Human Body: ID-Implants

Are implantable chips in your future?

For a period of time, a tech company offered an integrated chip that is about the size of a grain of rice and is injected beneath the dermal layers. Operating just like those in millions of pets, the chip returned a radio-frequency signal from a wand passed over it.

The chip was meant to serve as basic identification or possibly a link to a database contained the user's medical records. There are also plans to provide a chip with broadcasting capabilities that could signal the bearer's GPS coordinates, perhaps serving as a victim beacon in a kidnapping.

A 1990 study in the journal Toxicologic Pathology by Ghanta N. Rao and Jennifer Edmondson of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park, N.C., reported that a subcutaneous tissue reaction occurred in mice implanted with a glass-sealed microchip. No problems were seen in the 140 mice studied after 24 months, except in those mice that had a genetic mutation in their p53 gene. In that case, if the device was kept in too long, "these mice develop subcutaneous tumors called fibrosarcomas," Rao said.

In humans, the corresponding p53 mutation causes Li-Fraumeni syndrome, a rare disorder that predisposes patients to a wide variety of cancers. Rao sees reason for caution: "More evaluation may be necessary before they are used in humans."

Implanted microchips may not be so stable under the skin either, according to a 1999 paper in the Veterinary Record by Jans Jansen and his colleagues at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands.

Jansen found that in just sixteen weeks chips inserted in shoulder locations of fifteen beagles had moved, a few by as much as eleven centimeters. (Transponders implanted in the dogs' heads, however, hardly moved at all).

An inflammatory response is also a risk, Jansen observes, similar to what is sometimes seen with other devices implanted in humans. "I'm not claiming it's not safe," he says, "but you have to be completely sure it will not damage patients in the end."

More than twenty-five million dogs, cats, racehorses and other animals have been chipped without reports of significant problems. There have been clailms that "no side effects or ramifications whatsoever" have come to those people who received chips.

Unless a substantial fraction of the population is chipped, hospitals may not bother installing scanning devices; if that's the case, what good is being chipped?

Of course, the chip introduces the potential for unsolicited surveillance and various privacy violations, a possibility that makes many people's skin crawl, even without a chip under it.