Tomorrowland (10 page)

“Are you ready?” repeats Dobelle.

“I’ve been ready for twenty years.”

Jens slides the glasses onto his face, and the techs power up the system. I am sitting across the table from him. As it turns out, when the world’s first bionic eye is turned on, Jens sees me.

“Wow!” says Jens.

“Wow what?” I ask.

“I’m really using the part of my brain that’s been doing dick-all for two decades.”

“And that’s only one implant,” says Dobelle. “We still have to integrate the other side, and we haven’t installed the edge-recognition software yet. The image is going to get better and better.”

Jens turns away, and we clear all objects off the conference table. Dobelle picks up a telephone and puts it down on the far corner. Jens turns back around. The camera is sending data down the pipe and to the implant in his brain at one frame per second. So when he first scans the table his head swivels, robotic, and turtle-slow. It takes him nearly two minutes to find the phone — but he finds the phone. Then we do it again. Fifteen minutes later, Jens can pick up the receiver in less than thirty seconds. Within a half hour, it takes him less than ten.

They gradually work the frame speed up until there’s nothing left to do but strap the signal processor and power pack to Jens’s hips, like guns in their holsters. Then Jens heads out back, where he climbs inside a convertible Mustang. The top is down. The wind is in his hair. He fires up the ignition. Dobelle doesn’t let him tour the freeways, but he has his way with the parking lot.

“The next version,” Dobelle tells me, “may have enough resolution to use while driving in traffic.” In fact, since this is only a simple camera we’re talking about, one could imagine the addition of any number of superhuman optical features: night vision, X-ray vision, microscopic focus, long-range zoom. Forget the camera, even; there’s no reason you couldn’t jack directly into the Net. In the future, the disabled may prove more abled; we may all want their prostheses.

7.

Public discussion of electricity’s effects on vision dates to 1751, when it was addressed by Benjamin Franklin following his celebrated kite-and-key experiment. Soon researchers were discussing
the possibility of treating blindness through electrical stimulation, but despite some early advocates the idea did not catch on.

This is perhaps not surprising. The human eye occupies a weird place in history. For more than a century, creationists, staring down Darwin’s evolutionary barrel, claimed sight as proof positive of God’s existence. The eye was too complicated for anything as seemingly accidental as natural selection. By extension, curing blindness was the sole province of faith healers. “It used to be a religious miracle,” says Tom Hoglund of the Foundation Fighting Blindness, “but now it’s a scientific miracle.”

On June 13 Dobelle addressed the annual meeting of the American Society of Artificial Internal Organs in New York. He told the stunned, packed house about eight patients of his who’d had the surgery, with Jens the first to have his implant turned on. Then he showed a tape of Jens driving. “I got the most applause,” Dobelle told me, “but I don’t think anyone really knew what they were seeing.”

In fact, to most of the artificial vision community, Dobelle’s breakthrough came out of the blue. For years he had been merely a footnote, known mainly for his early work in phosphene stimulation. People had heard of Jerry, but because the testing was done privately, outside of academia, many felt the work suspect.

Dobelle leads one of a dozen teams spread out over four continents racing ahead with all sorts of artificial vision systems. There are teams working on battery-powered retinal implants and solar-powered retinal implants, and teams growing ganglion cells on silicon chips, and teams working on optic-nerve stimulators. And there is Dick Normann, the former head of the University of Utah’s department of bioengineering, who up until Dobelle’s success was among the front-runners.

Like Dobelle, Normann is working on a visual neuroprosthesis. I was the first to tell him that the race was over: He lost.

“That’s fantastic,” Normann says.

“You’re not even mad?”

“Fantastic, fantastic, fantastic” — and then he pauses — “if it works.”

“What do you mean? I was there. I saw it work.”

“But what do you mean by work? If a patient sees a point of light and it moves, is that sight? I need to know what the patient sees.”

“OK. But what does it mean for your research?”

“Mean? It doesn’t mean anything. We’re going to keep going like we were going.”

Normann also envisions a three-part system — implant, signal processor, camera — but with a critical difference. While Dobelle’s implant rests on the surface of the visual cortex, Normann’s would penetrate it.

