360 GRADI MAGAZINE // MAY-JUNE 2021

was forced to face a growing escalation
of technological innovation for the
conquest of deep space, on that journey
that will then take the American astronauts
in July of 68 to land on the moon.
It came from a time when the largest
conventional army in the world, the
army of the Soviet Union, had been confronted
with new weapons, the atomic
warheads of the United States. Beyond
the history of conflict and the cold war,
what happened was that the new frontier
of confrontation between the two
blocs became deep space; a space that
saw the first living being, the first man
out of the atmosphere, not from the US
but from the Soviet Union. As a reaction,
the United States invested heavily
in this area and, within this research, a
whole series of human physiology studies
were carried out that tried to answer
the following question: how can a living
organism survive in an environment
that does not is it fit for life? The answers
until then seemed to be of only
two types: either we transform what
the environment is or, alternatively, we
modify the living being.
Thus was born the term
cyborg, which is an abbreviation
of the binomial
cybernetic organism
(cybernetic organism),
and was used for the
first time in 1960, within
the scientific article
Cyborgs and Space, written by Nathan
S. Kline, psychiatrist at Rockland State
Hospital, and Manfred Clynes, scientist
working at the Dynamic Simulation Lab.
n the memoirs of these
two scholars we also find
some jokes on the subject,
when one says to
the other: “... you know
cyborg almost looks like
the name of a city in Sweden,
like Gothenburg ...”.
What they meant by the
term cyborg, or rather Cyborg 1, was a
modified organism that adapted to different
living conditions, in a way they
called homeostatic: “... the cyborg deliberately
incorporates exogenous components
to extend the self-regulating function of
the organism in order to adapt it to new
environments… “. Ultimately, the cyborg
would have been, in Kline and Clynes’
original vision, a hybrid organism, partly
natural and partly artificial, better
than the purely organic version of that
being.
We human beings are living organisms
composed of a series of organs, which
adapt their functioning within certain
operational parameters, to allow us to
survive; for example, if the temperature
rises as in summer, the functioning of
our organism adapts and allows us to
continue living. Today we are able to
transplant some organs that are unable
to function, as we understand this homeostatic
function of some components
in our body. In 1970, a 220-gram white
rat was combined with an osmotic pump
with a chemical, which altered the functioning
of his body in a completely automatic
way. This was the first cyborg.
The basic idea was to be able to modify
the physiology of the human body, to facilitate
it in what would have been jour-
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