USB-drive in your finger? Meet the 'body-hackers' who turn themselves into 'cyborgs'
Not content with version 1.0 bodies, today's bio-hackers are installing USB drives in their fingertips and growing third ears on their arms
When the director of a research institute called the Alternative Anatomies Laboratory says he's got something up his sleeve, you can safely assume it's not just a figure of speech.
For Professor Stelarc, an Australian performance artist whose previous party tricks have included using a robotic third arm and letting his muscles be remotely controlled by a computer, growing a human ear on his arm was the obvious next step. Now, he wants to connect it to the internet.
Nine years in the making, Stelarc's third ear is part surgically modelled, part grown from his own flesh - the result of an artificial implant that's been left to fuse with his body.
It began as an ear-shaped bio-polymer scaffold, inserted beneath his skin, which was then suctioned over the scaffold. Within six months, cell tissue and blood vessels had grown around the armature, and now the next step is to give it a more three-dimensional form, lifting the ear proud of the arm and adding an earlobe grown from his own stem cells. Not to mention making it Wifi enabled.
"This ear is not for me," Stelarc, based at Curtin University in Perth, told ABC News. "I've got two good ears to hear with. This ear is a remote listening device for other people. They'll be able to follow a conversation or hear the sounds of a concert, wherever I am, wherever you are." He plans to add a GPS tracker, so people will be able to follow his movements remotely, 24/7.