RALEIGH — A wonderful example of the magnificance of modern science can be found right here in North Carolina, among Dr. Miguel Nicolelis and his research colleagues at Duke University. A story in Monday’s News & Observer clued me in on Nicolelis’ most recent work, but you can learn a lot more by searching online for “Nicolelis” and “monkey.”
Basically, Nicolelis, the co-director of Duke’s Center for Neuroengineering, and his research team have helped to open the door to truly functional artificial limbs, among other promising developments. They hooked up the brains of monkeys to computers and later to prosthetics. Eventually, the monkeys were able to direct computer images and robotic limbs to move simply by thinking about it — precisely the same way that we operate our own appendages.
The possibilities are mind-boggling. Already conducting some preliminary work with humans, Nicolelis thinks that within a couple of years there may be devices based on their research that could allow people with spinal-cord injuries or other forms of paralysis to talk again. This is truly amazing.
For some, it’s a little too amazing. There are critics, as I am coming to understand (though not without some shock). For one thing, Nicolelis’ research has been funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The Pentagon is interesting in finding ways to aid soldiers and others suffering from war-related injuries. Is there a taint to science generated by the military-industrial-university complex? Only if you live in a Noam Chomsky fantasy world. Meanwhile, here in the real world, the suffering can now feel hope that a miracle is around the corner.
Speaking of the suffering, another line of attack on this kind of research, and on Nicolelis in particular, is that his work results in cruelty to his animal subjects. The Duke team rejects these charges, made by groups whose credibility is questionable, but more important is the underlying problem of employing any kind of moral calculus that would elevate the needs of a few laboratory animals over the crushing burden felt by millions of people around the world living with partial or near-total paralysis — and the suffering of the millions more who love and care for them.
Finally, some “ethicists” are apparently troubled not that the kind of medical progress represented by the Nicolelis research is being facilitated by the warfare state or the torture of monkeys but that people consider it to be progress at all. Taking their lead from the national movement to squelch other medical research into fields such as human genetics, these critics believe that something unique and morally compelling about humanity will be lost if physicians and researchers find ways to eliminate our flaws, cure our diseases, and, yes, make the lame walk again. If God wanted our lives to be easy, why did he create disease and tragedy? they ask. Shouldn’t we leave the working of miracles to him?
I find this argument unpersuasive, and that’s putting it politely. “God’s plan” surely does not require creatures created in his image to stand idly by and let fellow human beings suffer and die when the means of forestalling such tragedies are within their grasp. If this twisted view of our ethical responsibilities were correct, then we wouldn’t bother protecting ourselves against injury, or taking vitamins, or visiting our doctors, or performing the many other actions we do each day to make ourselves safer, healthier, and happier. Who is to say that the human mind isn’t itself a miracle, and that failing to use it to ameliorate human suffering isn’t a grievous sin?
It’s delightful, even liberating, to contemplate that while the activists fulminate, the chin-tuggers ruminate, and the politicians procrastinate, bright and heroic people out in the real world are out solving some of mankind’s most ancient and challenging problems.
Thank God. Really.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.
