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/sci/ - Science & Math

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2280239 No.2280239 [Reply] [Original]

I want to be a bionicist and spend my career turning people into pretty little machines. What kind of qualifications do I need?

Pic related I guess.

>> No.2280240

That would be engineering, so lots of gay sex

>> No.2280244

>>2280240

Serious answer anyone?

>> No.2280246

That would be illegal under the current legislation unless there is clinical need. So the closest you could get would be to first get an MD in neurology and make neural implants for people that need them, like blind people.

>> No.2280248

>>2280244
Neuroscience more than anything. The problem is more with translating neural signals into digital signals to drive actuators, and then inputs from digital sensors into something comprehensible to the nervous system. The actuators and the sensors themselves are a lesser problem, so neuroscience encompasses the bottleneck.

That's as close as you'll get to a serious answer.

>> No.2280252

>>2280248
It's a serious answer but it's also inaccurate. As a neuroscientist you won't be allowed to actually implement the things designed by engineers on humans. Neuroscience is needed to solve the translation problem, however that's not what OP asked.

>> No.2280254

So I need to be an engineer to make the things, a neuroscientist to use them, and either way I'm not allowed to?

>> No.2280255

>>2280254
No you need to be a neuroscientist so the engineers can make their things. Only a medical doctor (neurologist) can install them.

>> No.2280257

>>2280254

Not being allowed to is more of an ethical matter which probally will be gone by the time we have serious implants available which vastly overcome human limbs.

>> No.2280258

>>2280252
Either way, and whether you're allowed to or not, it's a prerequisite for what the OP wants to do. Maybe it's not allowed to do such things with humans, but still, the primary expertise required is neuroscience. I don't see how you've pointed out any inaccuracy. In fact, it seems you've only offered up a red herring.

>> No.2280259

>>2280257
The problem is we won't have those until the law changes, which, in all likelihood, won't happen any time soon.

>> No.2280260

>>2280258
From what I understand OP wants to implement these things into humans. Neuroscientists don't do that, neurologists do.

>> No.2280263

>>2280259
The law won't stop the creation of this kind of technology. First of all, it won't stop the creation of medically necessary implants, because that would be widely denounced as inhumane. Secondly, when someone sees a gainful, non-medical application that requires only some minimal translation research, the government will be powerless to stop it. As a last resort, those interested in this stuff would just go overseas with it. Globalization to the rescue once again!

>> No.2280270

>>2280263
>Secondly, when someone sees a gainful, non-medical application that requires only some minimal translation research
See, this part is where you're wrong. These clinical applications will always remain clinical because it violates the ethical code of doctors to apply them on healthy humans. Advancements will be made in non-invasive body-computer interfaces to be sure, but those have their limits in terms of directed communication with neurons.

>> No.2280275

>>2280270
No, you're wrong in that this ethical interpretation is far from as universal as you think it is. People have non-necessary (cosmetic) surgeries all the time, and it's hardly obvious or universal that surgery to make you look better is a-ok while surgery to make you perform better in some other aspect is unethical.

>> No.2280278

>>2280275
That type of surgery is allowed because it doesn't involve the modification of muscular, neural or bone tissue. Subdural modifications are allowed only to remove fat and insert stuff. Fucking about with neurons is illegal.

>> No.2280280

>>2280278
Besides, there aren't any plastic neurologists. Good luck finding a doctor willing to do that stuff at the risk of facing a massive lawsuit when shit goes wrong.

>> No.2280281

>>2280278
We've already been over this. Even if it's illegal in one jurisdiction, it could be done somewhere else. If you're really claiming that the caveat-filled list of proscriptions you just gave is somehow so universal that medical practitioners everywhere will naturally follow it, I disagree. In fact, history shows that as soon as some beneficial application arises, directed toward some other aim than curing disease, the medical ethics are bent to accommodate it. How did those caveats to allow cosmetic surgery get there in the first place? They got there because doctors are all high-handed with their supposed ethics until there's a buck to be made, then it all comes due for re-evaluation.

>> No.2280286

>>2280281
I guess time will tell. But you can be sure it won't happen within our lifetime. As a neuroscientist, I wish it would.

>> No.2280343

>>2280281
>Even if it's illegal in one jurisdiction, it could be done somewhere else.

You do realize the internationally accepted nature of the guidelines underlying clinical research into such technologies and their eventual application, don't you?

>> No.2280348

>>2280343
Those guidelines have no legal force. Strangely enough, only laws have that.

>> No.2280365

>>2280348

And yet - stranger still - they are adopted into local law or are recommended by local authorities (and I have yet to meet the biotech company who willingly goes against an FDA 'recommendation').

