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Cyborgs of 2011

The future is closing in. We would never have fathomed 25 years ago having need for an entire four gigabytes of memory, and now we carry around this massive byte-prowess on a flash drive hooked to our key rings. Beyond mere computer memory, the stuff of science fiction is seen with increasing frequency. Sure, Luke Skywalker lost his hand and received a life-like prosthetic 31-years-ago, but that wasn't real. Mark Hamill the actor didn't actually get a bionic hand. It was just a movie. That sci-fi dream, however, may be getting closer to coming true. Between new robotics and medical technology, people are finding machines that can return to them abilities robbed from them by severe injury. Just like Luke Skywalker's prosthesis or Iron Man's suit, humankind is making greater personal use of mechanical parts to replace lost limbs.

Bionic Hands:
While visiting his childhood home of Serbia a decade ago, "Milo" skidded off his motorcycle and slammed into a lamppost, severely injuring his shoulder. Ten years and several surgeries later, Milo finally was given some ability to move his arm, but the 26-year-old man's right hand remained paralyzed. After Viennese surgeon Professor Oskar Aszmann hooked up Milo to a hybrid bionic hand, though, giving him a "test drive", Milo decided to have his useless physical hand amputated and replaced with a prosthesis.

This particular prosthesis, however, is no normal plastic limb; it truly verges on science fiction. Manufactured by the German prosthetics company Otto Bock, Milo's bionic hand can actually pick up signals from the brain and use them to pinch and grab. The sensors which pick up the signals do not even have to be directly attached to nerves. They can pick up signals from nerves in the forearm just by being placed on the skin above. The same movements in Milo's real hand would have been sparked by the same nerve impulses that now control the prosthesis.

"The operation will change my life. I live 10 years with this hand and it cannot be (made) better. The only way is to cut this down and I get a new arm," Milo told BBC News prior to his surgery at Vienna's General Hospital.

Milo is not the first to take this bionic leap. A 24-year-old Austrian named Patrick was the very first to have Professor Aszmann amputate a useless hand and replace it with a bionic one. A year later, Patrick can tie his shoelaces and open a bottle, a joy after having had three years without the use of his hand because of a work-related injury.

"I can do functions which I did with my normal hand with the prosthetic arm," he said. "I think it was very cool - I did not do things with my hand for three years and then you put on the new hand and one moment later, you can move it. It's great."

The hands are limited in what they can do. There is so far no individual finger movement, for instance. The new hand Patrick is testing has six sensors instead of two, which the manufacturers say will give him a greater range of movement.

Graduating Cyborg:
On the other side of the world, paraplegic Austin Whitney recently used an exoskeleton to walk across the commencement stage at UC Berkeley and shake the hand of Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, to the ecstatic cheers of the crowd.

"Ask anybody in a wheelchair; ask what it would mean to once again stand and shake someone's hand while facing them at eye level," Whitney said.

Four years before, shortly after graduating from high school, Whitney had gotten into a car after having a few drinks and ended up pancaked into a tree, his spine severed above his hips. After his accident, Whitney stopped drinking and now tours high schools to tell his story.

After transferring to UC Berkeley from a community college, Whitney found a robotics team already in place busily designing exoskeletons. The research started as a Defense Department project to help soldiers carry heavy loads. The research has gone on to develop exoskeletons for people who cannot walk, and last October their company Berkeley Bionics unveiled E-Legs for use by rehabilitation centers.

The exoskeleton Whitney wore to his graduation is not up to Iron Man capabilities yet. It requires a walker or crutches, and without a miniature Tony Stark arc reactor to power it, a power pack. However, Whitney was instrumental in testing the machinery and offering suggestions for its improvement, and it gave Whitney the opportunity to walk across that stage for his diploma.

Twenty-five years ago, everyday computers were slow and klunky. Today, we can slip a computer massively more powerful than a Commodore 64 into our jacket pockets, guaranteed that it has thousands of times more memory than the 64 kilobytes of that home computer of the 1980s. The bionic efforts of today are still slow and klunky, but they offer a technology in the future – perhaps not so distant – in which paralysis need not be permanent. Whether for good or otherwise, the human mind may one day directly control machines with finesse.