Genetically engineering animals for war

It was not your everyday government request, but it was an utterly serious one. For years, the U .S. military has been hoping to develop "micro air vehicles" — ultrasmall flying robots capable of performing surveillance in dangerous territory. Building these machines is not easy. The dynamics of flight change at very small sizes, and the vehicles need to be lightweight enough to fly yet strong enough to carry cameras and other equipment. Most formidably, they need a source of power, dual screen car dvd player and batteries that are light enough for microfliers just don't have enough juice to keep the crafts aloft for very long.

By implanting these micromachines into animals' bodies and brains, we can seize control of their movements and behaviors. Genetics provides new options, too, with scientists engineering animals whose nervous systems are easy to manipulate. Together, these and other developments mean that we can make tiny flying cyborgs — and a whole lot more. Engineers, geneticists and neuroscientists are controlling animal minds in different ways and for different reasons, and their tools and techniques are becoming cheaper and easier for even us nonexperts to use. Before long, we may all be able to hijack animal bodies. The only question is whether we'll want to.

But Maharbiz bristles at the most sinister suggestions, at the media coverage that suggests his beetles are the product of, as he puts it, "some evil government conspiracy." As for the possibility that the U.S. government is planning to use the bugs to build a killer insect army or to spy on its own citizens?

A wireless system would allow scientists to manipulate a rat's movements and behaviors while it was roaming freely and give us a robo-rodent suitable for all sorts of special operations. Rats have an excellent sense of smell, so cyborg rats could be trained to detect the scent of explosives, for instance, underwater digital camera and then steered to a field suspected to contain land mines. (The task would pose no danger to the animals, which are too light to set off mines.) Or they could be directed into collapsed buildings and tasked with sniffing out humans trapped beneath the rubble, performing a job similar to the one Maharbiz imagines for his cyborg insects. "They could fit through crawl spaces that a bloodhound never could," says Linda Hermer-Vazquez, a neuroscientist who was part of the SUNY team at the time.