 They communicate the message, transform, transform your community, environment, transform the status quo, but most importantly they convey the distinct characteristics of a mechanical object and a human being that feels endowed with faculty, endowed with free will. In March 2021, the brain scientist, inventor and national security advisor, Newton Howard erected two transformer statues, Bumblebee and Optimus Prime, outside his home in Washington D.C.'s Georgetown neighborhood. His neighbors were furious. It was intriguing how with an abundance of real issues out there in the world, two sculptures were at the center of debate by such high intellectuals and high-powered people. They complained to the D.C.'s Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs and the federally funded Old Georgetown Board, which oversees the historic district. He was fined $20,000 and ordered to take down the statues. This is my property, I'm putting something on it, that's one of the unenlightened rights. You can't just take it. You can't just come and yank it because you feel like it. Howard decided to fight the order. After 11 years in the intelligence community, including as an analyst for the CIA, dictating to him what he was allowed to put on his own property, he says, was a violation of the principles he had dedicated his career to upholding. I would fight it all the way to whatever the highest court. It's a symbolism for freedom of speech. It represents one's ability to freedom of expression and to just simply take him down would be to give away that right. So why did Howard put transformers outside his home? He's not really a toy lover or a fan of the animated movies or TV shows. He's trying to convey to the world a philosophical idea about the nature of free will and the capacity of humans to remake the world around them. I wanted him to carry that message of transforming and accepting and changing things. Howard immigrated to the U.S. from France when he was 11. When I came to the state, I went into a talent show where you built technological objects and kind of show and tell, but on a larger scale. And I had built a hydrogen power cell back then and then kept on building things. He invented a computational system to predict Karmal functions. After college, he joined the army as an intelligence officer and ended up in the CIA's venture arm, which invests in new technologies. In one mission, Howard had an experience that changed his life. In one of the exploratory events that I participated in, I was in a transport that had received an IED or some kind of explosive device that injured me in the prefrontal areas of my brain. I'm good now, but it influenced my direction of travel, if you will, in life. It took folds, one fold that affects your physical abilities and the other fold where it takes you to the darkest corners of your brain, places where you don't want to go. And when you go there, you need to have the power to actually come back into the light part of your brain, into the positive side. Howard says that he came out of this experience with the conviction that humans have enormous power to shape their own destinies. When the US withdrew from Afghanistan in August of 2021, leaving behind many of the men and women who had worked with the American military, Howard joined the private evacuation effort. He also signed on to foster five kids waiting to be reunited with their parents. They're full of life, full of joy. They have no awareness or cognizant of the evil that surrounded them in Afghanistan. War and conflict is just one of those enemies. We have other things like diseases and mental disorders and brain traumas and neurodegenerative disorders and slow other things that requires a battle also and that battle happens at home. After his incident, Howard decided to refocus his career on using technology to transform the experiences of people suffering from neurodegenerative illnesses. In his lab at Georgetown University, he's working on a brain implant that would help treat Alzheimer and Parkinson's. The device that I refer to as the Kiwi, it's a very small chip about the size of a grain of rice and it is used to place into the areas that have the damage in the brain, bringing about corrections and operating almost as a micro brain inside that atrophy zone or the areas that where you have brain that died, neurons that died and whatnot. It interfaces through connectivity to a unique material that these neurons made out of, it's called carbon nanotubes and modulate electrical and optical or light if you will in that zone to bring it back to life. To date we were able to produce some of those prototypes and hopefully very soon we'll be able to get them to market. Howard fears that the FDA might delay the arrival of these implants to market. If the FDA and other regulatory bodies involved in these things understood what it needs to happen to move it faster, then it's a matter of a year or two years. If there are delays in understanding of the technology by the regulators and they need more definitions and more understanding, then it could take longer. There's an enormous expense and cost barriers should be simple but I don't understand the budget constraints and other things. There could be a good reason why they do things the way they do. Generally, bureaucracy gets under my skin because bureaucrats tend to granulate a problem or fragment of a problem into multiple problems and then add on each one of these problems a human to control it and then get this whole chaos to supposedly support a greater good which is making sure that things are done right. When in fact most of the time things are done right but in practicalities this is just slowing it down. In his fight with local planning agencies over the transformers, Howard has prevailed for now. He hired a consulting firm which argued that the statues constitute works of fine art, conveying the concept of transformation from some more earthly object into their hero mode, i.e. from car, truck, plane into action. The old Georgetown board agreed to let him keep the statues on the condition that he renew his permit every six months. We're all transformers. We're all about transforming things. Transforming is in essence of human nature, how we become in harmony with our environment.