If you hear mention of cyborg animals, you may think a young child is discussing a new popular children’s cartoon. However, there have been advances in science, making cyborg animals not in a matter of time, but a manner of course. Specifically, the cyborg animals in question (at least for the purposes of this article) are, you guessed it, rats. But there’s no need for alarm; these cyborg animals are actually being used for extremely ingenious purposes, all of which promise benefits for humanity in general. Thank you, cyborg rats!
So how are these cyborg animals of the rat persuasion assisting humanity, besides making the world an admittedly more interesting place in which to live? It’s common knowledge that rats can fit virtually anywhere, much to the horror of housewives everywhere. It may be less general information that rats also have an incredible sense of smell. Scientists realized that this combination of physical plasticity and ability to sniff out environments could be used and augmented in a practical fashion.
Lab rats were turned into cyborg animals by first being trained to enjoy smelling human body odor. How was this possible? Well, this first portion of the experiment doesn’t exactly correlate with animals being turned into cyborgs, rather, it involved the simple process of stimulating the reward centers in a group of rat’s brains when they smelled human odor. Therefore, the rats learned to enjoy sniffing out humans, enticing them to continue the practice.
Next, and this is where the idea of cyborg animals does come into play, electrodes were inserted in a group of rat’s brains. The electrodes, consisting of 32 stainless steel wires which have a diameter of 75 micrometers and lasting up to nine months, were implanted in three main portions of the brain. The first portion of the cyborg animal’s brains in which the electrodes were implanted was the olfactory cortex, as this is the area in which odor is processed. This ensured that when a cyborg rat smelled a human, scientists could be notified. The second portion of the brain in which electrodes were inserted into the reward center because this is the area of the brain in which reward is monitored. As these cyborg animals had been trained to enjoy smelling human body odor, these electrodes ensured that scientists would have a second warning that a rat was indeed smelling a human. The last of the electrodes were inserted into the motor cortex, so that scientists could be alerted in which direction the rats were moving when they smelled a human, allowing the scientists to also know where humans are located.
Now, at this point you may be feeling a bit uneasy that cyborg animals are literally being trained and manipulated with technology in order to sniff out the location of humans.
While this advance in technology may seem more like a horror than a benefit of humanity, scientists are not creating cyborg animals in order to unleash a new terror unto humanity. Instead, these cyborg rats have been created in order to find bodies after disasters such as earthquakes. As rats are naturally capable of fitting into very small or awkward places, and can be trained to smell human body odor, cyborg rats are the ideal cyborg animal for search and rescue missions in which people may be trapped.
WORKS CITED
Singer, Emily. “Rats’ Brain Waves Could Find Trapped People – 22 September 2004 – New Scientist.” Science News and Science Jobs from New Scientist – New Scientist. NewScientist, 2004. Web. 18 May 2011. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6429.
