Word: skins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Working in Konikoffs laboratory, L. W. Reynolds implants corrosion-resistant electrodes in his rats, one of them just under the belly skin, the other in the abdominal cavity. Thin insulated wires lead out of the skin, and through them flows a current strong enough (155 microwatts) to run a miniature 500-kilocycle transmitter. The transmitter used at present is too big to put completely inside a rat, but the engineers believe that if it were reduced in size and tucked under the rat's skin, its body-powered signal would be easily heard several hundred yards away. The electrodes...
Using rabbits and dogs, Konikoff plans to put the whole works, electrodes and transmitter, inside the skin and leave the package there for long periods, the transmitter broadcasting all the time. The ultimate purpose is to develop body-powered devices for use inside humans. One possibility is the "pacemaker," which gives electrical timing to ailing hearts. Existing pacemakers tucked into human bodies get their electricity from small batteries that must be replaced periodically by a surgical operation. This should not be necessary, says Konikoff. The body's own electricity can keep a pacemaker running indefinitely...
Another possibility is an internal telemetering system to report vital information such as heart beat, blood pressure, brain waves, etc. A man with such a device healed inside his skin would need to trail no wires. His physical condition could be checked from a distance without his knowing that a doctor was listening to his insides...
Then Koufax's luck went sour. The index finger of his pitching hand turned white and numb; layers of skin began to peel off. Doctors decided he had Raynaud's Phenomenon, a circulatory ailment resulting from a blood clot in his palm. Unable even to grip a baseball properly, Koufax did not win another game all year...
...evening there fell upon me without warning a horrible fear of my own existence. There arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, looking absolutely nonhuman. That shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him. I became a mass of quivering fear. I remember wondering how other people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so unconscious of that...