To more rigorously understand the relationship between the original creation of Star Trek and science in a way that does not symptomatically rely on a notion of representation, we must contemplate the “elective affinities” between the TV show’s inception and the real contextualized activities of 1960s space scientists. Technoscience studies identifies and scrutinizes objects of scientific knowledge that emerge in a given historical period. It should pay special attention to the coincidence of appearance among scientists and media artefacts of a new cognitive construct. We pursue the association between NASA’s design of a cyborg astronaut and Gene Roddenberry’s design of his first alien, Mr. Spock. In spite of all that has been written about cyborgs, the connection between Spock and the cyborg has never been made. Chris Hables Gray, editor of The Cyborg Handbook, says that there were no notable cyborgs (aside from the disabled Captain Pike) in The Original Series. In thirty-five years of journalism and scholarship about Star Trek, Spock has been unendingly described in terms that rarely go beyond the cliché of his being the master logician or a figure “torn between logic and human emotions.” Donna J. Haraway, author of the seminal 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” has emphasized the importance of using the term “cyborg” specifically for techno-scientific entities that became possible in the historical conjuncture around 1960. “Pushing the reality of the cyborg harder” with situated knowledge means examining its entanglement in a definite matrix of cybernetic communications theories, ideas about humans as information processing devices, Cold War militarization, and behavioral and psycho-pharmacological research.
In their landmark 1960 article “Cyborgs and Space,” based on a conference paper presented at a symposium sponsored by the U.S. Air Force School of Aviation Medicine in San Antonio, TX, Austrian-Australian neuroscientist Manfred Clynes and American psychiatrist Nathan Kline coined the influential term cyborg. This new word, an abbreviation for cybernetic organism, described a technologically-enhanced astronaut of the present and future who would be better equipped than an “ordinary human” to endure the rigors and thrive in the harsh conditions of outer space travel. The “augmented man” of orbital, lunar, interplanetary, and interstellar voyages would be endowed with upgraded replacement parts, integrated electronic extensions, and an internal pharmacological drug-releasing device to promote optimal performance by the engineered extraterrestrial explorer.
During the heady days of the “telemetrically implanted chimpanzee” Enos (who orbited the Earth twice while cradled in his 1100 kg. capsule on November 29, 1961) and the flights of the other pioneering Mercury-Atlas soloists, NASA commissioned The Cyborg Study. The final report of this investigation was submitted by Robert Driscoll to the federal aeronautics agency in May 1963 under the title “Engineering Man for Space.” Driscoll’s United Aircraft Corp.-led group studied the feasibility and application of artificial organs, hypothermia, suspended animation, implanted oxygenating equipment, electric neurological excitation, multimedia sensorial stimulation, and regulated drugs in facilitating the adaptation of astronauts to the extreme conditions they would confront in alien planetary surroundings and during Deep Space expeditions. NASA’s cyborg architects also believed that their conception of refitting human beings to function efficiently in a “freely chosen” alternative environment was part of a spiritual awakening of “man” taking an “active part in his own [second] biological evolution.”
In a 1995 interview, Dr. Manfred Clynes expressed dismay at the travestying and “total distortion” of his original concept of the cyborg by popular icons of contemporary science fiction cinema and television, such as James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop, and even Star Trek’s Borg, with that Delta Quadrant alien species’ connotations of insect-like Group Mind and “technological totalitarianism.” (interview with Clynes in The Cyborg Handbook)
Contrary to cultural legend and widespread misleading interpretations which identify the fearsome Borg Collective of assimilated robotic-humanoids as the leading cyborg figure in the Star Trek universe, it is the Enterprise’s half-human, half-Vulcan First and Science Officer Spock who most perfectly embodies the cybernetically-extended spacefarer of which NASA scientists dreamed, and which they partially succeeded in constructing. Looking at the particulars of Spock’s imaginative creation by Roddenberry reveals him to conform very closely to the 1960 specification of Clynes and Kline, as well as to that of the 1963 Cyborg Study and other NASA-affiliated studies of the “physiology of man in space” undertaken during the epoch of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. Looking at Spock’s character development in the episodes themselves reveals him to be a cyborg in Haraway’s related second sense. He is a divided self exploring the boundaries between organic and machinic, human and nonhuman, informatics and biology.
Gene Roddenberry Designs His First Alien
There was one consequential disparity between the cyborg astronaut whom speculative NASA scientists designed and the alien astronaut hailing from a politically unified body that orbits the star 40 Eridani A, allied with Earth in the United Federation of Planets, whom Star Trek Executive Producer Gene Roddenberry designed in the mid-1960s. This discrepancy was the respective designers’ differing stress on the constitutive infrastructure of the advanced astronaut’s divergence from humanity: biotic technological components or alien DNA.
