Pete McRae, a robotics software programmer with a background in genetic engineering and neuroscience believes machines, in the very near future, will not only have the ability to think but will also have emotions. He is so obsessed with this belief that at times he cannot distinguish between biological life forms and machines. This strong belief and developments in the fields of robotics, neuroscience and nanotechnology lead him to develop a robot with an electronic brain that has the capabilities of a human brain. Could this mechanical brain think and feel like a human brain? The results of his experiment are not only shocking but they also bring back painful memories of his past. What does he learn about love and other emotions that go with it? Does he prove machines can have emotions and, dare we say, consciousness? What does his finding mean to the future of machines? Or for that matter, the future of biological life forms as we know them today?

Auszug. � Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

SLAVES TO NEURONS

Are we different from Machines?By Kaliannan Raju

AuthorHouse

Copyright � 2012 Dr. Kaliannan Raju
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4772-8712-5

Acknowledgements................................................................ixPreface.........................................................................xiChapter 1 Mice..................................................................1Chapter 2 Machines..............................................................31Chapter 3 Humans................................................................83Chapter 4 The Plan By Humans....................................................121Chapter 5 The Execution Of The Plan By Humans And A Machine.....................173Chapter 6 Machine With A Human Brain............................................231Chapter 7 A Very Human Machine..................................................295Chapter 8 Machines Of The Future................................................351Bibliography....................................................................369About the Author................................................................373

Chapter One

MICE

This was the part that Pete hated the most about his work: killing those mice after the completion of an experiment. Just entering the animal colony in the basement floor of the Neuroscience Research Institute was very unpleasant to him; the odor generated by the combination of the mouse food and the waste excreted by the mice was everywhere on the floor despite the excellent ventilation system that was always running. He entered a long narrow room about thirty feet in length and less than ten feet in width. The mouse cages—there were hundreds of them—were kept on shelves that ran along the entire length of the wall on both sides of the room. Pete pulled a cage that housed about a dozen mice that were no longer needed and carried it across the hallway to a smaller room where the carbon monoxide gas cylinders were kept. As he opened the door, he saw Alex Hamilton, another post doctoral research fellow in the Research Institute coming down the hall way.

"Going to gas those suckers?" Alex said in a derisive tone that Pete was only too familiar with.

"Yeah, will save their bodies for your Sunday barbeque.". Pete yelled back at Alex as he entered the room where the cabon monoxide gas cylinders were kept. As the door closed behind him he heard Alex say "You're wasting gas."

He put the cage with mice on a small counter next to a white plastic box that was connected to a gas cylinder. He stared at the mice wondering if they knew they only had few more minutes to live. Some mice looked at him directly for a few seconds; "Are they pleading for their lives?", he wondered. Few others were running along the walls of the cage oblivious to what was going on; the movement of the cage seemed to have excited them. One mouse was quietly eating the food that was in a small container in a corner of the cage, his last meal for sure.

Pete adjusted his thick eye glasses and pulled couple of latex gloves from the box on the counter and put them on. He never felt comfortable touching the mice even with gloved hands. His fellow researchers were so used to handling the mice they would not even bother using the gas to kill them. They would kill them by cervical dislocation—holding their head and tail and pulling them apart in a swift and sudden move. They said it was painless killing and the scientific community accepted this technique as an ethical way to kill small animals such as mice, but Pete never believed it. "It had to hurt for at least a few seconds." he thought. He relied on using the gas even if he had to kill just one mouse. He was perfectly at ease with cutting meat in the kitchen or carving turkey but handling those small rodents made him feel squeamish and cervical dislocation was just unthinkable. His colleagues made fun of him and called him a chicken but that never bothered him and he even made a conscious decision not to learn the technique.

With gloved hands, he opened the lid of the cage; the mice were all getting excited now and started making noise, like whistling with their lips. Pete scooped a few mice with both his hands and put them in the white plastic box. He slowly transferred rest of the mice to the plastic box and closed it. He then grabbed the metal knob on the cylinder and turned it counterclockwise to slowly release the gas into the plastic box and walked away to the other end of the room with his hands inside the deep pockets of his lab coat. He did not want to see the mice go to sleep although they never showed any sign of suffering. He always did this part very, very carefully and slowly. The right amount of gas had to be released, so the mice would just go to sleep within a few minutes. This, he thought was certainly painless. Once all of them were asleep, he would open the gas inlet a little more and wait for another few minutes before all the mice died.

He shut the gas off, opened the box and poked at the dead mice with his fingers to make sure they were not breathing. If any of them were still alive, he would have to start this process all over again and he hated doing that. He dumped the dead mice into a plastic bag, closed it and tossed it into a bin in the corner of the room. The cleaning staff would later sterilize and dispose off the dead mice.

Pete went back to the room with mice cages and saw Jane Harvey, a newly hired lab technician standing next to a table. There was a mouse cage on top of the table and there were couple of mice moving slowly on a diaper sheet next to the cage. There were also some dead mice on the same sheet. She picked one of the two mice, laid it on its belly on the diaper sheet holding it by the back of the neck in one hand and by the tail with her other hand as she looked up to greet Pete.

"Hello Dr. McRae" Jane said with a smile and at the same time without even looking down, she pulled the tail and the head of the mouse in opposite direction in a quick move and then put aside the almost dead rodent which jerked its body once before becoming still.

"Haven't I told you to call me just Pete?" He responded to her greeting while making a deliberate effort not to look at what she was doing with the mice as he walked to a cage that carried an identification tag with his name.

He stared at the mice inside that cage and thought about all the hard work, the long hours, the weekends and the sacrifice he and his wife Pam had to make since the time he started this project as a postdoctoral fellow at the Research Institute. It took him more than two years to create those genetically engineered mice and all he needed was just one mouse with a mutation at the exact location in the genome targeted by his experiment. His train of thoughts was interrupted by Jane.

"Pete, I am new here and I do not understand this 'gene knockout' technology. I heard you are very close to completing a gene knockout experiment. Can you explain this in simple terms that I can understand?" She was almost pleading with him in a soft and somewhat nervous tone.

Pete had been asked several times, mostly by his friends, to explain the new technology that had received lot of media coverage. Jane had started her new job just after completing her undergraduate program in a small town university and was obviously very excited by the high tech environment at the Research Institute and wanted to know all about the new technology. Pete could see the enthusiasm in Jane's face and he was more than happy...

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