The Bionic Man.(human-machine research)(Brief Article)

To get an idea of the lengths Kevin Warwick will go to to satisfy his scientific curiosity, check out the purple two-inch scar on his left wrist. Last March surgeons hammered a tiny silicon chip studded with 100 electrodes directly into one of his arm's main nerves. The two-hour operation had never been tried before, and it might have left his hand paralyzed. When surgeons hit the nerve, it felt like a lightning strike. "It was exhilarating," says Warwick, a British cybernetics professor. "I wouldn't have missed it for the earth." The pain quickly passed and for the first time, Warwick says, the nervous system of a human being could trade messages with a computer. Man and machine had merged.

Warwick's four-month spell as a proto-cyborg might be a first step toward augmenting the human mind with machine intelligence. The chip, which linked to a computer, was removed in June after he'd conducted a range of experiments. This is the first step, he believes, to augmenting the human mind with machine intelligence. In important ways, he says, the brain trails far behind the computer. The brain has a woefully limited memory, it doesn't operate efficiently in a network and it's slow to download data. "From my research with robots, I can see their intelligence," says Warwick. "Why not look at this technology to explore the possibility of upgrading people?" In time, he says, an implant or an injection might deliver a simple microdevice that turns the average Joe into an imposing cyborg, with superhuman powers.

For the moment, Warwick's efforts have gone toward proving that implant technology can create a new form of mind-machine communication. Since the human nervous system uses electrochemical signals to carry messages, there's no reason it can't be made compatible with the electronic signals of a computer. In his latest groundbreaking experiments (detailed in his autobiography, "I, Cyborg," recently published in the United Kingdom), Warwick has already tested the concept. He's linked himself to computers via both--wires and radio transmitters and passed signals back and forth between his nervous system and electromechanical devices. The electrode in his arm picked up neural signals and sent them on to a computer, which converted them into instructions for a three-fingered robot hand elsewhere in his lab. When Warwick clenched his hand, so did the robot. Similarly, Warwick used the chip to control a small robot on wheels. He's even rigged up a computer-mediated mind meld of sorts. He fitted himself and his wife, Irena, with matching chips, each linked to a computer. When Irena clenched her hand, Warwick's left index finger got a shot of current--a "beautiful, sweet, deliciously sexy charge," he says. The first cyborg foreplay?

In his native Britain, Warwick, 48, is something of a cyber bad boy. Some of his colleagues dismiss his work as a pointless sideshow and deride his forecasts of a ...