Normann’s implant is much smaller than Dobelle’s — about the size of a nail’s head and designed to be hammered into the cortex, sinking to the exact spot in the brain where normal visual information is received. According to Normann, the implant is so precise that each electrode can stimulate individual neurons.

“The reason this matters,” he explains, “is that the cornerstone of artificial vision is the interaction between current and neurons. Because Dobelle’s implant sits on the surface of the visual cortex, it requires a lot of current and lights up a whole bunch of neurons. Something in the 1- to 10-milliamp range. With that much juice, a lot can go wrong.”

Tell me about it.

“With penetrating electrodes, we’ve got the current down to the 1- to 10-microamp range. That’s a thousandfold difference.” Lowering the amperage lowers the risk of seizure.

But that’s not all. Decreasing the amount of current also allows an increase of resolution: “The lower the current, the more electrodes you can pack on an implant,” explains Normann. “We’re not there yet, but with my electrodes there’s the chance of creating a contiguous phosphene field — that’s exactly what you and I have — and that’s just not possible with Dobelle’s surface implant.”

Which is the way things go when what was once a land of
mystics becomes a field for engineers. Just like every other new technology, like operating systems and web browsers, artificial vision is heading toward a standards war of its own.

Now that it’s not faith healing, it’s Beta versus VHS.

8.

To really try to understand what Jens sees, I head to USC in Los Angeles, where Mark Humayun has his lab. Like the competition, Humayun uses eyeglass-mounted video cameras and signal processors to generate an image, but unlike Normann’s and Dobelle’s neuroprostheses, his implant sits atop the retina. It’s designed to take the place of damaged rods and cones by jump-starting the still-healthy ones and then using the eye’s own signal processing components — the ganglion cells and optic nerve — to send visual information to the brain.

“It’s a limited approach, aimed at a limited number of pathologies, but it has its advantages,” says Humayun. “We thought it was a better idea to operate on a blind eye than on a normal brain.”

Humayun’s Retinal Prosthesis Lab runs out of USC’s Doheny Eye Institute. The room is small and square. Piles of electronic gear sit atop counters of maroon plastic — the same hue that offsets the bright yellow on Trojan football jerseys. Lab-coated technicians hunch over computers, barely registering my arrival.

James Weiland, an assistant professor at the institute, helps me into an elaborate headdress: Wraparound goggles cover my eyes, and black, light-blocking cloth hangs down over my ears. Plastic straps secure a miniature camera to the middle of my forehead, and wires run down my back and to a laptop computer to my left. The camera moves where my eyes move and then projects that image onto the “screen” of the goggles. The device, called a Glasstron and built by Sony, turns my normal eyesight into a pixelated version of itself.

With the power shut off, the view is complete darkness. Weiland flips a switch and asks me what I see.

“Vague gray shapes. Big dots. Blurry edges.”

“Can you see the door? Could you walk to the door?”

“Yeah, I could, if you want me to trip over things and fall down.”

“That’s a five-by-five display. Hold on,” says Weiland. “I’m going to up your pixel count to thirty-two by thirty-two.”

It’s Weiland’s belief that a 32-by-32 array, 1,024 pixels, should satisfy most vision needs. This is probably ten times the count on Dobelle’s implant and much closer to Normann’s design.

Beside me I can hear Weiland futzing with the computer. There’s a sudden wash of light, like viewing the
Star Wars
jump to hyperspace through a waterfall.

“Can you see now?”

“Not really.”

“Give it a minute, let yourself adjust.”

“OK, I’ve got blobs and edges and motion.”

Suddenly, things become clearer. What moments ago was attack of the Jell-O creatures has become doorways and faces.

“What happened?” I ask. “Did you up the resolution again?”

“No,” says Weiland, “that’s your brain learning to see.”

It’s a weird feeling, watching my brain reorganize itself, but that’s exactly what’s happening. Beside me the fuzzy edge of the counter becomes a strong line, and then the computer atop it snaps into place.

