Merging Man and Machine in 2010

Although we are stay a long way from a fully functioning artificial human body, we are taking steps toward restoring different aspects of human functionality faster than ever before. The focus of this research, however, remains focused in restoring lost human ability rather than enhancing it or creating an artificial being. In fact, most of these technologies still rely on the human brain and focus on restoring motion, sight, etc to interact with the brain as similarly to normal as possible. Without an artificial brain, these technologies would be useless on a fully bionic man. I think that this will put the concept of a fully bionic man far in the distant future. While most of these procedures and technologies remain "experimental," many patients are greatly benefiting from these advances:

Aiden Kenny, 10 months old

Aiden Kenny was born deaf beyond the help of any existing hearing aids. His cochlear implants bypass the parts of his ears that don't work by carrying an electrical signal directly to his auditory nerves. Within months of his surgery, in which he had 22 electrodes implanted under his skin, Aiden was learning his first words like any 1 year old boy. The implant is composed of several parts. an antenna receives the auditory signal from a microphone, which is contained in an external speech processor. A magnet holds the external transmitter which sends the signal to the antenna. The receiver directs the signal from the antenna to the electrodes, which are placed in the cochlea. Finally, the electrode array stimulates Aiden's auditory nerve to transmit the signal to his brain. John Niparko, a surgeon from Johns Hopkins University, calls him "a real bionic kid."

Amanda Kitts, 40 years old

Tomorrow's People- a group whose missing body parts have been replaced by machine that can respond to their own nervous system. This means that they can control the machine with their brain, similarly to how they control any other natural part of their body. These "machines" are called neural prostheses and most recently, bionics. Amanda Kitts lost her arm in a car accident in 2006. However, her brain did not lose the sense that her arm was still there. Often referred to as a "phantom limb," recent amputees can often continue to feel their missing limb and even forget that it has been amputated. This feeling is due to impulses that the brain continues to send and receive to the missing limb, even after it has been amputated. Amanda has volunteered to test one of these neural prostheses. The technique is called targeted muscle re-innervation, first used in 2002. Although this technique does require surgery to reroute the damaged nerves to major muscles nearby (see next post), the results are astounding. Amanda is now able to use this bionic arm and control it in the same way as she controlled her natural arm. She can turn her wrist and extend her elbow, and she can even feel how hard she is grabbing something, or if it is smooth or rough (thanks to pressure pads at the finger tips of the prosthetic arm!

Jo Ann Lewis, 79 years old

Jo Ann lost her sight to retinitis pigmentosa several years ago. This is a degenerative disease in which the rods and cones, the light detecting cells in your eyes, are destroyed over a period of time. The retina is normally filled with ganglion and bipolar cells, which gather signals from the rods and cones and pass them on to the optic nerve through fibers. Many patients with retinitis pigmentosa still have a surviving layer of retina, but until Mark Humayun, from Second Sight and the University of Southern California, no one knew how to feed it images in a way that the retina could understand. Jo Ann was among the first patients to use the Argus, which is a pair of dark glasses that have a very small video camera. A radio transmitter send signals from the video camera to a small computer that can be worn on a belt. This computer is then able to translate the video signal into a series of electrical impulses that the retina is able to understand. The patient also has a square array of 16 electrodes attached to the retinal surface, which are triggered that the computer. This has allowed Jo Ann to see edges and rough shapes. She says, "Now I'm able to see silhouettes of trees again. That's one of the last things I remember seeing naturally. Today I can see limbs sticking out this way and that."