14 DAY TRIAL // Sinister looking and incredibly effective, such devices look like they are coming straight from the scenes of a dystopian movie.
Featured in the Cell magazine, the development of such a device by Dr. Michael R. Bruchas and his team of researchers managed to build a device for releasing drugs directly into the brain via remote control.
Cell magazine mentions the therapeutic advantages of such a device and how it can actually help calm or excite the brains it is attached to via special substances. This time medics and scientists won't need to introduce substances in the brain only via the blood and pass the blood-brain barrier, if it happens, as the blood-brain barrier effectively prevents most substances from reaching their targets within our brain.
The effectiveness of this device has been tested in an experiment on laboratory mice. The critters have been trained to react to stimulation by secreting dopamine-releasing protein every time they were exposed to light. The scientists interfered with the animal's light-sensitive reaction by using the remote-controlled device to release a drug that counteracts the effects of dopamine. Dopamine is also the same substance that controls the risk-taking behavior like gambling.
Useful and possibly evil
Apparently, scientists also managed to "remotely control" not only the device implanted in the mice heads but also the mice themselves. Once they decided to deploy a drug in one side or the other of the mice's brain, the researchers managed to steer the pets left and right.
Morally, the new device makes a ton of sense, and it will help patients with intractable mental disease and will also help patients who have serious locomotion issues by stimulating the brains for possible cures. However, as any medical device that connects straight into the brain, it can also have less morally acceptable uses. By releasing anti-dopamine drugs straight into soldiers’ brains, remote controllers could turn those people in mindless berserkers and ruthless killing machines. The same way people feelings and attitudes could be dialed down by a simple push of a button.
Although being used for such purposes wouldn't be accepted in the civilized world in a public manner, less morally constrained individuals with enough financial and political power would see devices like these as being of great use.
