The cyborg has become something of a sci-fi cliché, but the term was still novel in the 1970s, when The Six Million Dollar Man hit the air waves — too novel for American audiences, apparently. The show was originally going to be called Cyborg, after the Martin Caidin bestseller it was based on, but the TV audience wasn’t deemed as sophisticated as the book’s techno-spy-thriller audience.
While the term is now used as a (more fashionable) synonym for bionic — a mix of biological and electronic parts — the original meaning of the word was subtly different. In 1960, when Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline suggested artifact-organism systems for exploring space, their emphasis was on systems. Such cyborgs would be cybernetic organisms, in the sense of the then-burgeoning field of cybernetics, the study of the structure of regulatory systems — what we tend to call control theory or systems theory today.
Their piece on Cyborgs and Space reminds me of Cordwainer Smith’s hard-to-explain science-fiction classic, Scanners Live in Vain:
What are some of the devices necessary for creating self-regulating man-machine systems? This self-regulation must function without the benefit of consciousness in order to cooperate with the body’s own autonomous homeostatic controls. For the exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic system unconsciously, we propose the term “Cyborg.” The Cyborg deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulatory control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments.
If man in space, in addition to flying his vehicle, must continually be checking on things and making adjustments merely in order to keep himself alive, he becomes a slave to the machine. The purpose of the Cyborg, as well as his own homeostatic systems, is to provide an organizational system in which such robot-like problems are taken care of automatically and unconsciously, leaving man free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel.
I suppose it wasn’t obvious at the time that flying his vehicle wasn’t going to be particularly challenging for the astronaut. (I believe Chuck Yeager had a few choice words on that.)
What kind of high-tech homeostatic systems did they have in mind?
One device helpful to consideration of the construction of Cyborgs, which is already available, is the ingenious osmotic pressure pump capsule developed by S. Rose for continuous slow injections of biochemically active substances at a biological rate. The capsule is incorporated into the organism and allows administration of a selected drug at a particular organ and at a continuous variable rate, without any attention on the part of the organism. Capsules are already available which will deliver as little as 0.01 ml/day for 200 days, and there is no reason why this time could not be extended considerably. The apparatus has already been used on rabbits and rats, and for continuous heparin injection in man. No untoward general effect on health was noted when the injector was buried in animals. As long as five years ago, an injector 7 cm long and 1.4 cm in diameter, weighing 15 gm, was successfully buried under the skin of rats weighing 150-250 gm. The photo on page 27 shows a rat weighing 220 gm with an injector in situ.
The combination of an osmotic pressure pump capsule with sensing and controlling mechanisms can form a continuous control loop which will act as an adjunct to the body’s own autonomous controls. In this manner, these controls can be changed to the desired performance characteristics under various environmental conditions. If these characteristics were determined, such a system would be possible today with the selection of appropriate drugs.
Not exactly Steve Austin.
(Hat tip to Nyrath.)