To cope with the environmental, physiological-medical, and psychological difficulties encountered by “man in space,” information and life science systems experts (like Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline) conceived of a bionic posthuman outfitted with surgically grafted electronic sensors; homeostatic and feedback-yielding measuring instruments; and an osmotic pressure pump capsule developed by S. Rose, embedded under the skin to allow continuous injections of selected chemical substances at controlled rates.
To create a “convincingly realistic” science fiction television program about interstellar space travel, Roddenberry devised an ideal starship crew member of extraterrestrial origin with special exo-genetic capabilities and anatomical advantages making him especially suited to carry out the duties of supervisor “of all scientific departments” and working-level commander “of all the ship’s functions.” (Whitfield and Roddenberry, The Making of Star Trek)
In the inaugural tracking shot of Star Trek, at the beginning of the teaser of the first pilot episode The Cage, the camera slowly zooms in on a view of the Main Bridge as seen through the top “transparent bubble” of the Enterprise’s saucer module. The ship’s senior officers and the first known alien of the galaxy are brought into focus. Between its rejection of The Cage in 1965 and its acceptance of the second pilot Where No Man Has Gone Before, NBC put pressure on Roddenberry to eliminate the character of Mr. Spock (“to drop the Martian”). But the former Pan Am and Army Air Corps flyer knew that the half-Vulcan was essential to the show’s credibility. “I felt we couldn’t do a space show without at least one person on board who constantly reminded you that you are out in space and in a world of the future.” (The Making of Star Trek)
Thanks to systematic regulatory modifications made to his body, the NASA cyborg envisioned by Clynes and Kline can survive for long stretches of time in Deep Space’s hostile conditions of radiation, near-zero gravity, extreme temperatures and air pressures, low oxygen supply, and scarce ingestible resources. If breathing “becomes cumbersome in space,” a physio-technological system that substitutes for breathing will be designed and medically implanted. (“Cyborgs in Space”)
Due to the genetic sequencing he shares with other inhabitants of Vulcan, Mr. Spock can “withstand higher temperatures, go for longer periods of time without water, and tolerate a higher level of pain” than humans. (The Making of Star Trek) Spock is more resistant to radiation and needs less food to nourish himself than his non-Vulcan counterparts on board the Enterprise. Physical distress, for Spock, is merely a kind of information input, “which a trained mind ought to be able to handle,” as he declares from his biobed in sick bay in The Original Series episode Operation — Annihilate!.
Like the hyper-intelligent fish invoked as metaphor in the article “Cyborgs and Space,” who would fabricate extraordinary techno-apparatuses to venture onto land, Cape Canaveral’s Man will overcome his innate biological limitations to prosper within the closed-system confines of space travel. He will master his own preestablished metabolic and physical movement requirements, including the constraining cycles of hunger, thirst, and fatigue.
Lt. Commander Spock does not perspire. He exercises extreme restraint in his “movements, gestures, and facial expressions.” (The Making of Star Trek) He has much greater physical strength than his Terran colleagues. He has more acute hearing, resulting from evolutionary accomodation to sound wave attenuation in the thin atmosphere of Vulcan. As explained in Operation — Annihilate!, Spock has an extra inner eyelid to protect his vision against strong solar and electromagnetic rays (Clynes and Kline’s cyborg astronaut is protected from excessive radiation by periodic doses of cysteine and amino-ethyl-isothioronium).
By the late 1960s, NASA personnel en masse wholeheartedly embraced Mr. Spock as one of their own. Leonard Nimoy was invited to be guest of honor at the March 1967 National Space Club dinner, and to take an extensive tour of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. The actor concluded from the warm and intense reception that he received that astronauts like John Glenn and aerospace industry engineers, secretaries, and shareholders alike all regarded Star Trek, and especially the character of Mr. Spock, as a “dramatization of the future of their space program.” (The Making of Star Trek)
First-Wave Cybernetics
The farther-reaching intellectual background to the 1960s NASA scientists’ enthusiastic figuration of the astronautical cyborg was the cybernetic science of control, command and communication in humans, animals, machines, and living-nature elaborated by mathematician Norbert Wiener of MIT in the years just after World War II. First-wave cybernetics emphasizes message feedback loops and information transfer as organizational forces in the study and mastering of complex systems. The term cybernetics derives from the Greek kybernetics, denoting steering or governance. By underlining the importance of informatics and statistics in a systems context, Wiener and his colleague Arturo Rosenblueth of the Harvard Medical School contributed to unifying the conceptualization of techno-scientific knowledge objects which had been divided into the separate categories of the living and the non-living.
One of Wiener’s primary conceptual models, the self-regulating man-machine system, was taken over by researchers like Clynes and Kline and brought to bear on the challenges faced by administrative exobiologists. As articulated by the two Rockland State Hospital research scientists, the handlers of the cyborg astronaut would systematically overcome his recurring states of discomfort through an approach combining time-released pharmacology, machinic apparatuses, and prerecorded hypnotism.
