04. FINDING PHIL

JOHN HOLTEN: Hi Eva.

EVA KELLEY: Hey John.

JH: How did you sleep last night?

EK: Great, great – but listen, I’ve been working all morning researching this story, and I want to run you through it.

JH: Ok, sure. What have you got?

EK: Ok, so a little while ago I read an article in a book called What Future, which I borrowed from you. It’s a collection of the year’s best articles and essays concerned with the future.

JH: And this is the 2017 edition I gave you, right?

EK: Yeah.

JH: Roy Scranton who wrote We’re Doomed. Now What? and Learning to Die in the Anthropocene was one of the editors. It’s a really good collection of writing.

EK: In there, I read a piece by Daniel Engber from 2016, which originally appeared in WIRED, and it’s titled, hold on to your seats, “The Neurologist Who Hacked His Brain And Almost Lost His Mind.” Right up my alley.

JH: Really? Is this your thing now?

EK: Well, it’s just such a title! It’s so strange. We have come across a lot of out-there ideas and scenarios when looking at the future in this podcast, but there is something immediately attention-grabbing about this article. So bear with me because today I want to tell you about how I found the neurologist in question. And this guy, this doctor, his name is Phil Kennedy. When you hear his super fascinating crazy sci-fi ridiculous story that’s too good to be true, you will understand my obsession with finding Dr. Phil.

DR. PHIL TV SHOW SOUNDBITE

EK: It’s not that Dr. Phil. It’s another Dr. Phil.

JH: Ok. Go ahead then. Can’t wait.

EK: So, this can be episode four.

JH: Finding Phil!

EK: Finding Phil!

JINGLE

EK: I’m going to read you the first paragraph of Daniel Engber’s story on Dr. Phil Kennedy, just to set the mood right here:

»The brain surgery lasted 11 and a half hours, beginning on the afternoon of June 21, 2014, and stretching into the Caribbean predawn of the next day. In the afternoon, after the anaesthesia had worn off, the neurosurgeon came in, removed his wire-frame glasses, and held them up for his bandaged patient to examine. “What are these called?” he asked. Phil Kennedy stared at the glasses for a moment. Then his gaze drifted up to the ceiling and over to the television. “Uh … uh … ai … aiee,” he stammered after a while, “… aiee … aiee … aiee.” “It’s OK, take your time,” said the surgeon, Joel Cervantes, doing his best to appear calm. Again Kennedy attempted to respond. It looked as if he was trying to force his brain to work, like someone with a sore throat who bears down to swallow. Meanwhile, the surgeon’s mind kept circling back to the same uneasy thought: “I shouldn’t have done this.”«

JH: Wow, gosh - what has this man done to himself? And why is he in the Carribean?

EK: I know! So this whole story is super intense.

JH: Implants in the head are of course of interest for us, because in SEED, the characters have brain implants, transhumans that they are. SEED is the computer game Klang is developing, whose office we’re currently sitting in. Perhaps this doctor is their spiritual father. Who is he?

EK: Dr. Phil Kennedy, he’s Irish, just like you, John. He’s also a neurologist. In the late 90s he became kind of famous. He was in the Washington Post and on Good Morning America, because he had successfully implanted these wire electrodes into the brain of a paralyzed person, who was locked in, which is a state in which a person is aware but can’t move or communicate except for doing eye movements.

JH: Locked-in syndrome really is a deep personal fear of mine. It is the most awful scenario.

EK: Terrifying.

JH: It can be brought about by ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) or MND (motor neuron disease), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, or from strokes and such. The person is wholly paralyzed, but their EEG is working just fine.

EK: Maybe just tell us what EEG means.

JH: Sure, because it’s going to come up as we go forward. EEG stands for electroencephalography. Quite a mouthful. In it, you’ve got the cephalon, which is Latin for “head.” Basically, brainwaves. It’s an electrophysiological monitoring method. Usually none-invasive, but …

EK: Kennedy had successfully taught a locked-in patient, whose name was Johnny Ray – he’s died since, sadly, he died in 2002 of a brain aneurysm – to control a computer cursor with his mind. This was a big deal. The press reported this was the first time ever a person communicated through a brain computer interface. Kennedy himself called Johnny Ray “the world’s first cyborg.”

