EVERY lifetime thought and sensation experienced by an individual could be preserved forever - on a computer chip implanted behind the eye.
British scientists believe the technology will enable someone to re live his or her own past, or somebody else to experience it after the person with the chip had died.
"This is the end of death, immortality in the truest sense," said Dr Chris Winter, head of British Telecom's artificial life team. He predicted last week that a complete record could be kept of every memory from cradle to grave. Winter, an expert in solid state physics and biochemistry, has nicknamed the chip "the Soul Catcher".
The technology sounds like something out of a Bruce Gibson sci fi novel, or Dennis Potter's final film, Karaoke. Implanted into the optical nerve, the memory chip would act like an aircraft black box and its contents could be stored and transmitted onto computers.
"By combining this information with a record of a person's genes, we could recreate a person physically, emotionally and spiritually," Dr Winter said.
He admitted that there were important ethical considerations. "An implanted chip would enhance communications beyond current concepts. For example, police would be able to use it to re-live an attack, rape or murder from the victim's viewpoint to help catch the criminal," Dr Winter said.
The BT researchers believe chips with a memory capacity of 10 million megabytes - over a million times the capacity of today's average PC chip - will be available within 30 years. They also predict that the capacity of optical fibre links, which can currently carry the equivalent of a million TV channels, will have risen to 10 million within two decades. This would give "the capability of downloading an entire lifetime from chip in a second".
Industry observers believe BT has invested some £20 million sterling in the project - almost 7 per cent of its total R&D budget of £282 million sterling.
However, some scientists are sceptical about the concept. Professor Ken Rose of Open University told the Guardian last Thursday: "The problem is that the information recorded on the chip would be meaningless. You have to be able to understand what's going on in not just hundreds of thousands of nerve cells, but millions of nerve cells across the brain."
WHILE the idea of a "mind recorder" chip might sound too fantastical, last week US researchers announced two major breakthroughs that could open the door for manufacturers to produce chips 10 times faster and with 1,000 times more memory than today's ones.
The scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a US Department of Energy lab near San Francisco, said the advances could overcome critical hurdles in using extreme ultraviolet (EUY) light to make computer chips.
"We've built the bridges to show that the use of EUV lithography is feasible and may be commercialised early in the next century," said the lab's Don Kania.
EUV lithography is one of several potential techniques for making faster, higher density integrated circuits in the future.
All of the techniques have technical challenges that need to be resolved and the industry still hasn't selected any one technique for making these "superchips".
Three of the Department of Energy's labs are undertaking the research under agreements with AT&T, chip makers Intel and AMD, Ultratech Stepper, Jmar Industries, Tropel, Micrion and KLA Instruments.
One advance stems from an "ion beam sputter deposition system" developed by Lawrence Livermore and Veeco Instruments, a New York based semiconductor equipment company.
Compared with current technology, this permits a 300,000 fold reduction in the number of defects for the multilayer coated reflective masks used to transfer circuit patterns onto silicon wafers or chips, the lab said.
However, for EUV lithography to go into commercial production the defect ratio would need to be reduced still further.
The lab's second advance is an instrument that significantly improves the measurement accuracy of optical surfaces, without which it would be impossible to build the optical systems required for EUV lithography, the lab said.