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Florida family, executives implanted with microchips
BEATRICE E. GARCIA
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Published Saturday, May 11, 2002
MIAMI -- The implants for the Jacobs family of Boca Raton and Nathan Issacson of Tamarac went without a hitch Friday.
These four persons, plus five company executives, were the first to have a microchip -- about the size of a grain of rice -- implanted in the upper part of their right arms. The chip, made by a unit of Palm Beach-based Applied Digital Solutions, contains an ID number that's linked to a database with their medical information.
At a press conference where the company gathered executives, directors, distributors, potential customers and media to discuss VeriChip and its marketing rollout, the Jacobs got high fives as they were introduced and entered the room. The media attention started early in the day, with implant procedure for Jeffrey Jacobs being shown live on NBC's "Today" show.
"I hope it becomes a standard, but I hope I never have to use my VeriChip," said Leslie Jacobs in an interview after the press conference.
Applied Digital's stock, which has been charging ahead in days and weeks leading up to Friday's events, fell back in heavy trading.
The shares dropped 65 cents, or 28.76 percent, to $1.63, as 73.2 million shares changed hands. It was the fourth most-active stock on NASDAQ Friday.
Scott Silverman, the company president said the company expects the market for VeriChips to reach $2.7 million in its first year. He envisions it widening to $170 million in five years as more applications for the chip are rolled out including security, access control and identification.
The VeriChip will retail for $200 plus the doctor's expense. The scanner will sell for about $1,000 to $1,500, but company officials said they would most likely donate the scanners initially to medical facilities.
Right now, Applied Digital is marketing VeriChip in South Florida until June 30 to gauge market reception and to set up the infrastructure needed to make the chips realize their full potential.
Hospitals, healthcare facilities and emergency-care facilities need to have a scanner, also manufactured by VeriChip Corp., to read the individual ID number that resides on each VeriChip. That number is then plugged into an online secure database, which the company is maintaining, to obtain a person's medical history and records.
Silverman said he expects that in the next two to three years, it will be standard protocol for emergency room personnel to scan the upper right arm of every patient admitted for care.
However, Applied Digital said it's still negotiating with local hospitals on their acceptance and use of the VeriChip scanner. Silverman said the company has "verbal agreements" 13 of the 14 hospitals in Palm Beach County. But no hospital has actually agreed to use the scanner.
The company, asked by several reporters, declined it list the hospitals it has met with because it doesn't have signed agreements at this point.
Silverman, who said Applied Digital expects to release its first-quarter results within the next week, reiterated his guidance for the quarter.
The company said it should be EBITDA positive in the first quarter, its cash balance increased by more than $3 million to more than $7 million and it's in full compliance with all debt covenants with its senior lender.
He added that the company right now doesn't need to issue more stock to fund its operations or its marketing for VeriChip.
Dr. Harvey Kleiner, the Sunrise, Fla., physician who implanted the chip in Issacson, and Dr. David Wulkan of Boca Raton who implanted the chips in the Jacobs family, said they will do implants in others interested in getting "chipped."
Kleiner said he has some 6 to 12 patients who are interested in the VeriChip. Some are patients that he has alerted to the chip's existence.
Bolton said that the company has a list of 4,000 to 5,000 persons in Florida, New York and California who have expressed interest in the implantable chip.
Although VeriChip is doing a local trial for the time being, Applied Digital is working to market the chip in Latin America.
Antonio Sergio Aguiar, president of ASA Enterprises, a Miami-based trading and consulting firm, is helping Applied Digital arrange distribution deals throughout Latin America, except in Mexico and Guatemala. He said several deals are two to three weeks away from completion.
Mexico will be handled by Ysolino Anton Gonzalez, director general of Speko. Gonzalez, who signed the distributor agreement with VeriChip in late April, said he hasn't inked any deals so far.
http://staugustine.com - (verichip source)
THE REAL ID ACT OF 2005
link to a summary of the REAL ID ACT of 2005
don't trust Zeitgeist??? go to http://www.flhsmv.gov/realid/ - to see proof that it has already begun
First humans receive biochip implant "Chipping" promoted as "medical benefit"
© By Peter Chowka
All rights reserved
(May 15, 2002) Purported medical benefits have recently been cited as among the more compelling reasons why people should receive an implanted microchip or biochip. On May 10, three members of a family in Florida ("medical pioneers," according to a fawning report on the CBS Evening News) became the first people to receive the implants. Each device, made of silicon and called a VeriChip™, is a small radio transmitter about the size of a piece of rice that is injected under a person's skin. It transmits a unique personal ID number whenever it is within a few feet of a special receiver unit. VeriChip's maker describes it as "a miniaturized, implantable, radio frequency identification device (RFID) that can be used in a variety of security, emergency and healthcare applications."
