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Body-hackers: the people who turn

themselves into cyborgsNot content with their version 1.0 bodies, biohackers are installing USB drives in their fingertips,

giving themselves night-vision eyedrops and growing third ears on their arms (that can go online).

Welcome to the world of DIY cyborgs

Oliver Wainwright

Friday 14 August 2015 12.39 BST

When the director of a research institute called the Alternate Anatomies laboratory

says he’s got something up his sleeve, you can safely assume it’s not just a figureof speech.

For Professor Stelarc, an Australian performance artist whose previous party tricks haveincluded using a robotic third arm and letting his muscles be remotely controlled by acomputer, growing a human ear on his arm was the obvious next step. Now, he wants toconnect it to the internet.

Nine years in the making, Stelarc’s third ear is part surgically modelled, part grown from

his own flesh – the result of an artificial implant that’s been left to fuse with his body. It began as an ear-shaped bio-polymer scaffold, inserted beneath his skin, which was thensuctioned over the scaffold. Within six months, cell tissue and blood vessels had grownaround the armature and now, the next step is to give it a more three-dimensional form,lifting the ear proud of the arm and adding an earlobe grown from his own stem cells.Not to mention making it Wi-Fi enabled.

“This ear is not for me,” Stelarc, whose experimental lab is based at Curtin University inPerth, told ABC News. “I’ve got two good ears to hear with. This ear is a remote listeningdevice for other people. They’ll be able to follow a conversation or hear the sounds of a

concert, wherever I am, wherever you are.” He plans to add a GPS tracker, so people will be able to follow his movements remotely, 24/7.

“There won’t be an on-off switch,” he added. “If I’m not in a Wi-Fi hotspot or I switch off my home modem, then perhaps I’ll be offline. But the idea is to try and keep the earonline all the time.”

He had the idea in 1996, but it took a decade before he found a team of surgeons willingto make it a reality. The project began as a quarter-scaled ear, grown outside his body, to

 be grafted on to his head, but the ambition grew into a full-size organ, complete withcommunicative capabilities. He has already tried to implant a microphone into the earonce. It functioned successfully at first, but had to be removed because of an infection.He hopes this won’t be a problem second time around.

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Stelarc is by no means alone in attempting to augment his own body with electronicimplants. As Bluetooth and Wi-Fi enabled devices become ever smaller, and access tothe technical know-how ever more open, a whole community of budding DIY cyborgshas emerged. Known as grinders, these body-hackers have stuck everything fromtracking devices and magnets to battery supplies and LED lights under their skin. Theirgruesome kitchen-sink procedures are often uploaded to YouTube, with tips and tricksenthusiastically discussed on online forums, and wetware (the biological equivalent of 

hardware) implants offered at weekend meet-ups. Here are some of the experimentsthey’ve conducted on themselves.

Project Cyborg

Declared “the world’s first cyborg”, Kevin Warwick is the academic face of biohacking,less bio-punk than bio-prof, as professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading. In1998 he was one of the first people to have an RFID tag implanted in his arm, whichtracked him around the campus, letting him open doors without touching them andmaking lights switch on when he walked into his lab. Christened Project Cyborg, his

experiments later extended to more sophisticated implants, including a 100-electrodechip implanted into the nerve fibres of his arm in 2002 that transmitted signals from hiswrist to a computer.

DIY health tracker

Bio-hacker Tim Cannon took a more DIY approach when he inserted a chunky device thesize of a pack of cards beneath his skin to monitor his temperature and blood pressure –two biometrics that can be read from outside the body just as accurately. The Circadiawas designed to communicate with a thermostat, controlling the climate of a room basedon a person’s body temperature, as well as send the person text messages when it thinksthey might be getting a fever. After the battery played up and he started suffering frompanic attacks, Cannon had the device removed after three months. But his company,Grindhouse Wetware, is now developing Circadia 2.0, which will apparently be able todetect blood glucose and oxygenation levels, as well as blood pressure and heart ratedata. They are also planning a gesture-sensitive silicon implant for the back of the handcalled North Star; tap it and it will glow red, during which time you will be able to use itto send Bluetooth commands to your phone.

