- Meet the Jacobs family - Jeffrey, Leslie
and their son, Derek. They're a fairly typical American family, middle
class and ambitious. The father is a dentist, the mother is an account
executive at an interior design magazine and the 14-year-old son plays
jazz and tinkers with computers in his spare time.
But one thing may soon make the Jacobses stand out: They could become the
first family in the world to be implanted with microchips that contain
their personal information.
The chip in question, the <LINK> VeriChip, is similar to the <LINK> biochips that have been <LINK> used to identify pets and livestock for years.
Made by Applied Digital Solutions (ADS), the VeriChip stores six lines
of text and is slightly larger than a grain of rice. It emits a 125-kHz
radio frequency signal that can be picked up by a special scanner up to
four feet away.
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- The company initially plans to market
the chip in the United States as a medical device that would allow hospital
workers to simply scan a patient's body in an emergency situation to access
their health record.
The Jacobses, who live in Boca Raton, Florida, first heard about the microchip
in a television news report.
"Derek stood up and said, 'I want to be the first kid to be implanted
with the chip,'" Leslie Jacobs said. "For the next few days all
he did was talk about the VeriChip."
Derek, an eighth-grader who became a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer
at age 12, fantasizes about merging humans and machines. Jeffrey Jacobs,
who is severely disabled, was interested in the device for health reasons.
So Leslie called up Palm Beach-based ADS and offered her family as guinea
pigs once the microchip is approved for testing by the FDA.
ADS chief technology officer Keith Bolton said he was a bit wary about
the family's motives at first, but the Jacobses quickly convinced him they'd
be perfect subjects. Since the VeriChip was announced in December, the
company has been bombarded with queries from people interested in the device,
Bolton said.
"Right now we have over 2,000 kids who have e-mailed, wanting to have
the chip implanted," he said. "They think it's cool."
Derek, for one, dreams of a day when he'll be able log onto his computers
or unlock his house and turn on the lights without lifting a finger, functions
that British professor Kevin Warwick was able to do in a 1998 experiment
with an implanted microchip.
Derek was also inspired by Richard Seelig, the company's director of medical
applications, who injected two VeriChips into himself after hearing stories
of rescue workers at the World Trade Center scrawling their names and Social
Security numbers onto their bodies in case they didn't make it out of the
rubble alive.
"I think it's one more step in the evolution of man and technology,"
said Derek, who once needed to move into the family room after his electronics
equipment crowded his bedroom. "There are endless possibilities for
this."
(Currently the chip is immutable once the device is injected via a syringe,
using local anesthetic. In future applications, the chip may include a
GPS receiver and other advanced features, company officials said.)
Jeffrey, a 48-year-old cancer survivor, has more practical reasons for
wanting the VeriChip.
"If something happens to me and there's no one that knows anything
about my medical history, any paramedic or hospital worker, if they have
the scanner -- which hopefully everyone will have at some point - will
be able to scan all my information," he said. "It could save
my life."
Leslie, 46, said she was motivated by security concerns. The Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks hit close to home: Her family lives in South Florida, where authorities
say 14 of the 19 hijackers lived. Her office is a block away from tabloid
publisher American Media, where a photo editor died after contracting anthrax.
The world would be a safer place if authorities had a tamper-proof way
of identifying people, she said.
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- http://wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,50187,00.html
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