Technology for the body on the road to cyborgs?

The Terminator ... an infamous cyborg.

On September 2, 2010, Karen Throsby became the 1153rd person to swim the English Channel, taking 16 hours and nine minutes, and keeping herself going on handfuls of jelly babies.

Many Channel swimmers are purists: wetsuits are banned, never mind performance-enhancing drugs. The sport sees itself as an assertion of human ability in natural form. But Throsby, a sociologist researching the effects of extreme sports, takes a different view.

She was a speaker at Human Limits, a Wellcome Collection symposium linked to its Superhuman exhibition in London on physical and mental enhancement. The question it investigated was how much technology can humans use before they become something else a cyborg, perhaps, or a superhuman, a post-human, or a trans-human. What are our limits?

Some speakers discussed the "singularity": the idea that in a few years' time, we may converge with our technology to the point that some as-yet inconceivable superhuman entity emerges.

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Others highlighted the fear we can feel when new inventions threaten our sense of who we are; uneasy about our authenticity, we look back nostalgically to an era assumed to be more human.

Throsby's contribution was to remind us that even something as apparently basic as marathon swimming involves many artificial techniques: gaining weight, acclimatising to the cold, monitoring one's psychology, and developing new micro-senses an awareness of tiny differences in water temperature, a heightened kinetic sense of the body's balance and position, and so on.

It means self-transformation, and is filled with "uncountable, mundane bodily technologies". Channel swimmers use rubber caps, sunblock, Vaseline to prevent chafing, sleek swimsuits, and energy-boosting snacks. They are accompanied by boats with GPS.

And they use goggles, an invention variously attributed to Polynesians, Persians and the Inuit, but later improved by innovators such as first female Channel swimmer Gertrude Ederle, who smeared paraffin wax on motorcycle glasses in 1926 to make them watertight. More recently, goggles have been made with better rubber, adjustable straps, and prescription lenses. It would be hard to swim far or fast without them.

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Technology for the body on the road to cyborgs?