A college senior returning to classes this fall has spent nearly their entire undergraduate career under the shadow--or in the embrace--of generative AI. ChatGPT first launched in November 2022, when that student was a freshman. As a department chair at Washington University in St. Louis, I witnessed the chaos it unleashed on campus. Students weren't sure what AI could do, or which uses were appropriate. Faculty were blindsided by how effectively ChatGPT could write papers and do homework.

The arrest of Harvard Professor Charles Lieber for failing to reveal his work for the Chinese is more than alarming. One of the world's leading experts in nanotechnology, Mr. Lieber contributed to China's Thousand Talents Program and assisted China in its military arms race with the United States, whether knowingly or not. Americans should be concerned that China is pursuing military nanotechnology solutions, including linking soldiers' brains directly to computers. Since at least 2000, when President Clinton proclaimed his National Nanotechnology Initiative, U.S. government agencies have been heavily engaged in nanotechnology research. A significant part of the work has been funded by the Defense Department, and the long-term goal is to create a new kind of warrior linking the human brain to machines, to millions of sensors and to the computer cloud.

Want to understand what happens to the brain as it ages, or figure out how people learn to recognize faces? Neurologists asking such questions, or struggling to deal with brain degeneration caused by Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, might get some insight from detailed observations of the brain's circuitry over time. But so far, such information has been hard to come by. Now researchers at Harvard have shown that they can track brain activity, at the level of individual neurons, for months at a time, using a tiny electronic mesh that can be injected directly into the brain. A group led by Charles Lieber, a chemistry professor at Harvard, reports in this week's Nature Methods that they were able to record the neural activity of mice over eight months, long enough to see how the animals' brains changed as they entered the mouse version of middle age.