I take one last glance around. Weiland is still not visible. Then there is a subtle shift in color. A drizzle of gray firms up, and I can see the white plane of his forehead offset by the darkness of his hair.

I look around: door, desk, computer, person.

So this is what a miracle looks like.

PART TWO

THE FUTURE OUT THERE

Reengineering the Everglades

THE WORLD’S FIRST TERRAFORMING PROJECT

Certainly, science and technology are transforming our internal environment — our bodies, our biology, our brains — but what about the external environment, what about our impact on the world at large?

As of late, there has been much talk about this impact. From an environmental perspective, we have not played well with others. Melting icecaps, dying species, poisoned landscapes — the list goes on and on. To combat such decline, researchers have begun using big words — mega-engineering, terraforming, hydroforming — to discuss having an even bigger impact. No longer are we simply tinkering with ecology; now we’re transforming ecosystems.

The story told in this chapter is one example: an attempt to rebuild the Everglades, the world’s largest saw-grass prairie, once a free-flowing wonder, now a devastated mess. This effort is the largest and most expensive public works project ever undertaken. It also marks our first attempt at terraforming, our once sci-fi term for the sculpting of worlds, and both a testament to the incredible scale at which our species can now play and, perhaps, the incredible hubris it takes to play at this scale.

1.

The Everglades are dying. Nearly half of their 4 million acres have been swallowed up by sprawl and sugarcane. Almost 70 plant and animal species that reside there hover on the brink of extinction. The wading bird populations — egrets and herons and spoonbills and the like — have declined a staggering 90 percent. The saw grass prairies, for which the region is famous, have grown smaller with each passing year, and the once legendary game fish populations aren’t doing much better. Among the few fish that do remain, scientists have detected enough mercury in their fatty tissue to open a thermometer factory.

In truth, this degradation is nothing new. The Everglades have been suffering since 1850, when Florida’s first settlers began draining the swamp. But it was a later effort to fix the state’s weather that really spelled ecosystem doom. The state has only two seasons: wet and dry. The wet season produces floods; the dry, drought. This bad-news cycle ran unchecked until the 1920s, when a pair of back-to-back hurricanes created a deluge that killed 2,500 people. Public outcry moved the government into action. The Army Corps of Engineers, the world’s greatest earthmovers, were called in to do a top-to-bottom liquid redesign of the entire state. The “4 Ds” was the Corps’s unofficial motto: Dike it, dam it, divert it, drain it. Over the next 50 years, they cut 1,800 miles of canals between Lake Okeechobee and the Florida Bay and installed 300 floodgates and 16 major pump stations to manage the water.

The Corps captured the Everglades. By taming the flood-and-drought cycle, the engineers made Florida’s Atlantic Coast safe for development and its midlands safe for agriculture. But
like most wild things, this ecosystem had trouble with captivity. What once had been one of the world’s largest contiguous wetlands was jigsawed into 16 parts — separate and isolated and not faring well. By 1990, it was clear that the Everglades were facing more than the loss of native species. The underlying hydrology was out of whack; the whole deal was fading fast.

To combat environmental disaster, President Clinton, in his last year in office, signed the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) into law. It’s the largest, most complicated, and — with a cost of $8 billion — most expensive ecological restoration project ever attempted. Former secretary of the interior Bruce Babbitt, who helped usher the measure through Congress, contends that future historians will rank the Everglades Plan as one of the most important pieces of environmental law ever passed. Maybe the most important. But unlike, say, the Clean Air Act, which merely limits the release of pollutants, CERP is a massive engineering project on a scale that is literally out of this world.

Scientists and engineers and politicians are still dithering with the details, but everyone agrees upon one fact: You can’t just “go back to nature.” Florida’s population has grown exponentially over the past hundred years and, in many places, there’s no nature to go back to. Instead, you have to bulldoze this land back to its original ecological function, Roto-Rooter the planet’s plumbing, rethink and redesign and rebuild it. The plan calls for rechanneling a major river, transforming Florida’s natural aquifer into a hundred-billion-gallon freshwater storage tank, and developing a new type of filtration system that meets the toughest water-quality standards on earth.