Among Mr. Spock’s governing modi operandi, as developed in Roddenberry’s narratively matching and coterminous application of first-wave cybernetics, is his superlative control over undesirable states like pain and distracting emotions, which detract from peak performative efficiency. The most important of Spock’s preeminent qualities as a cybernetic organism is his vastly superior neural-cerebral proficiency, due to the “enlarged neocortex” of Vulcans, in the areas of information gathering, processing, and analysis. Spock can directly understand machine language output from a computer’s CPU, without requiring the interface of higher-level programming languages, graphical displays, or speech synthesis. “He can even read memory bank ‘bleeps’.” (The Making of Star Trek)
Mr. Spock is perpetually preoccupied with calculating the odds in any given situation. Leonard Nimoy’s chances of “becoming” Spock at the moment of the actor’s birth were exactly one in 789,324,476.76. (Leonard Nimoy, I Am Not Spock) This concern is reminiscent of cybernetics founder Norbert Wiener’s lifelong obsession with the reduction of entropy, uncertainty, chaos, degradation, Brownian motion, and “disorganizational noise.” (Stephen Pfohl, “The Cybernetic Delirium of Norbert Wiener,” in Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, eds., Digital Delirium) The epic outcome of Wiener’s work in cybernetics was that “humans were to be seen primarily as information-processing entities who are essentially similar to intelligent machines.” What allowed Wiener to include “transformed humans” and “beyond mechanical” machines that were enriched by feedback in the same heuristic category was their shared “ability to use probabilistic methods to control randomness.” (N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman)
Wearable computing is a contemporary trend in wired culture and the computer industry that inherits from both first-wave cybernetics and the NASA cyborg. One of the earliest instances of this tendency was the casino gambling feedback system developed in 1961 by information theorist Claude Shannon and blackjack “card counting” expert Ed Thorp to gather real-time data on the speed and friction of a roulette wheel. Using this instantaneous information, a player wearing a radio tone communication device in his ear could propitiously decide which number to bet on.
Mr. Spock is a data wizard, constantly in the flow of information feedback, long-range sensors, handheld tricorders, and makeshift techno-contrivances. In The Original Series episode The City on the Edge of Forever, he concocts the alternate timeline online newspaper reader from vacuum tubes and pieces of wire. He holds the highest computer expert certification (A7) awarded by the Operating Systems Division of Starfleet Command. Spock is most typically seen standing at his Bridge position — the library-computer station which interconnects all host and distributed workstation systems on the ship. He can absorb “library” database information at a rate eight to ten times faster than a normal human. Spock the cyborg is an organism rethought as a technological device. But in the “first-wave” order of rational technoscience to which he corresponds, entropy, turbulence, chaos, and flows are still the targeted enemies. The “emergent phenomena” of uncontrolled, complex self-organization or Artificial Life are exterior to its definition of information. The Vulcan side regulates and excludes the human side. The body is a unified field or molar organism to be disciplined in the organization of its organs. Gender is decidedly masculine, even militarily encoded.
The character of Mr. Spock parallels the application by NASA scientists of the ideas of first-wave cybernetics to the refining of the cyborg astronaut. Roddenberry analogously applied general cybernetic notions to construct a key element of his science fictional TV show about interstellar space travel. Klynes and Cline sought a bodily freedom or overcoming of inherent physiological limitations for their cyborg astronaut, who would function without the “constraints that having evolved here on Earth make him subject to — the level of gravitation, the oxygen, the atmosphere.” (Chris Hables Gray, The Cyborg Handbook) What makes Spock more adept than his fellow Enterprise crew members is the altered evolutionary adaptation of Vulcans to the high temperatures and low-oxygen atmospheric conditions on their planet.
It is unlikely that Gene Roddenberry knew directly of The Cyborg Study. A significant feature of the original starship Enterprise was the availability to crew members of familiar ambiances and sensations, including subliminal odors and sounds awakening memories of the home planet. This goes against a pivotal idea of the NASA cyborg designers, that of choosing to augment the astronaut himself rather than impracticably attempting to “bring along” an Earth-like environment on the ship. Roddenberry acknowledged in 1968 that the comforts of home design decision had been a mistake. “Star Trek is probably inaccurate in the way it portrays the crew members. If we project humanity three centuries ahead, we might find humanity has undergone some rather drastic changes. If Star Trek had portrayed man’s nature as significantly changed, the audience might have had great difficulty in identifying with them. Perhaps this is also an expression of Gene’s own hope for the future: man won’t allow himself to change that much.” (Whitfield and Roddenberry, The Making of Star Trek) Roddenberry’s quick reversal in thinking in mid-paragraph exemplifies the permanent double-game of provocation and denial of the hypermodern or “posthuman” condition engaged in by the official Star Trek industry, Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, Steven Spielberg’s science fiction films, and our techno-culture in general. Star Trek or technoscience is constantly working on new technologies that radically change everything. Yet it is always insisting – in the domain of ideas and discourse – that liberal humanism remains fundamentally intact.