Trying to map the brain is nothing new in itself. By the 1980s, scientists had figured out how to record brain signals of a monkey, for example. They were able to see which parts of the brain fired up, and therefore understood which limbs the monkey intended to move. The problem was that the signals were unstable, though. The cells in the brain are able to drift around because they live in a jelly-type mass, so their location is somewhat unreliable. Certain cells can get killed off in the process, because they are poked by metal. Eventually, the electrodes get so caked with scar tissue that you can’t pick up any signal anymore.

This is where Phil Kennedy comes in. He set out to try and solve this basic issue. His idea was to fix the tips of these gold, teflon-coated wires inside a hollow glass cone, so that the electrode would stay securely anchored inside the brain. Another crucial part to this was that he also inserted a piece of sciatic nerve, or ischiatic nerve. It’s the nerve running from our lower back down to our foot, and it’s the largest nerve we have in our bodies. He replaced the nerve with a chemical cocktail in his human subjects, though. This piece of nerve, or chemical cocktail resembling it, would fertilize the neural tissue surrounding it, getting the local nerves to weave their way into the cone. Instead of just having a naked wire in the brain, Kennedy transformed wire and cone into citizens of the brain, not strangers. This allowed the wires to be in the brain for long stretches of time, even life-long stretches of time.

This invention is called the neurotrophic electrode. After Kennedy invented it, he quit his academic post at Georgia Institute of Technology, and founded a biotech company called Neural Signals. In 1996, after testing on animals for years, the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) gave Kennedy the approval he needed to implant the cone electrodes into human patients: Enter Johnny Ray. It’s 1998.

Johnny Ray was at this time a 52 year-old Vietnam war veteran who had suffered a stroke at the base of his brain. He was paralyzed completely except for twitching in his face and shoulder. He could answer questions by blinking, to signal a yes or no answer. Kennedy and his partner, neurosurgeon Roy Bakay, implanted Johnny Ray with the cones and tried to decode the waves from his motor cortex. After a while, Ray could modulate the signals by thinking what he wanted to signal. So when Kennedy hooked him up to a computer, Ray was able to control a cursor on the screen. He could pick out letters on the screen and spell out words. When Kennedy presented these results in 1998 at a conference of the Society of Neuroscience, the news of “The Amazing Story of Johnny Ray,” as it was referred to, was sent around the world.

So, great success, Kennedy was on a roll. But then, things started to spiral downward. Everything got messed up. Pushed by this breakthrough, Kennedy and Bakay started to implant more locked-in patients, which didn’t really work out all too well. One patient’s incision didn’t close properly and the implant had to be removed. Another patient’s disease was progressing so rapidly that the recordings were basically useless. At the same time, other companies and labs were working on the same thing, developing tiny little neural implants, which made Kennedy’s glass cones look old-fashioned very quickly. And funding was more focussed on creating implants helping patients use prosthetic limbs. Kennedy, on the other hand, was focussing on something enabling a person to share their thoughts via a computer. You have to remember, creating a speech prosthesis is much more complicated than creating a movement prosthesis, because formulating words and sentences requires much more coordination.

Kennedy continued on, and a few years later, he tried a different angle. This time he implanted Erik Ramsey, a young man who had been in a car accident and had a brain stem stroke. Now, instead of implanting the cone in the motor cortex, Kennedy and Bakay went deeper into a strip of brain tissue along the cerebrum which wraps around the head, like a headband. With this device, Ramsey was able to produce simple vowel sounds. The problem was that Kennedy had no way of knowing what was going on in Ramsey’s head. Ramsey could technically respond to yes or no questions, but this quickly failed to be accurate, because Ramsey had eye problems. So there was no way of knowing what was going on in Ramsey’s head. Kennedy could ask Ramsey to imagine a certain word, but had no way of confirming if Ramsey was actually thinking that word. Ramsey’s health declined. The device declined. Kennedy’s grants weren’t renewed. He had to let his staff go. His partner, Bakay, died. Kennedy had to hire temporary help. While all of this was going on, he still kept his own normal business hours at his neuro clinic.

