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Applied Digital Solutions--which is trademarking the phrase "Get Chipped!"--has big plans for its little device. In the next few years, it wants to add sensors that will read your vital signs--pulse, temperature, blood sugar and so on--and a satellite receiver that can track where you are. The company makes a pager-like gadget called Digital Angel that does both those things, and its engineers are doing their darnedest to cram Digital Angel's functions into a package small enough to implant. Once they do, VeriChip will be very powerful indeed. That's one of the reasons the Jacobses want to get involved. "There are endless possibilities," says Derek. "For me it's marvelous," says Leslie. "Every day I worry about my husband. We definitely feel it will make us all feel more secure."
Security is part of the VeriChip business plan. The company has already signed a deal with the California department of corrections to track the movements of parolees using Digital Angel. Seelig believes VeriChip could function as a theftproof, counterfeit-proof ID, like having a driver's license embedded under your skin. He suggests that airline crews could wear one to ensure that terrorists don't infiltrate the cockpit in disguise. "I travel quite a bit," he says, "and I want to make sure the pilots in that plane belong there."
Could the airlines or government really require pilots to get chipped? "I think we have a right to demand that," says Seelig. "Our lives are in their hands." It sounds extreme, but there are precedents. In the early '90s several states considered laws that would have required female child abusers and women on welfare to wear birth-control implants. The proposals were not very popular. "There's a feeling that technology has outpaced the policy process," says Steven Aftergood, a senior research analyst at the Federation of American Scientists. "We aren't in a position to apply these new devices with the wisdom and prudence that is needed."
Prudent or not, implant technology is racing ahead with bionic speed. Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading in England, is working on the next step. In a few weeks, he will receive an implant that will wirelessly connect the nerves in his arm to a PC. The computer will record the activity of his nervous system and stimulate the nerves to produce small movements and sensations; such an implant could eventually help a person suffering from paralysis to move parts of the body the brain can't reach. If all goes well, Warwick will put a companion chip in his wife Irena and let the two implants communicate with each other. "If I move my finger, she'll feel something," he explains. "We'll be closer than anybody's been before--nervous system to nervous system."
There are plenty of skeptics, but Jeffrey Jacobs is not one of them. "People have been worried about Big Brother for years," he says. "The three of us want to be part of not just this new technology but an evolution of humanity."