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And you call yourselves geeks!

I'm appalled to discover /.ers are so frightened by an area of research, so willing to make value judgements about a technology which doesn't even exist, so devoid of imagination as to the potential benefits of such a technology.

You people sound exactly like all those clueless yahoos^H^H^H^H^H^Hcommentators in the mainstream press who ranted that "The internet will be the end of interpersonal contact, high culture and human civilization" and "ATMs will never catch on because people really like standing in line to interact with slow and surly service personnel" and "Wouldn't it be terrible if everyone used email." Not to mention "Cloning will be the end of human individuality!" and "Designer genes will be the end of human individuality!"

Get A Grip, people.

This guy may be off the deep end for skipping all those pesky intermediary animal tests, but investigating ways to interface wetware and hardware is one of the most interesting and potentially humanitarian aims a scientist could have. Think prosthetics that work like (or better than) original limbs. Think repairs to nerves. Think about the control of mental illness (such as depression) without side-effect riddled drugs. Think about just having a sufficient grasp of how the nervous system works to be able to hack on it.

Yeah, there are potentially scary applications. That's medicine. All hacking on the human body could be used to human detriment, hence the aphorism "the power to heal is the power to harm". And not only in medicine. Universally, the only technologies without the potential to do harm are those without any potential at all.

I'd thought nerds, of all people, would grok that.
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Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.