THE CELL PHONE AS EARTH MOTHER?

"60 Minutes" recently featured an interview with the 71-year-old inventor of the cell phone. He proudly noted that today's hand-held communicators hold the world in their hands, but he questioned instruments whose user guide is heavier than the phone.

So now he's designed the Jitterbug which is a little phone that is only a phone. No screens, no keypads, no nothing else except talking with someone. Kinda like inventing our way back to the future.

But just when you think it's safe to pick up your little phone again, he promised that sometime soon, phones will be chips implanted behind the ear. With this step, mankind becomes the phone and the phone becomes mankind. Which sounds like a cross between a Star Trek and a Woody Allen movie!

For those not born into the mobile-phone culture, it's customary at this point to smugly say, "Yeah, but no phone will ever take the place of a good hug!"

Enter Seth Pollak of the University of Wisconsin. According to her research, "Biochemically speaking, a phone conversation with your kid is as good as a hug..." Whoa! Were they right when they kept telling us: Reach out and touch someone? According to this study, yes, because in it the phone call and the hug released the very same amounts of the "love hormone" oxytocin.

So here at the crossroads of another brave-new-world leap, we are left to ponder whether anything we've learned in the past fits the future. Among those sacred absolutes was the firm conviction that moms hold the key to life and to love. However, now Ms Pollak (who does not identify herself as a mother) is suggesting that the "key" may be something you can buy at your local phone shop for $79.99!

I'm wondering here what my Mom would have said to a price tag of $79.99. Wait -- I know what she'd say. "Come over here and give me a hug...!"