Ethics committees (through and along with authorities) will remain the deciding factor in the research necessary to bring such technologies to market - and they will remain hidebound in the likes of the Nuremberg code and the DoH.

>> No.2280384

>>2280365
Most of the technology has obvious medical application. If you'd actually read my posts, I show awareness of these issues. It doesn't take much to adapt the technology, invented for medical reasons, to non-medical uses.

The key word in your description of how ethics guidelines are implemented into law is "local." Not all localities will fully implement the guidelines, not all localities will have the same interpretation of the guidelines, not all localities will acknowledge the authority of the political bodies responsible for the guidelines, not all localities will have the resources to conduct the oversight necessary to enforce the guidelines, not all authorities will conduct enforcement efforts in good faith (money talks, including the money of people who want to be cyborgs), etc.

Not to mention that the guidelines themselves are not immutable, and in practice the advent of new technology has encouraged their modification. "Bioethics" is still a lively field.

>> No.2280403

>>2280384
Obviously they are not immutable (I just realised I cropped out the half-sentence where I mentioned that - serves me right, I guess).

The point is, they have not changed - and in my opinion will not change in the forseeable future - in a way that will encourage not-medically indicated human enhancement.

The watchword - both for authorities/ethics committees and for the industry - will remain '(unmet) medical need' for the forseeable future.

Obviously we will see further new 'disorders', new ways of looking at and defining disease, and new diagnostic methods, which will give rise for medical indications where there were none before - but we will not see the transition from a bio-medical to an enhancement industry.

As for the local laws: True, but the core precepts do remain the same. Additionally, it will always be the laws of a few select places which will decide what the industry will sponsor and what not. The market is the driver. And the market is the US, the EU, and Japan. If a company cannot get market approval there under the applicable local laws in these jurisdictions, it will be hard pressed to go forward with a development project.

>> No.2280423

>>2280403
You're missing the point for the most part. The research, no matter what internal goals and aspirations the researchers may have for curing diseases, *is equally applicable to human enhancement.* Let's take just one, not-too-farfetched example: a device that directly stimulates the cochlear nerve to cure deafness. Now, the medical application would couple this with a speaker of similar sensitivity to the human ear, replicating human hearing as closely as possible. Turning this into "human enhancement" is as easy as upgrading the speaker or accepting other signal sources (say from a cellular communication device). All that's left is to get somebody reasonably qualified to perform the surgery on non-deaf patients. For that, *even one jurisdiction* suffices. People will shop that jurisdiction and there's little anyone will be able to do about it. The outlier won't change, because they'll be raking in the dough.

Pretty much every other form of human enhancement could become available mutatis mutandis.

>> No.2280483

You want biology, psychology, and maybe computer science. Biology's important if you want to do any actual hands-on work with the body, more important than the psychology really. I'm on this educational track right now, and while it's pretty brutal it's what you require, OP.

>> No.2280503

>>2280423
Hi, it's me [>>2280286] again.
>Turning this into "human enhancement" is as easy as upgrading the speaker or accepting other signal sources
This is not as simple as you make it out to be. Patients groups differ from healthy subjects in the sense that they are most likely missing large part of the biological systems needed for the sense. Blind people that get a prosthetic eye usually don't have a retina, dear people that get an ear implant usually don't have a middle and inner ear. Healthy people obviously do. This makes surgery considerably more complicated. Furthermore, 'upgrades' in the sense that we would be able to perceive stimuli we couldn't normally perceive are a different ballgame altogether. Other than the direct hardware needed for sensation, we don't have the necessary neural basis for perception either. Our auditory cortex simply isn't wired to receive ultrasound. Enabling that would require considerable neural restructuring that is not necessary in patient groups.

>> No.2280505

>>2280503
>dear people
deaf people*

>> No.2280507

>>2280423

I see your point very clearly. Of course enhancement is just a different application (ie application to a healthy subject) of a curative technology (already well understood in the biopharmaceutical area).

I do not support your conclusions though, that

a) the transfer from curative application to enhancement will be a major field of activity

and

b) such transfer being indeed conducted in a theoretical single locale outside the primary markets (though obviously reachable from them) will prove adequate incentive for the industry to invest in such developments.

Rather, we will have an ever widening understanding of human health and 'disorders', broadening possible indications. This will be a gradual process though, and not a radical change to an 'enhancement driven' market catalysed by a single out-of-the-way country going 'oh, well, sure you may implant healthy adults in our hospitals. Thanks again for investing in out economy!'.

Neither will we have such a radical change in the core market regions. It is my believe that - for better or worse - the idea of large scale (invasive) human enhancement will remain an ethical no-go both for independent ethics committees and for the authorities (in the latter case probably affected by a fear of political fall-out).

Established companies will follow suit in this.

