Overview
The story broke on a Saturday. On September 8, 2007, the Associated Press moved a report by Todd Lewan under a plain headline about chip implants and animal tumors, and by that weekend it was running in newspapers across the country. Lewan had gone back through veterinary and toxicology studies stretching from the mid-1990s onward and found something that had never been part of the public conversation about the VeriChip: in a series of experiments, laboratory mice and rats implanted with glass-encapsulated transponders had developed malignant, fast-growing cancers at the injection site. The chip in question was not a prototype. The Food and Drug Administration had cleared it for implantation in human beings in October 2004, and a couple of thousand people already carried one under the skin of the upper arm.
The device itself was almost aggressively unremarkable. A cylinder of bioglass about the size of two grains of rice, pushed in through a large-bore syringe, carrying a sixteen-digit identification number that a reader could pull up wirelessly. VeriChip Corporation marketed it as a medical safeguard: an unconscious emergency-room patient could be identified, their records retrieved, in seconds. What the AP added to that picture was a paper trail nobody had been asked to reconcile with the marketing.
What the studies actually said
The research Lewan cited was real and, for the most part, published. A 1996 study associated with Dow Chemical, led by researcher Keith Johnson, reported that implanted transponders had induced tumors in mice. A 1997 German study of more than four thousand chipped mice found tumors in about one percent of the animals, with the authors writing that the growths were clearly tied to the implants. A 1998 study out of Connecticut put the rate higher still, above ten percent in a group of 177 mice, a figure the researchers themselves called surprising. A 2006 French study of some 1,260 mice found tumors in roughly four percent. Across the body of work, the reported incidence ran from about one percent to ten percent.
The scientists Lewan reached did not speak with one voice, and none of them claimed the mouse data proved a human hazard. Robert Benezra of Memorial Sloan-Kettering told the AP there was no way in the world he would let one of the chips be put in his own body. Oded Foreman of the Jackson Laboratory said something real appeared to be happening in the animals and that it deserved study. Cheryl London of Ohio State called for a long-term study of chipped dogs before any conclusions could be drawn. The recurring note was uncertainty about whether a tumor pattern seen in inbred rodents said anything at all about a person.
The company answers
VeriChip and its parent, Applied Digital Solutions, pushed back within days. In coverage by RFID Journal on September 12, the company said flatly that there was no evidence the injection of an RFID chip under the skin caused tumors of any kind. Zeke Mejia, chief technology officer of the affiliated Digital Angel, argued that lab mice bear little relation to pets or to humans and can grow a tumor from little more than a grain of sand, and that jumping from mouse to man was a very big leap. The company pointed to its FDA clearance, to more than two thousand human implants with no reported sarcomas, and to millions of chipped dogs, cats, and fish without a documented tumor problem, and cited a Sandoz Research Institute study that found no link.
One detail traveled further than the rest. Tommy Thompson had been Secretary of Health and Human Services, the department that houses the FDA, when the VeriChip clearance was moving through. He left the Cabinet in early 2005 and, within months, joined VeriChip's board, compensated in stock and options. Thompson had publicly promoted the idea of implantable medical chips; he had also, when pressed, declined to have one put in his own arm. The AP reported the sequence without alleging that he influenced the clearance.
The advocacy case
Much of the underlying research had reached Lewan through Katherine Albrecht, the privacy campaigner who ran CASPIAN and co-wrote the book Spychips. She did not treat the tumor studies as a loose end. In materials her group published, including a June 2008 report laying out what she called VeriChip's lies and deception, Albrecht argued that the company had misled reporters, regulators, and shareholders about the cancer record, and that the studies should have surfaced during the approval process rather than a decade later in a wire story. VeriChip rejected the characterization. The FDA, for its part, had cleared the device as a Class II product, and critics noted the tumor literature was not flagged in that review.
Running underneath all of it was an older suspicion. From the moment a chip was first sold as something to embed in human flesh, evangelical readers had cast it as the mark of the beast from Revelation, the number no one could buy or sell without. That reading gave the VeriChip a second life in sermons and message boards, separate from any question a pathologist might ask.
Where it stands
The implant business never recovered its footing. The stock slid, the human-chip line generated only a trickle of revenue against the company's infant-protection and pet-recovery products, and by 2010 the firm, by then renamed PositiveID, had pulled the implant from the market, citing poor sales. The animal studies remain in the literature, and the two readings of them that collided in 2007 have never quite been reconciled: that the rodent tumors were a warning quietly buried, or that they were a rodent problem misapplied to people. No long-term human study of the kind Cheryl London asked for was ever completed, which is much of why the question has stayed open.