But he knew, as any brilliant scientist knows, that if he just found another patient, he could push for the next breakthrough. He realized that he needed someone who could still speak. Someone who had a disease that was neurodegenerative like ALS who could still articulate themselves at first, so that Kennedy would be able to map out their brain and find the correspondence between sound and neural cue before their health declined further. But then, the FDA revoked its approval for Kennedy’s implants. He was banned from using his cones and wires on any humans. In order to lift the ban, he had to prove that his methods were safe and sterile, which he couldn’t do, because he didn’t have any funding. He was stuck.

Guess, what he did?

He implanted himself. That’s a level of commitment.

JH: This story doesn’t end with poor Phil Kennedy dead, right?

EK: I can neither deny, nor confirm.

JH: There is a whole history of inventors and scientists risking their lives for the progress of the human species, like flying cars, the classic age-old dream of every good sci-fi scenario. A guy called Henry Smolinski died tragically when he tried to make his dream of a flying Ford Pinto come true in the 1970s. But there are also genuine heroines like Marie Curie who won two Nobel prizes. She famously discovered the elements polonium and radium, and helped usher in X-ray to change medicine forever. But she died from the radiation exposure she suffered from her own research. There is a slight echo of this in Dr. Phil’s story, because he used himself. Is this story going to end like that?

EK: You know, I like to keep a little bit of mystery when I tell my stories, so you’re just going to have to wait and see.

For starters, Kennedy couldn’t get implanted in the US, so he went to Belize in the Carribbean. And a guy called Paul Powton, apparently an orange farmer and former nightclub owner, organized the trip and logistics. Belize’s first native-born neurosurgeon, Joel Cervantes, performed the operation. Powton and Cervantes had founded Quality of Life Surgery, a medical tourism clinic, treating things from spinal disorders to nose jobs.

JH: Let me just Google these guys, Quality of Life Surgery. Their website is down … All it goes to is a facebook page. I’ll message them there to see if they’re still operating. I Guess medical tourism is a thing.

EK: For sure. So, Kennedy hired them to perform a procedure implanting glass and gold wire electrodes into his brain. The surgery itself went well. Everything went as planned. Then, Kennedy wakes up, and he can’t talk. He’s locked in. Two days in, his jaw begins to grind uncontrollably, his hands began to shake – Powton and Cervantes were freaking out a little bit – and when he did say words, he wasn’t making any sense. The words in his brain seemed to be scattered, like a messed up puzzle. They were still there, but he had lost the connection and meaning to them. He would pick up a pen and call it a ladybug, for example (probably not that, but you know what I mean). They thought that they’d potentially damaged him for life, and no one from the US was coming down to take him back. Apparently, when they called his fiancé to inform her of the state he was in, she said: “I told him not to do it.”

However, after a few days, his speech started improving more and more. It turned out that him being locked in was a symptom of post-operative brain swelling. They had not damaged him permanently. So all good.

JH: Wait, the Quality of Life Surgery just responded on Facebook chat. As the website was down, could have been that it was all over, but no, they’re alive and kicking and able to perform. He says: “Of course - we can arrange for sure. But of course will need medical info & your current diagnosis.” That’s good to know.

EK: What did you ask them?

JH: I just asked if they were still operating. Anyway, what happened next to Kennedy?

EK: Kennedy went back to Atlanta, Georgia, a couple of days after the operation, and started treating his patients again with a bandaged head, which he apparently hid under a multicolored Belizean hat.

JH: A little taste of the Caribbean in his practice.

EK: Life went on as he waited for his cells to grow around the glass cones. A couple of months later, he went back to Belize. This time, he wanted a power coil and a radio transceiver connected to the wires sticking out of his brain.

JH: A radio transceiver! He’s such a transhuman hero.

EK: Such a pioneer. The funny thing is that the doctors were really surprised by how clunky these devices were. They looked retro to them, and just too big. It’s such a weird concept. I guess it’s hard to relate to as a non-doctor, to go to a surgeon and confidently tell him: put this thing I brought with me from home inside me, please. But the surgery went well and Kennedy returned home.

Now the real research began. Kennedy started gathering his own data in this extreme self-experiment of his. He would treat his patients until the afternoon, and in the evenings, he would go into the lab and record his own brain activity. He would say different phrases out loud, and synch his words with neural traces. His lab notes show he referred to himself as Subject P.K. But Kennedy and his implant did not live happily ever after. The electronics were too bulky, so the incision couldn’t heal properly. And so, after 88 days with the full implant in his head, it had to be removed. This time, he didn’t have to go to Belize.