The May 10 development was headline news around the country, with most of the coverage decidedly positive and uncritical of the potential ramifications of the technology.
For several years the American public has been softened up to accept the microchip implant concept. In the late 1990s, thousands of Americans' pet dogs and cats began to receive small, surgically implanted microchip identifiers. If a cat or dog that had received an implant became lost, it might be identified and reunited with its owner if a veterinarian, animal shelter or animal control officer had special equipment and scanned the animal. This equipment has quickly proliferated and it is now the policy of the Animal Humane Society to implant all animals it makes available for adoption and to scan all lost or homeless animals it picks up
On May 10, the human biochip era was born as volunteers Jeff Jacobs, 48, his wife Leslie, 46, and their son Derek, 14, received the VeriChip implants in their arms while under local anesthesia. According to Applied Digital Solutions, the company that manufactures and markets the VeriChip, the Jacobs' were the first people to be "chipped." At the company-sponsored chipping event, Leslie Jacobs told the assembled press, representing 40 major media organizations around the world including a live national audience watching on NBC's Today show, "We're doing this as a security for us, because we've worked so hard to save my husband's life." She was referring to the fact that her husband has been treated for cancer, injuries suffered in a car accident, a degenerative spinal condition, chronic eye disease and abdominal problems. Derek, meanwhile, is reportedly allergic to certain antibiotics. The theory is that, if any of the Jacobs' become ill, or are injured or impaired, their medical histories can be accessed by professionals who can scan their microchip implants.
The Jacobs family chipping was performed by Jeff Jacobs' physician, David Wulkan, MD, at the Surgical Associates of Palm Beach County in Boca Raton, Florida. According to an Applied Digital Solutions (Nasdaq: ADSX) press release, Surgical Associates, located in Boca Raton, Florida, is the first "Authorized VeriChip Center." A second chipping procedure took place on May 10 involving another volunteer, Nate Isaacson, an 83 year old retired building contractor with Alzheimer's. The procedure to implant the microchip in Isaacson's upper back was performed by Harvey Kleiner, MD at The Family Health Place, the Authorized VeriChip Center located in Sunrise (Broward County), Florida.
According to a company news release, ADSX "president Scott R. Silverman said that the VeriChip rollout would follow the successful business model used by Applied Digital's sister company, Digital Angel Corporation, with the introduction of the now familiar companion animal identification system (HomeAgain™)."
ADSX announced that Wulkan also performed the "chipping" procedure on three of the company's senior executives: Silverman; Richard J. Sullivan, Chairman and CEO; and Dr. Keith Bolton, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. Silverman commented: "All three of us wanted to 'get chipped' to experience for ourselves just how safe and easy the procedure is and to demonstrate to the world our complete confidence in the success of this exciting, life-enhancing technology."
ADSX foresees a growing market for chipping (which it terms the "emergency information and verification market") "exceeding $15 billion," starting with millions of Americans who might be sold on a perceived medical or personal security need (for example, Alzheimers patients -there are an estimated 4 million people in the US with the disease -and young children). "The entire VeriChip program is designed to save lives in an emergency and enhance the peace of mind of Subscribers and their loved ones," reads an ADSX news release. ADSX' business model is based on demand for the $200-per-patient chipping, and providing expensive proprietary scanning equipment to scan the chips and a database of information on chipped individuals linked to the chip's ID number maintained by Digital Angel™, the ADSX associated company. The database is called "the Global VeriChip Subscriber (GVS) Registry service" and according to ADSX it "provides immediate access to a secure database containing vital Subscriber personal verification and Subscriber-provided information." It costs each patient or subscriber $10 a month to store their information.
