Researcher Infects Himself With Computer Virus

Ever since Mark Gasson got a virus, his cellphone won’t work, and he can’t unlock the door to his building on campus. But those are the kind of symptoms humans can expect when they get infected with computer viruses. 

Mr. Gasson, a research fellow at the University of Reading, in England, has a radio-frequency identification chip implanted in his hand. It’s the kind of computer chip that is sometimes used to track animals, but Mr. Gasson uses it to activate his cellphone and unlock doors. He also uses it for research that explores the potential risks of implanted devices, which he expects will become more common in humans. When he infects the chip with a virus, he can then transmit that virus to another computer.

Mr. Gasson stresses that the virus in his chip is spreading from implanted technology to a computer, not from a human being to a computer. Still, he says we should consider how computer viruses could potentially affect people’s bodies.

“It is known that some people with invasive medical implants, over time, consider them to actually be part of their body,” he wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle. “In this context we can and should talk of computer viruses infecting the person.”

“It certainly sounds like science fiction when you hear it, but when you break it down to the technical elements, it’s an interesting experiment,” said Brian D. Voss, chief information officer of Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge.

Mr. Voss said that Mr. Gasson’s research was “a very simple sort of experiment” and “is not anything that is earth-shattering.” However, it still has important implications. Especially as medical devices get more complex, Mr. Voss said, “it would be possible for them to get infected with viruses that could do nefarious things.”