Headphone implants

Fed up of losing your headphones? You could get them grafted into your head. That’swhat amateur grinder Rich Lee did, by implanting tiny magnets in his ears that pick upsignals from a wire coil around his neck, connected to a music player, to generate sound.This means he can listen to music without anyone knowing – though stealthy listeningwasn’t his main motivation. He had the magnets installed when he discovered he wasgoing blind. He decided that he could compensate for his loss of vision by learning toecholocate, just like a bat, interpreting the shape and dimensions of his surroundings

 based on how they react to emitted sound waves. And his ambitions don’t end there. “If I can have x-ray vision through some cybernetic technology I will have it,” he told the

Guardian, “even if it requires an ocular prosthetic that leaves me looking like amonster.”

Night vision eyedrops

For California biohacking group Science for the Masses, eating raw carrots just wasn’t

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More features

TopicsDesign Wearable technology Biometrics Computing Robots

cutting it in the quest for night vision. Their dream of seeing in the dark drove them todevelop a chemical cocktail, made up of chlorin e6 (a substance found in deep-sea fish),along with insulin and dimethylsulfoxide, and squirt it into the eyes of plucky groupmember Gabriel Licina. After turning his eyes black, the liquid apparently allowed Licinato identify shapes the size of a hand 10 metres away in the dark, as well as pick outpeople hiding in the woods 50 metres away – according to the findings of their study(PDF). Ophthalmologists strongly advise against trying this at home: they say a single

application of Ce6 can cause retinal haemorrhage and central retinal vein occlusion. Apair of night-vision goggles might be a safer option.

An extreme headache cure

Suffering from chronic cluster headaches, Dutchman Sander Pleij decided to insert aneurostimulator into his body. Controlled by a handheld remote, the device could sendelectrical impulses to the nerves in his head, calming headaches when they hit. But theimplant had unexpected psychological consequences, leading Pleji to suffer from severepanic attacks. Recounting the episode on a blog, he wrote: “The image of a knife flashed

through my mind, knife in my skin, in my scar; I would cut myself open with it, rip thetechnology from my body, if I couldn’t control myself … what? No! But the fear doubled:now I was also afraid I would cut the whole thing out of my body. What was my bodydoing to me? What was I up to?” As he told Vice Motherboard: “I wasn’t scared of thething, that it would do something. I was scared of me doing something to the thing.”

The sound of colour

For artist Neil Harbisson, the solution to being colour-blind was to transform the worldinto a polychromatic soundscape. His “eyeborg” antennae – which curves up from the

 back of his skull to hang in front of his face, like a wayward call-centre headset – isconnected to a microchip that translates colour into sound, detecting the light’s hue andconverting it into a frequency that he hears as a note. The sensor was originally devisedto help him counter a rare form of colour blindness called achromatopsia, which affectsone in 33,000 people and means he sees the world in greys. The antenna also allows himto perceive colours beyond the normal human spectrum: he can hear infrared andultraviolet. “For me, red isn’t the colour of passion as it is for many humans,” he told theGuardian. “It’s a serene colour. Violet, though, is savage to my ears.”

USB finger drive

When Finnish computer programmer Jerry Jalava lost half a finger in a motorbikeaccident, the obvious solution was to replace it with a USB stick. “It basically started as aoke with my friends,” he said. “Now I only have half a finger, what should I do with it?”

The answer from his computer geek chums was a prosthetic finger with a built-in 2GBflash drive, accessed by peeling back a rubbery “nail”. “When I’m using the USB, I justleave my finger inside the slot and pick it up after I’m ready,” he said, adding that he wasthinking about upgrading his faux finger to include more storage and wirelesstechnology.

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