Kindgo
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By Jason Hopps
Reuters
Posted September 2 2002, 1:16 PM EDT
LONDON -- A British scientist said on Monday he had been inundated with requests by panicked parents to implant a tracking microchip into their children after the recent murders of two 10-year-olds in a quiet English town.
Cybernetics expert Kevin Warwick from Reading University near London believes he can allay parents fears with a tiny microchip that may prevent an abduction from becoming a murder.
The controversial robotics scientist gained fame in Britain after he wired his own nervous system to a computer in an experiment he hopes will eventually give paralysed people more control over their own bodies.
``A number of families have contacted me after the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman with the possibility of using an implant for their own daughter,'' Warwick told Reuters in a telephone interview.
The bodies of the two friends were found in remote woodland two weeks after they went missing from their home town of Soham in eastern England on August 4.
``There are several options, including the possibility of using a mobile phone network to transmitting a signal and linking it to a Global Positioning System,'' he said.
One family, the Duvals, has offered up their 11-year-old daughter Danielle as the first guinea pig to test the electronic tag, which Warwick said he hopes to perfect sometime before Christmas.
The operation would involve implanting a small transmitter about one inch long -- the size of a lozenge, Warwick says -- either into the child's arm or stomach.
``A potential abductor wouldn't know the child had the device and it could be switched off to sleep mode when it wasn't needed and to conserve its battery,'' Warwick said.
Watches that perform a similar function are already commercially available in the United States, but they could be too easily removed and discarded, Warwick said.
Danielle's mother Wendy told the Daily Mirror newspaper on Monday:
``After the news of Holly and Jessica we sat down as a family and discussed what we could do...I know nothing is ever foolproof but we believe the microchip will go a long way to protecting her.''
A spate of recent abductions in the United States have put parents there on edge as they worry about their children, but Warwick believes it is for society to decide if a microchip implant is the ethical way to combat such fears.
``There are of course many more questions to be asked and I suspect there will be objections to an implant, but if the general trend in Britain is in favour of such an operation it will be ready to go by Christmas,'' he said.
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God bless,
Kindgo
Inside the will of God there is no failure. Outside the will of God there is no success.
Posts: 4320 | From: Sunny Florida | Registered: Jun 2002
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