IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

202 Chapter 9
thanks to advances in embedded-chip technology.’’ 47 According to writer
Thomas Grose, ‘‘Because of embedded chip technology, artificial limbs permanently
attached to amputees and controlled by their brains could be
available some time within the next decade or two. And while it’s unlikely
that such prostheses could ever improve upon a real arm or leg, bioengineering
nevertheless offers America’s 1.3 million amputees the real possibility
of mechanical limbs that closely mimic nature’s. ‘It is a matter of when,
and not if, such technology will be ultimately realized,’ says Joel W. Burdick,
deputy director of the California Institute of Technology’s Center for
Neuromorphic Systems Engineering.’’ 48 Our bodies are not just being synthesized
bit by bit; they’re also being connected to the Net. Soon we’ll all
be always on, thanks to fast-spreading connectivity between monitoring
devices on (or in) our bodies, on the one hand—and health care practitioners,
their institutions, and their knowledge systems, on the other. Heart
disease is a big driver of the trend. You give every heart patient a wearable
or implanted monitor; it talks wirelessly to computers, which are trained to
keep an eye open for abnormalities: Bingo! Your body is very securely
plugged into the network. That’s pervasive computing, too. Health and
medical telematics are expanding and connecting to each other in the
same unobtrusive—and unplanned—manner that characterizes the way our
body parts are being changed. In one project, a vast database containing information
about tens of millions of experiments and drug tests is being
centralized. 49 In dozens of different experiments, patient records are being
digitized and coded—which means they can be accessed online from anywhere.
50 Medical journals are migrating at high speed to online publishing
environments, thereby shrinking the time lag between discovery and dissemination
of new discoveries. 51 The drug industry is putting performance
data about thousands of drugs online. 52 And bioengineers have devised a
multitude of noninvasive, digital patient-monitoring systems that measure,
record, and evaluate our vital functions—continuously. 53
The result of this is a vast, distributed, and—for the wired-up patient—
immersive medical knowledge system in which the boundaries between
‘‘me’’ and ‘‘the system’’ are dissolving. This is why artists talk about
‘‘wetware’’ and ‘‘the recombinant body.’’ The body itself will become a
communication device if some engineers have their way. IBM’s Thomas
Zimmerman is a specialist in ‘‘intrabody communications’’; he says our