On April 4, 2002, ADSX announced that it had received written guidance that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not consider VeriChip's personal verification device to be a regulated medical device. According to the Los Angeles Times (May 10), "Company officials said they were free to proceed because the implant contains identification numbers that correspond to personal medical information in a separate database" and does not contain the information in the chip itself.
Chips Ahoy
The next step in the evolution of this technology is the placement of additional personal information, and "Global Positioning (tracking) Capability," in an implantable microchip that would be a bit larger than the VeriChip. ADSX is working on such a device and tests are scheduled to begin before the end of the year. (Reports have circulated for a number of years that some U.S. military personnel and covert operatives working in dangerous areas or behind enemy lines have been implanted with sophisticated microchips that allow the host to be tracked by orbiting American spy satellites.)
Digital Angel Corporation, formerly wholly owned by ADSX (ADSX now owns a sizable percentage of Digital Angel's stock), already has such capability in its wristwatch-sized Digital Angel™ device. According to ADSX, "Digital Angel™ technology represents the first-ever combination of advanced biosensors and Web-enabled wireless telecommunications linked to the Global Positioning System (GPS). By utilizing advanced biosensor capabilities, Digital Angel will be able to monitor key body functions – such as temperature and pulse – and transmit that data, along with accurate emergency location information, to a ground station or monitoring facility."
In the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on America and the new interest in ensuring "homeland security" and in preventing future attacks, there has been growing political and public interest in and support for new and supposedly more effective methods of identifying people, primarily by mandating a national ID card. Public opinion polls last fall reported over 70 percent of Americans supported the national ID concept. Taking the concept further, some analysts have even advocated chipping everyone in the country.
With the political climate now as it is, it looks like it could be a short hop from "medical safety" to "security" (both concepts already widely accepted) to national ID to "voluntary" or ultimately mandatory biochip implants. As New York Times columnist William Safire wrote last December 24, "In the dreams of Big Brother and his cousin, Big Marketing, nothing can compare to forcing every person in the United States - under penalty of law - to carry what the totalitarians used to call 'papers.'
". . .Hospitals would say: How about a chip providing a complete medical history in case of emergencies? Merchants would add a chip for credit rating, bank accounts and product preferences, while divorced spouses would lobby for a rundown of net assets and yearly expenditures. Politicians would like to know voting records and political affiliation. Cops, of course, would insist on a record of arrests, speeding tickets, E-Z pass auto movements and links to suspicious Web sites and associates."
Safire cautions, however, that "A national ID card would be a ticket to the loss of much of your personal freedom. Its size could then be reduced for implantation under the skin in the back of your neck."
"We're going to track everything."
On February 7, 2002, Charlotte A. Twight, professor of economics at Boise State University, in an article "Why Not Implant a Microchip?," wrote, "Over half of the population now supports some form of national identification. If Americans accept a National ID system as they accepted SSNs [Social Security Numbers], and if the intrusiveness of such a system expands as did government-mandated SSN usage, ten years from now the idea of a national microchip system may not seem as alien and repugnant as it does today. As with SSNs, people will get used to it."
Jeffrey Rosen, an associate professor at George Washington University Law School and the legal affairs editor of The New Republic, wrote a chilling article, "Silicon Valley's Spy Game," published in the New York Times Magazine on April 14 about the technological imperative that is helping to accelerate what seems like an unstoppable momentum for both a national ID and combining private and government databases into one massive, inescapable mega database that will eventually include data about everyone on the planet.
"The technology for integrated databases already exists," Rosen writes, "waiting to be activated by the flip of a switch. In the wake of Sept. 11, few politicians or judges seem willing to keep the forces of centralization in check. And no one should count on the technologists to police themselves."
Among the people Rosen interviewed was billionaire Larry Ellison, the founder and CEO of Oracle Corporation, which describes itself as "the world's leading supplier of software for enterprise information management." Last October, Ellison wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "The single thing we could do to make life tougher for terrorists would be to ensure that all the information in myriad government databases was integrated into a single national file." Ellison proposed that the federal government adopt a digital national ID database with a card for each citizen. In several interviews, he offered to provide the software to make it all happen to the government for free.
In the Times article, Rosen writes, "I had one last question for Larry Ellison. 'In 20 years, do you think the global database is going to exist, and will it be run by Oracle?'''
'''I do think it will exist, and I think it is going to be an Oracle database,' he replied. 'And we're going to track everything.
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