Nathan Kline

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“To Keep From Getting Numbed Their Brains Will Be Warmed Or Fed Energizers”

August 10, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I put up a couple of posts this week about computer scientist Manfred Clynes (here and here), who, along with psychiatrist Nathan Kline, coined the term “cyborg” in 1960 for a theory they had that as humans began to travel in space they would have to incorporate silicone into their carbon in order to survive and thrive. It was the nascency of the space program and seemed no more far-fetched than anything else. From “Man Remade to Live in Space,” a 1960 Life magazine article that further investigated their cyborg theories:

“The cyborg idea, presented recently to an impressed Astronaut conference, was conceived by an unusual partnership of doctor and computer engineer. Dr. Nathan Kline is a famous psychiatrist and researcher in mental drugs at New York’s Rockland State Hospital. Engineer Manfred Clynes does computer studies at the same hospital on body cybernetics: the interrelationship of the body’s check-and-balance systems.

For cyborgs, Kline and Clynes dispense with most conventional space flight plans. Cyboorgs will wear sealed skintight suits but will travel in unsealed cabins exposed to the near vacuum of space. Ordinarily, at these low pressures the blood would boil and the lungs explode. But cyborgs’ lungs will be partly deflated and their blood will be cooled. To keep from getting numbed their brains will be warmed or fed energizers. Their messages to one another will be picked up electrically from their vocal nerves and transmitted by radio. Their mouths will be sealed and unused. Concentrated food will be piped direct to their stomachs or blood streams. Wastes will be chemically processed to make new food. Totally worthless end-products will be kept in small canisters on their backs. Kline’s and Clynes’ motives in developing cyborgs are not at all astronautic. Kline wants to work out the problems involved because the solutions will have vast implications for medicine as a whole. Clynes, an accomplished pianist, feels the artistic experiences to be had in space should not be overlooked. ‘Imagine,’ he says, ‘what leaps a ballet dancer could take on the moon.'”

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“Only By Augmenting Our Physiology With Drugs And Machines Could We Thrive In Extraterrestrial Environs”

August 9, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Ben Popper’s new Verge consideration of the queasy topic of bio-hacking and the advent of the real-life cyborg:

“In one sense, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, part man, part machine, animated by electricity and with superhuman abilities, might be the first dark, early vision of what humans bodies would become when modern science was brought to bear. A more utopian version was put forward in 1960, a year before man first travelled into space, by the scientist and inventor Manfred Clynes. Clynes was considering the problem of how mankind would survive in our new lives as outer space dwellers, and concluded that only by augmenting our physiology with drugs and machines could we thrive in extraterrestrial environs. It was Clynes and his co-author Nathan Kline, writing on this subject, who coined the term cyborg.

At its simplest, a cyborg is a being with both biological and artificial parts: metal, electrical, mechanical, or robotic. The construct is familiar to almost everyone through popular culture, perhaps most spectacularly in the recent Iron Man films. Tony Stark is surely our greatest contemporary cyborg: a billionaire businessman who designed his own mechanical heart, a dapper bachelor who can transform into a one man fighter jet, then shed his armour as easily as a suit of clothes.

Britain is the birthplace of 21st century biohacking, and the movement’s two foundational figures present a similar Jekyll and Hyde duality. One is Lepht Anonym, a DIY punk who was one of the earliest, and certainly the most dramatic, to throw caution to the wind and implant metal and machines into her flesh. The other is Kevin Warwick, an academic at the University of Reading department of cybernetics. Warwick relies on a trained staff of medical technicians when doing his implants. Lepht has been known to say that all she requires is a potato peeler and a bottle of vodka.”

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