Scott Goldsmith
I tried biohacking: the use of tech implants to augment biology
A man with metal horns protruding from his forehead and a split tongue poking out between his teeth advanced toward me with a scalpel. “I’ve never done this before,” he joked, inching closer.
A full-sleeve tattoo snaked out from beneath his black T-shirt, extending from a demon on his bicep to a skull on his fist. My eyes darted between skull and scalpel, then instinctively shut as I cringed, bracing for contact. Zack Watson, the inked-up body modification artist I’d hired — and drove seven hours from New York City to see — was about to sew a magnet under my skin.
The entire procedure took two minutes: Watson rubbed iodine on my right ring finger for sanitization, sliced open the soft pad of my fingertip, spread the edges of my skin apart with a curved hook and inserted a gold-plated, silicone-coated magnet the size of a pencil eraser inside with tweezers.
He then wiped up the blood with gauze, tied my finger shut with two stitches, and told me how to take care of the wound in the weeks following to make sure my body didn’t reject the magnet as it healed.
Scott Goldsmith
Watson, who has several implants of his own, including silicone rectangles in his forearms that make his skin feel riblike, has been putting magnets and chips in people for three years at Ice 9 Studio, a tattoo and piercing parlor in Pittsburgh’s South Side Flats (though he recently left to open his own shop). His efforts are part of an underground movement in which people get implants as commonly as others get tattoos.
Interest has been spreading, with Watson quickly working through his latest supply of magnets. One woman recently traveled to Ice 9 Studio from Australia for a radio-frequency identification chip she uses to store personal information. Watson’s business frequently comes through his connection to Grindhouse Wetware, a Pittsburgh-area startup of “biohackers” who aim to augment the human body with technology. If successful, they’ll be at the vanguard of a movement called transhumanism that experiments with how technology can give us new, almost-superhuman, abilities.
Is biohacking the next phase of human evolution?
An underground community is experimenting with tech implants that could disrupt the healthcare industry by pushing the limits of the human body. But will regulation stop their devices from wide adoption?
Biohacking enthusiasts have tinkered with electronic tattoos and subdermal — underneath-the-skin — implants for two decades, sharing their efforts in videos on YouTube and internet forums to spread and encourage innovation. Proponents believe smart implants represent the future of wearable technology, potentially making humans healthier and more efficient while providing new opportunity to consumer-technology companies such as Apple Inc. AAPL, -0.01% and Alphabet Inc. GOOGL, +0.43% GOOG, +0.20% that are investing heavily in technology that could revolutionize health care.
“You’re talking about extending your body to its maximum potential — and then beyond,” said Grindhouse co-founder Tim Cannon.
Scott GoldsmithBig tech companies see big opportunity
In the late 1990s, an Englishman named Kevin Warwick was among the first people to put an RFID chip under his skin, letting him turn lights on and off and interact with appliances by scanning the chip with computer-controlled devices. Today, many people — including Warwick — are pushing that concept even further.
Amal Graafstra, who has tinkered with biohacking for at least a decade, is developing a smart gun that would use an RFID chip to ensure that it only fires in the hands of its owner. French tattoo artist JC Sheitan Tenet, who lost his right arm as a child and had to relearn how to draw with his non-dominant left hand, was recently fitted with a working tattoo machine prosthetic so he could resume work with his dominant hand.
