They're no RoboRats, but. . .: Scientists control rodents through electrode implants

By implanting electrodes in rats' brains, scientists have createdremote-controlled rodents they can command to turn left or right,climb trees and navigate piles of rubble. Someday, scientists said,rats might even carry tiny video cameras to search for disastersurvivors.

"If you have a collapsed building and there are people under therubble, there's no robot that exists now that would be capable ofgoing down into such a difficult terrain and finding those people,but a rat would be able to do that," said John Chapin, a professor ofphysiology and pharmacology at the State University of New York inBrooklyn.

The lab animals aren't exactly robot rats. They had to be trainedto carry out the commands.

Chapin's team fitted five rats with electrodes and power-packbackpacks. When signaled by a laptop computer, the electrodesstimulated the rodents' brains and cued them to scurry in the desireddirection, then rewarded them by stimulating a pleasure center in thebrain.

The rats' movements could be controlled up to 1,640 feet away, thelength of more than five football fields.

The findings appear in today's issue of the journal Nature. Otherresearchers said the work is interesting but is an engineering feat,not an advance in animal neuroscience.

Randy Gallistel, a professor of psychology and cognitive scienceat Rutgers University, said it's basically the same thing, with atwist, that scientists found they could do almost 50 years ago bystimulating the reward-sensing area of a rat's brain.

"Without the gee-whizery, without the remote-control and so on,that this kind of thing was possible has been obvious for decades,"he said.

The experiments used three implanted electrodes - one in the brainregion that senses reward or pleasure, and one each in areas thatprocess signals from the rat's left and right whisker bundles.

Chapin's team trained the rats in a maze by signaling the left andright whisker-sensing regions. When a rat turned in the correctdirection, its reward-sensing region was stimulated. Activating onlythis region caused them to move forward, the team found.

Howard Eichenbaum, a professor of psychology at Boston University,said the research, while not a major advance, is "clever" and holdsthe promise of using animals as humans'"eyes" or as couriers to reachtrapped victims.

Aside from the technological challenges, he said there may beethical concerns about turning animals into "intelligent robots"serving humans.

"It's one thing to see a rat running around like this, peopledon't get too emotional about that, but as soon as you get into dogsor work animals, people start getting real excited," he said.

Chapin's team has tested tiny video cameras strapped to wired ratsto see whether they might be used to transmit images and sounds ofpeople trapped inside ruins. But Chapin said the camera needs to berefined to compensate for the rodents' jerky movements, and the rats'backpack miniaturized to implant it beneath their skin.

The potential of using such implantable electrodes to controlhumans - which a Tulane University researcher tried during the 1960s,with unclear results - is something Chapin said he opposes sostrongly he believes it should be illegal.

Kate Rears, a policy analyst at the Electronic Privacy InformationCenter in Washington, said technological advances mean human-controltechnology can no longer be dismissed as far-fetched.

"I think that a lot of people are very wary of that sort of thingand understandably so," Rears said. "I don't think it's a sign ofparanoia to react against this because it is very odd. It's Brave NewWorldish."

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