Let’s take a look at the latest scientific breakthroughs: goats that are producing milk with the strength and elasticity of spider silk, a new type of optical chip that senses light for the first time and robotic rats.

Yes, robotic rats. The basic premise is this: take a rat and place electrodes in two areas of its brain, the somato-sensory cortex. The electrodes will control bodily sensation, and the medial forebrain bundle, the “pleasure pathway” of the brain.

The first set controls which way a rat moves when an electrode stimulates a certain part of the somato-sensory cortex and then the rat feels a nudge on its left whiskers.

When another part is stimulated, the nudge is to the right. Because rats use their whiskers to sense the world around them, the electrodes “persuade” the rat to move one way or the other.

The electrodes in the forebrain reinforce these movements by making the rat feel good whenever it moves where its whiskers tell it to. When its whiskers tell it to move to the right, it does so, and when it feels good doing so, it quickly “falls into line.”

Now, this innovation doesn’t mean (hopefully) that we are going to have suicide bomber rats to add to our terrorist lists. Rather, the utilization of preexisting resources by humanity is nothing new – we’ve been doing it for thousands of years.

The difference with roborats, as I see it, is that men are directly messing with the idea of “free will,” and whether or not a rat has any. While these rats have not yet been “persuaded” to do anything that would harm or kill them, they have also not been tested to their limits: what are the limits of a rat’s willpower?

Why shouldn’t we do this kind of research, since this does have beneficial uses for humans? And why has it not yet been tested on human beings?

Well, why should we wait until the threat of this technology applied to humans galvanizes us into action? This is not “just a rat,” but the steppingstone to much wider applications for other animals, including humans.

We should not just sit around and wait for this technology to directly threaten us – after all.

A rat’s brain and a human brain are not that dissimilar – we both possess somato-sensory cortexes and medial forebrain bundles.

While these advances in science are in many ways unavoidable, they should not be excuses for not acting responsibly, drawing a line between utilizing our natural world to help our species, and creating a world where we spend our time thinking up ways to have other animals do everything for us.