It may be, that we will see a new generation of bio-medical firms pushing in the direction of enhancement over cure. My prediction would be that these will be swallowed by the larger corporations though (as have so many of the old biotech startups) and thus loose their enhancement focus. Their technologies being instead funnelled into the therapeutic pipelines of their new bio/pharma/medical parents.

'Enhancement' will stay small scale, as it is now, while some select areas will be opened up only via the route of 'newly discovered/defined' 'medical concepts'.

>> No.2280557

>>2280503
I wasn't talking in my example about hearing ultrasound. Hearing sounds too soft to perceive doesn't require any new neurological mapping (e.g. the microphone could just be more sensitive than the ear and it could compress the dynamic range of its input). I also fail to understand how that digital signals from a microphone can't be mixed with digital telephony signals - the result in either case is auditory input representing sound in the range of normal human perception. In fact, if I were presented with a "stock" device, I could modify it for these applications with zero medical expertise. I'm a CS guy, and I promise you I could jigger that hardware to deliver sounds to the ear from a variety of sources if it can deliver sounds from one. Microchips don't care about "ethical" distinctions, and it's a matter of indifference to the nervous system, which receives signals in the same range in either case.

>>2280507
I don't believe that the views we're debating are as firmly entrenched as you think. I don't believe that biomedical corporations actually have any ethical principles at all; they just do a good job of pretending for the regulators while they pursue their profits. Society hasn't thought about these issues and they aren't part of the public consciousness, in part because there isn't a medical technology with an obvious enhancement application to bring the issue home to people. It could be that the current regulators don't represent the public consensus at all, but the issue has simply never arisen. I don't presume to know how the public will think on this issue when it is fully posed, but I suspect the political situation is more complicated than you think.

>> No.2280569

>>2280503
>Other than the direct hardware needed for sensation, we don't have the necessary neural basis for perception either.
Are you familiar with the concept of neuroplasticity? Our brains adapt to the loss of significant measures of their constituent matter. Entire sections of brain responsible for a given specific type of processing can be removed, and over time the brain can regain functionality by shunting the data to a new part of the brain for interpretation, despite the fact that that sector is not typically tasked with interpreting that type of data.

Who is to say that this concept cannot apply to sensory data of a type which was not in the original build? It remains to be seen, as we have not discovered any means by which digital data can be functionally translated into nerve-transmissible data. I mean to see, if I might.

>> No.2280586

>>2280557

>2280507 here again.

Let's agree to disagree then. (With the exception of the industry - of course it is profit focussed - but people are clever enough that there is profit in having a good image, and that there is absolutely no profit in financing research that will not pass ethics - development programs have been cancelled for less than that.)

Anyway, thanks for the discussion, it was certainly more fun than I had expected for New Year's day.

>> No.2280593

>>2280557
>and it's a matter of indifference to the nervous system, which receives signals in the same range in either case.
The problem also lies in connecting the implant to the cochlear nerve (or whatever nerve you want to stimulate). This can't be done without destroying at least some part of the original input neurons, which isn't a problem in patient groups because they don't receive input anyway.
>>2280569
Neural plasticity can only do so much. The point of it is to better the computational processing of enhanced input, which could help you (in the case of auditory stimulation) differentiate more precisely between frequencies, however it cannot accommodate enhanced <span class="math">perception[/spoiler]. You'd hear all enhanced frequencies as existing frequencies with no way to differentiate between them

>> No.2280612

>>2280593
> it cannot accommodate enhanced perception.
This remains to be seen, as nobody has been equipped with sensory rigs superior to those they were initially equipped with. I suspect that it is inaccurate, because there are people who randomly have superior this or that sense as a happy result of mutation; their brains are evidently capable of handling the data they're given, the important thing is that they're given that data.

>> No.2280618

>>2280612
That's a valid point. However this is most likely due to the enhanced plasticity during early development. The formation of the visual and auditory cortices are largely dependent on their input in early stages, after which plasticity decreases considerably. Mutations leading to altered perception are present from birth, implants are not.

>> No.2280626

>>2280612
I agree with you. As an example, I'd offer people (all of them are women, I think) with tetrachromatic vision. Research indicates that simply by having four retinal pigments with different sensitivities, they are able to interpret this input as four different colours, even though this ability is not natural to the mammalian lineage.

>> No.2280628

>>2280618
I'll cheerfully admit that that might be the case and that plasticity is much greater in younger samples, while hoping that it isn't; I have this happy hope that I'll have telescopic, IR-optional, UV-optional, etc. etc. eyes someday. =)

>> No.2280638

>>2280626
This is pretty specualtive. It hasn't been verified beyond doubt. And like I said, these mutations are present from birth.
>>2280628
I hope I'm wrong as well, but I fear for the worst. I don't expect to see those developments within our lifetime.