JH: Oh that’s too bad. They’re still writing to me on Facebook chat btw. I have a new message from Paul, presumably the nightclub owner. He says: “Ok quick recap John ...I closed QOLS after a four year period due to personal reasons. I have since been persuaded to resume QOLS since there is an obvious need for our services. We now have two very experienced neurosurgeons who are super excellent to work with (on a personal level), two really great guys.” He’s really selling this to me. That’s crazy that you would go to Belize for brain surgery. So I guess you go, and then maybe have a nose job, I don’t know.

EK: Well, Kennedy didn’t have to go back to Belize or travel at all, because removing a foreign object from his brain was actually covered by his regular insurance. A surgeon opened his scalp again, and removed the power coil and transceiver. He left in the glass cones and electrodes. Those will be in his brain forever. What a transhuman hero.

To me, this sounds like a sci-fi, self-administered, crazy-scientist story from another time. Something which might have been on the news when my dad was little, or my grandmother – but this was in 2014! It just happened.

JH: Particularly the need to leave US-American jurisdiction to get away from the FDA red tape plus the whole fact that this was a brain implant, gives it a weird veneer of the classic sci-fi story.

EK: But IRL. Get this. It gets even better. You are not going to believe this: He actually wrote and self-published a science-fiction novel before he had his brain hacked into, in the fall of 2012. The novel is called 2051 and tells the story of Alpha, an Irish born neuro-electrode pioneer … just like Kennedy! Alpha is 107 years old. He is the living example of his own technology. Instead of having a body, he is a brain wired up inside a two-foot-tall life support robot. This novel is a peek behind the curtain of how Kennedy imagines the future, I think. That maybe his research could serve locked-in patients to communicate, but also be the catalyst toward an enhanced future in which people can live forever as minds in two-foot-tall robot shells.

You can imagine, as I am reading about Dr. Phil Kennedy, it’s such a fascinating story, so mysterious, so magical it makes me doubt if it’s even real, if he is even real. So at this point, I’m like: “I need to find this guy. I need to find Phil!” I assume it is going to be a very tedious process tracking down the mysterious insurgent doctor. So I google him. And right at the top of the search results is a link to a website called neuralsignals.com. Neural Signals, if you remember, is the name of Kennedy’s practice and research company. Still, I’m sceptical. I’m thinking, this is probably a dead website that hasn’t been updated in forever, so I click on it … And I just want to show you here.

JH: Oh yeah, that’s a nice, pleasant website. Maybe a tad dated.

EK: This is the page you land on. It’s sort of a basic, clearly structured website. On the main page, there are multiple word columns laid out on a pistachio green background. What immediately strikes me are the headlines of those columns. One is titled “Mission Statement,” another “Neural Signals Cultures and Values.” And the Neural Signals Logo, I should explain, has an illustration to it, which is explained in the mission statement:

»The mission of Neural Signals Inc. is to provide a link to the outside world for people who are locked in their bodies – alert and intelligent but unable to communicate. This mission is embodied in our icon above. The icon attempts to illustrate the facial profile of a person locked in a box. The opening in the box to the right shows neural signals escaping, implying that the person's thoughts can be carried out into the world on these signals, something we have already achieved.«

Then, in the cultures and values section, there are four main guidelines highlighted in bold:

1) »I should be impeccable with my word.« 2) »I don't take anything personally.« 3) »I don't make assumptions.« 4) »I will always do my best.«

JH: Well, thank God for that. They don’t make any sense. “I don’t make assumptions.” Shouldn’t he be assumptive?

EK: You’re like: Isn’t that the main thing a doctor does?

JH: Especially communicating with someone who is locked in, you have to assume a lot of things?

