Dated: 2002-05-01
By implanting electrodes in rats' brains, scientists have created remote-controlled rodents they can command to turn left or right, climb trees and navigate piles of rubble. Someday, scientists said, rats carrying tiny video cameras might search for disaster survivors.
"If you have a collapsed building and there are people under the rubble, there's no robot that exists now that would be capable of going down into such a difficult terrain and finding those people, but a rat would be able to do that," said John Chapin, a professor of physiology and pharmacology at the State University of New York in Brooklyn.
The lab animals aren't exactly robot rats. They had to be trained to carry out the commands.
Chapin's team fitted five rats with electrodes and power-pack backpacks. When signaled by a laptop computer, the electrodes stimulated the rodents' brains and cued them to scurry in the desired direction, then rewarded them by stimulating a pleasure center in the brain.
The rats' movements could be controlled up to 1,640 feet away, the length of more than five football fields.
The findings appear in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.
Other researchers said the work is interesting but is an engineering feat, not an advance in animal neuroscience.
Randy Gallistel, a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Rutgers University, said it's basically the same thing, with a twist, that scientists found they could do almost 50 years ago by stimulating the reward-sensing area of a rat's brain.
"Without the gee-whizery, without the remote-control and so on, that this kind of thing was possible has been obvious for decades," he said.
The experiments used three implanted electrodes one in the brain region that senses reward or pleasure, and one each in areas that process signals from the rat's left and right whisker bundles.
Chapin's team trained the rats in a maze by signaling the left and right whisker-sensing regions. When a rat turned in the correct direction, its reward-sensing region was stimulated.
Activating only the reward region caused the rodents to move forward, the team found.
After training, the rats were tested in a variety of environments and remotely guided through pipes and across elevated runways. They were compelled to climb trees and ladders and to jump from varying heights.
The rodents could even be commanded to venture into brightly lit, open areas -- environments they normally would avoid.
Howard Eichenbaum, a professor of psychology at Boston University, said the research, while not a major advance, is "clever" and holds the promise of using animals as humans' "eyes" or as couriers to reach trapped victims.
Aside from the technological challenges, he said there may be ethical concerns about turning animals into "intelligent robots" serving humans.
"It's one thing to see a rat running around like this, people don't get too emotional about that, but as soon as you get into dogs or work animals, people start getting real excited," he said.
Chapin's team has tested tiny video cameras strapped to wired rats to see whether they might be used to transmit images and sounds of people trapped inside ruins. But Chapin said the camera needs to be refined to compensate for the rodents' jerky movements and the rats' backpack miniaturized to implant it beneath their skin.
The potential of using such implantable electrodes to control humans -- which a Tulane University researcher tried during the 1960s, with unclear results -- is something Chapin said he opposes so strongly he believes it should be illegal.
Kate Rears, a policy analyst at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, said technological advances mean human-control technology can no longer be dismissed as far-fetched.
"I think that a lot of people are very wary of that sort of thing and understandably so," Rears said. "I don't think it's a sign of paranoia to react against this because it is very odd. It's Brave New Worldish."
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Hermit
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Here come the Ratbots
« Reply #1 on: 2002-05-08 17:25:55 » |
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Here come the Ratbots
Source: Nature
Authors: Tom Clarke
Dated: 2002-05-02
Desire drives remote-controlled rodents.
Remote-controlled rats could soon be detecting earthquake survivors or leading bomb-disposal teams to buried land mines.
Signals from a laptop up to 500 metres away make the rats run, climb, jump and even cross brightly lit open spaces, contrary to their instincts. The rodents carry a backpack containing a radio receiver and a power source that transmits the signals into their brains through electrical probes the breadth of a hair.
"They work for pleasure," says Sanjiv Talwar, the bioengineer at the State University of New York who led the research team. One electrode stimulates the rat's medial forebrain bundle, or MFB, the 'feelgood' centre of the mammalian brain. "The rat feels nirvana," Talwar says.
Two more electrodes stimulate the brain region that normally processes signals from the rat's left and right whiskers.
Now the team hopes to work out how to record nerve impulses from a rat's nose when it detects an odour such as TNT or the human body. Then 'ratbots' equipped with satellite positioning tags could be used as smart sensors. The research arm of the US defence department is funding the work.
But the research has as much potential in the emerging field of neuroprosthetics according to learning and memory expert Samuel Deadwyler of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Artificial stimulation of brain regions could bypass damaged nerves that once controlled muscles in paralysed people. "This approach could restore those linkages," says Deadwyler.
Learning for pleasure
Talwar's team train the wired-up rats to turn left or right in a maze according to the artificial whisker stimuli. A jolt to the MFB rewards the rats for correct behaviour. After a week's training the rats turn on cue without reward.
Thereafter frequent pleasure pulses motivate trained rats to navigate through virtually any environment. Extra pulses spur them on to challenges like climbing or jumping.
There is a limit to what the animals can be made to do: instinct tempers their eagerness for reward. For example, even continuous MFB stimulation cannot make a rat jump from a dangerous height.
Manipulating animal's minds, especially for dangerous missions, raises ethical questions. "Debate is certainly needed," admits Talwar. [ Hermit quotes: "Animal rights, taken to their logical conclusion, mean votes for oysters" Bertrand Russell ] But he points out that the rats live as long as normal, and when not wearing mind-altering backpacks they are just like any other rats. "They're not zombies, they work with their instincts," he says.
In a way, ratbots are an extension of classical behavioural experiments in which animals learn to perform tasks in return for food, say. It's just that the reward for leaning, as far as a ratbot is concerned, comes from within. This virtual learning could make ratbots a new model for studying animal behaviour.
References: Talwar, S. K. et al. Rat navigation guided by remote control.. Nature, 417, 37 - 38, (2002).
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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