When you think of cyborgs becoming a reality, you probably picture Arnold Schwarzenegger's glowing red eye from Terminator or the steely, tight-lipped stare of Robocop. But the future where man and machine converge won't just be built with nuts and bolts. It will be built with biology.
Self-avowed cyborg expert Tim Maly said as much when I talked to him last year. The first full-fledged cyborg "probably won't be a mechanical body," he told Gizmodo. "It will probably be some biogrown body, and it won't be recognizable to us as Robocop, because it'll already be part of a long line of small improvements."
Those improvements have already begun.
The field is known as bioelectronics, and it's exactly what it sounds like: biology meets electronics. Before I get ahead of myself, though, it's important to define what bioelectronics is, then we can start to look at its very exciting possibilities.
Brief History
Bioelectronics is a fairly new word when it comes to scientific disciplines, although its origins go back at least a century. You can look at least as far back as the first accurate recording of the electrocardiogram in 1895 for the beginnings of bioelectronics. That's when it became obvious that electronic systems could have a profound impact on the field of medicine. Today, some 160,000 defibrillators are implanted in the United States alone, turning thousands of Americans into walking, breathing cyborgs, whether they realize it or not.
The field of bioelectronics has only recently taken off, however. In fact, about 95 percent of all papers written on the topic were published after 1990. And only in the past couple of years have truly world-changing breakthroughs started to surface. After the 20th century brought us everything from the pacemaker to robotic prosthetics, ambitious scientists started to wonder how they could push the synergy between biology and electronics even further. Instead of building electronic devices that could be implanted in biological systems, for instance, why not build devices that become a part of them?
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