Last year, Kennedy, a 67-year-old neurologist and inventor, did something unprecedented in the annals of self-experimentation. He paid a surgeon in Central America $25,000 to implant electrodes into his brain in order to establish a connection between his motor cortex and a computer.
Along with a small group of pioneers, Kennedy, who was born in Ireland, had in the late 1980s developed "invasive" human brain-computer interfaces—literally wires inside the brain attached to a computer, and he is widely credited as the first to allow a severely paralyzed "locked-in" patient to move a computer cursor using her brain. "The father of cyborgs," one magazine called him.
Kennedy's scientific aim has been to build a speech decoder—software that can translate the neuronal signals produced by imagined speech into words coming out of a speech synthesizer. But this work, carried out by his small Georgia company Neural Signals, had stalled, Kennedy says. He could no longer find research subjects, had little funding, and had lost the support of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 10 2015, @12:42AM
protect us from monstrous people
Yeah, horrible people like the guy who wants to help paralyzed people be able to talk again. Thanks, Daddy Gov't, for keeping us safe!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by anubi on Tuesday November 10 2015, @03:37AM
I think the OP was referring to those corporate leeches who use financial coercion to force the sale of whatever it is they want... in this case - they may want a YOU as a lab rat.
Financial and debt pressure being what it is, if it were made legal, there are those who would not think twice about conscripting you for "payment of debt".
Can you see the financial pressure to sell a kidney should that be made legal?
It would make yet another "rush to the bottom" as the elite classes who are chartered by our government to print money choose from those without that charter - just as it is for a person's time. Some of us must earn our money, while others pay for what they want by "extending the debt ceiling" - with all the work of a pen and a handshake.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]