EK: That’s a really good point. This is a little odd, right? It all seems real and legit, but it’s a little out there, maybe. Another interesting thing is in the top menu, and this is maybe my favorite thing. When you click on “INVESTORS,” you think you could learn about people who have invested previously. But, no, you’re directed to a page that says, and this is just so weirdly endearing:

»Special message: if you come to this site as a subject wishing to be implanted to restore your speech, please know that we would love to help you. But, before we can help you, we need to develop the multichannel wireless electronics, so that we can implant multiple electrodes. The cost of the electronic development is budgeted at 709,000 USD, and the cost of the implant and all training is about 500,000 USD. These financial issues need to be solved before we can implant anyone else. Perhaps we can raise the funding together.« [EDITOR’S NOTE: The site has changed since the recording of this episode, but what shows up now is equally straightforward.]

JH: Ok, well, that’s not cheap.

EK: All of this, still, seems kind of improvised and almost naive. And I’m still thinking: Who is this guy? How do I talk to him? Then I notice in the menu there is a button that says “Contact Us.” So I click on that. Right there, in huge letters, it says: “Dr. Kennedy’s mobile phone number.” So that was easy. His personal phone number right there.

JH: Funny how research goes sometimes. You read in a magazine article anthologized in a book published in The States almost two years ago, then you get lost on the web a bit, facebook-chatting to a tourist surgery clinic in Belize – I didn’t see that coming when I came into the office this morning – and then you recount your findings to your co-host, and bam, you find the number. You always want the number as a journalist.

EK: I always call first. I hope it’s a functioning number.

JH: Only one way to find out.

//

PHIL KENNEDY: Can I help you?



EK: Hi, Doctor Kennedy?

PK: Speaking with Doctor Kennedy.

EK: Hi! My name is Eva Kelley, I’m calling to see if you would be interested in talking to me about your work – not right now, but if we could schedule something perhaps? I’m a journalist and I work for a computer game company that is developing a game called Seed –

PK: What? Say that again, what’s it called?

EK: It’s called SEED, S-E-E-D, and it’s a game in which the players are sent to an alternate planet, with the hope of repopulating it by testing out new ways of living, and we’re developing a podcast that talks about issues that pertain to the game, like life extension, transhumanism, brain implants, cloning, and so forth. We were reading about you and would love to visit your practice in Georgia, and talk to you about your career.

PK: Aha. Aha. So you’re making an app or an article?



EK: No, it’s a podcast, a radio show.

PK: A podcast, I get it. Okay.

EK: We’re just very fascinated by your story and your career, and would love to have the opportunity to talk to you.

PK: Okay.

EK: We could even meet in person. I could come to Georgia and actually talk to you in person.

PK: Yeah. Video is not a part of that, right?

EK: No video, just audio.

PK: Okay, the reason is that I’m on another contract which states that I can’t do any more videos. But chatting would be fine, just talking is fine.

EK: Oh great. I’m so happy! Perfect. Should I reach out to you via email? To discuss details?

PK: Yes, that’s probably the best thing to do.

EK: Wonderful, thank you so much. I look forward to discussing details.



//

EK: Guess what? I found him.

JH: Dr. Phil? So how did it go?

EK: I called him last night and he answered after the first ring. He is super nice. So I’m on my way out to fly over there.

JH: Have we budgeted this?

EK: I don’t know. I feel like we should have budgeted this. It will sort itself out. We’ll figure it out. I just feel like I should go.

JH: Just go! Let’s do this. We’ve been cooped up here in Kreuzberg.



EK: I really want to check this out.

JH: Where is he?

EK: He is in Atlanta. In Georgia. I’ve never been.



JH: Fuck it, I’m just here on my own doing the credits, and Eva’s gone off to sunny fucking Atlanta, Georgia. She always says I swear a lot, so now I can swear even more because she’s not around to listen to it.



Anyway, whilst Eva heads off into the sunset, it just leaves me here to remind you all to like and subscribe to the podcast. Email us at contact@thelifecyclepodcast.com, because we’re always really delighted to hear from you guys.

The Life Cycle podcast is produced by Klang, was written, hosted, and produced by Eva Kelley and me, John Holten. This has also been produced by David Magnusson who also did the mix and sound engineering. Executive producer is Mundi Vondi. Special thanks to our Klang overlords, who, I do believe, are actually going to pay for Eva’s flight to Atlanta, Georgia. This episode was recorded at Klang headquarters in Berlin Kreuzberg. Let’s see if I ever meet Eva again.



I’m sure we’ll hear all about it.