>> No.2280641

>>2280618
As an extension of my example in >>2280626
consider this study: http://www.futurity.org/health-medicine/gene-therapy-has-monkeys-seeing-red-and-green/

That seems to directly contradict your hypothesis in the context of my example.

>> No.2280648

>>2280638

Even if we see the initial developments during our lifetimes, it will be years at best and decades at worst before we see any practical (consumer) application actually go to market.

>> No.2280651

>>2280641
I admit, this is somewhat convincing, however the problem here is the phylogenetic descendancy of monkeys. Most monkeys can distinguish between these colors. This would suggest the neural architecture is there to process it, however squirrel monkeys have simply lost the potential because they are missing one type of cone. This would be more convincing if they had made these cones responsive to wavelengths we wouldn't normally pick up, such as ultra violet.

>> No.2280663

>>2280648
I would say decades at best and centuries at worst. You shouldn't underestimate the workload that comes with research of this nature (or any type of research in neuroscience for that matter)

>> No.2280684

>>2280239
sorry OP, no faggots allowed in the Bionicist department

>> No.2280695

>>2280651
I see what you're saying, but you seem to be equivocating somewhat. You said "The formation of the visual and auditory cortices are largely dependent on their input in early stages" but now you say the "architecture" is genetic. If we go by your first statement, then these monkeys without colour vision did not have the input necessary to form their visual and auditory cortices for the reception of trichromatic input.

I think that overall, there's a lack of conclusive data. I *think* that the brain will prove more adaptive to new kinds of input than many believe. On the other hand, "induced" neuroplasticity is an area of active research (to aid recovery from stroke and trauma, for instance). I don't think it's impossible to recapitulate some aspects of development, although there are severe obstacles. The fact that it's thinkable enough for people to work on it is encouraging...

>> No.2280711

>>2280695
>ou said "The formation of the visual and auditory cortices are largely dependent on their input in early stages" but now you say the "architecture" is genetic. If we go by your first statement, then these monkeys without colour vision did not have the input necessary to form their visual and auditory cortices for the reception of trichromatic input.
Not exactly, but I can see the confusion. The development of the visual cortex is dependent on the imput in early stages (and also genetically determined) to be sure, however the fact that these monkeys are missing one cone means their function is replaced by the other two types. Overexpression of these cones in the retina compared to other species of monkeys means the cortex develops in full, and the overexpressed cones can be replaced by other types with a similar function after development is complete.

>I think that overall, there's a lack of conclusive data.
I heavily agree. My assertions are nothing more than an educated guess.

>I *think* that the brain will prove more adaptive to new kinds of input than many believe.
It may very well be.

>On the other hand, "induced" neuroplasticity is an area of active research (to aid recovery from stroke and trauma, for instance). I don't think it's impossible to recapitulate some aspects of development, although there are severe obstacles. The fact that it's thinkable enough for people to work on it is encouraging...
I agree with this as well. However development is going to be slow for sure. Gene therapy hasn't even reached wide clinical use yet, let alone on neural tissue. Commercial applications will take decades to be made safe, and in order to do this ethical constraints must be overcome.

>> No.2280745

>>2280246
Bullshit, point me to what part of the legislation is updated enough enough to ban cyborgization.

>> No.2280767

>>2280745
It's not directed at "cyborgization" specifically. It has to do with the violation of physical integrity if there is no clinical need. Just try and get an implant. See what the doctor tells you.

>> No.2280791

>>2280767
I have a convenient accident and damage my ear, there's now a medical need.

>> No.2280833

>>2280791
Now there's medical need to restore your hearing, not to enhance it.

>> No.2280839

>>2280767
Like breast implants, amirite?

>> No.2280863

>>2280839
-> >>2280278

>> No.2280891

>>2280833
Technically restoration is enhancement, you're enhancing an ability from being absent to it's previous or 'normal' state.

So I ask then if someone with horrible vision loses their sight will they get cybernetic eyes with horrible vision (restoration for them) or will they get 20/20 eyes (enhancement for them)?

>> No.2280902

>>2280891
They'll be restored to vision that is considered normal. There won't be a need to add extra sensitivity to ultra-violet light for instance, as it would be more invasive.

>> No.2280923

>>2280902
But what is normal?

Normal for the individual and normal for the masses is quite a large difference. Further even 20/20 isn't normal.

>> No.2280929

>>2280923
Normal for the population.

>> No.2280943

>>2280863
Oh, alright. Thanks.

>> No.2280954

>>2280929
Which would be less than 20/20.

So you wouldn't restore people to the pinnacle of their biological visual capabilities?

>> No.2280980

>>2280954
Perhaps, but that doesn't include extra sensory ability now does it?