A Pacemaker for the Brain? by Matthew

A Pacemaker for the Brain? by Matthew - December 2023 Scholarship Essay

AI, computer science, and software engineering are the fields of knowledge that promise us the soon-to-be life of sci-fi: 3D pill printers, real-time blood scanners, and phone-based checkups; however, with how excited we look to our futures, we often forget the phenoms that once inspired the roots of ancient science: electricity.

From the stories of Victor Frankenstein to his real-life counterpart Andrew Ure, there have been records since the mid-1800s of electrical stimulation being capable of manipulating our muscles and bodies in ways seemingly unnatural. However, once the public fascination with reanimated bodies died down (realizing standing witness to such macabre antics may be just slightly unethical), it was only natural to think of the medical implications of electrostimulation. It was then in the 1930s that we began to see the potential health benefits of electrostimulation that lay beyond just cheap spectacles—we have ways of directly energizing parts of our brain as we sleep. Using these ways for meditation and memory-retention, we opened up a new door for regenerative medicine and personal therapy—a luxury that was sparingly afforded to the common public, but it was an innovation that shined a bright light on new horizons.

Even now, electrical brain stimulation is a rarely used form of treatment, not for its lack of accessibility, but rather for the extent of its effectiveness. So long ago, Andrew Ure used “galvanism” for nothing more than a rather morbid parlor trick, “Ure is one of many scientists during the late 18th and 19th centuries who conducted crude experiments with galvanism—the stimulation of muscles with pulses of electrical current. The bright sparks and loud explosions made for stunning effects that lured in both scientists and artists. . .” (Young) Ugo Cerletti in the 1930s introduced electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), a revolutionary treatment for neurological disorders, but the practice easily strayed from the ethical path, “He used a series of electrical shocks to trigger a seizure in a patient with schizophrenia, relieving their hallucinations and confusion, and returning them to a normal state of mind. Within a few years of its invention, ECT was being widely applied in mental hospitals all over the world. But through the 20th century it was often used to control difficult patients as much as it was used to improve their mental health.” (Bell) Now we come to the modern crown jewel of specialized electrical applications: “deep brain stimulation” (DBS); the treatment is nothing short of miraculous in dealing with neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease—miraculous, but invasive. “Electrodes surgically implanted in specific areas of the brain generate electrical pulses. DBS is used to treat conditions such as Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, or tremors that don't improve with medicines.” (Shmerling) What is scarily apparent is that we can have the future we want, but not at the cost of something else—imagine this: your skull stuck with metal poles lodged deep inside your brain, and you grow reliant on the technology that guarantees no cure.

Sure, it’s beyond incredible to have a means of counteracting the most devastating disease that steals your memory along with your life, but that’s all DBS can be—a way of stalling out. At the same time, we also value the time we gain just from waiting out the inevitable, and, again, we are left with the question if we would leave ourselves walking science experiments just to roam this Earth for a bit longer.

This is really a choice for those elderly who frequently suffer from neurodegenerative disease, and it highly depends on the care afforded to them that can ensure these medical instruments can be both optimized and maintained. These electrodes actively stick out of your head, and there may be unshielded surgical sites that can seriously increase the risk of infection or contamination—if we leave Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s patients to not only care for themselves but also require them to regularly clean and monitor their own medical attachments, then we push our seniors into a whole new world of potential neglect. With existing senior abuse nationwide, we cannot afford the trade of medical attachments for personal safety, “Facilities that break rules designed to protect seniors typically pay the Arizona Department of Health Services $500 fines. Mayes said that’s a slap on the wrist — and one that some companies consider the cost of doing business.” (McGlade) Ignoring the problems in today’s basic care is a step too valuable to skip; if we plan to offload device management to the seniors who simply struggle to live with their non-augmented bodies, then we must fix the flaws in the senior care system before we even consider tuning up our seniors’ brains. With all the confusion and concern regarding personal monitoring, it seems that we’d be at a rather tough impasse of having a way of helping others, but no way to reliably implement the method. We can have remotely monitored systems that are notified for replacement—health professionals can be pinged miles off that a given device needs to be replaced within the coming year. If we smoothly mesh our pacemaker regulations with senior care standards, we can find ourselves pioneering a new era of Alzheimer’s treatment, a way of really changing elderly life as it is.

All this talk of electricity and its modern applications tracks the growing field of biomedical engineering, a world of knowledge critical to the new wave of medicine.