Coming soon: The real bionic man
Body parts grown to order, bionic eyes that allow the blind to see, downloading one's mind onto computer hard drives -- it sounds like science fiction, but it will soon become reality. By Damian Corless
Virgin Health Bank is promising customers will be able to withdraw deposits of skin, veins and hair follicles
A camera so tiny it can be implanted to combat blindness. A severed finger that grows back again. Your mind downloaded into a computer... The first two 'science fiction' medical miracles have already happened; the third is almost certainly on the way. Welcome to the incredible new world of 'science fact'.
One of the most most visually striking medical advances came to the fore last week when South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius appealed the decision to ban him from competing in this summer's Olympic Games in China.
The 21-year-old, who jokingly describes himself as "the fastest thing on no legs", is known in athletics as Blade Runner, after the prosthetic blades attached below his knees which enable him to out-run able-bodied rivals while burning 25pc less energy.
The development that helped Oscar become a world champion is mechanical; other scientists are working in a different way to help people like him. At the MIT Leg Lab in Massachusetts, another double amputee, Dr Hugh Herr, has spent a more than a decade developing prosthetic limbs that combine lightweight robotics with animal-derived muscle tissue.
His aim is to dispense with the motor parts which make some current prosthetics heavy and cumbersome, by developing cyborg limbs that burn glucose for energy just like human muscle. Coined in 1960, the term cyborg refers to an organism that combines artificial and natural systems.
As the work of Herr and like-minded scientists advances, the advent of the real life Bionic Man and Bionic Woman gets ever closer. Television's original Six Million Dollar Man, Steve Austen, had a bionic eye with a 20:1 zoom lens and infrared night vision.
Thirty years after the series ended, what was once the stuff of fantasy has become reality, with a team of US and German scientists recently unveiling a bionic eye designed to allow blind people see again.
Images from a micro- camera are fed into a computer chip implanted at the back of the retina, which translates them into impulses that the brain can interpret.
In a related development that brings to mind scenes from The Terminator, engineers at Washington University's Medical Centre last January unveiled the prototype of a flexible, biologically safe contact lens imprinted with electronic circuitry and lights. Just like Arnold Schwarzenegger's cyborg, the wearer will be able to access a range of visual data, from surfing the net to receiving traffic information while driving, and all within the privacy of your own eyelid.
But under the broad umbrella of a new discipline called Regenerative Medicine, there are even more profound and far-reaching developments in train. One of the most astounding of these concerns Lee Spievack, a hobby-store salesman from Cincinnati who severed the top of his middle finger on the propeller of a model airplane 30 months ago.
The piece of missing digit, almost an inch long, was never found and a surgeon recommended a skin graft to cover up the wound. Instead, Spievack turned to his brother, Alan, a pioneer of regenerative medicine at Harvard, who gave him a powder containing extract of pig bladder. The concoction, called extracellular matrix, is a mix of protein and connective tissue which has been used successfully by surgeons to repair tendons.
After four months of applying his brother's miracle grow, Spievack's damaged digit had grown back to its original length and looked "like my normal finger". Spievack says that his regrown finger feels harder than the rest, and that the nail on it continues to grow at twice the rate of its neighbours, but: "All in all, I'm quite impressed."
Explaining how the extracellular matrix works, Dr Steven Badylak said: "Every tissue in the body has cells capable of regeneration. Somehow the matrix summons the cells and tells them what to do. It helps instruct them in terms of where they need to go, how they need to differentiate -- should I become a blood vessel, a nerve, a muscle cell or whatever."
Badylak is one of a growing number of scientists who believe it is only a matter of time before it is possible to grow entire limbs.
In Wake Forest University, North Carolina, a team led by Dr Anthony Atala have begun growing body parts in a lab they call the Medical Factory. Starting with basic cells, they have so far grown 18 types of tissue including muscle, whole organs and the complete pulsing heart valve of a sheep.
Another fast-growing branch of regenerative medicine is called Body Banking, which allows individuals to freeze their skin, eggs, cells and other body parts for future cosmetic procedures and health interventions. Richard Branson's Virgin Health Bank is amongst the bodies promising that in the not-too-distant future, participants will be able to withdraw deposits of collagen, skin, veins, hair follicles and stem cells to help combat the effects of ageing and the degeneration of vital organs such as the heart and eyes.
Right now, the most talked about advancement in medical science is the embryonic work being carried out on face transplant procedures. The world's first partial face transplant operation was successfully carried out three years ago.
The doctor behind the pioneering procedure, Peter Butler, is originally from Dublin and spent years attempting to devise a treatment that would help those suffering from severe facial deformities. It is still in its infancy but Dr Butler has spoken about how technical refinements will ensure that the operation becomes more widespread -- and safer.
And it doesn't end there.
British Telecom's Futurology Unit has predicted that by 2050 those who can afford it will be able to buy immortality, of a sort. According to Ian Pearson, head of the unit: "Realistically, by 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine so when you die it's not a major career problem."
The BT think-tank predicts that mind downloads will be available to the well-heeled by mid-century and become routine for the masses by 2080, so that youngsters walking around today will have the option of prolonging their lives indefinitely in cyberspace. In support of their case, BT's boffins point to the astounding geometric progression of computer evolution.
When PlayStation 3 arrived three years ago it was 35 times more powerful than its predecessor, with roughly 1pc the capacity of the human brain.
According to Pearson: "PlayStation 5 will probably be as powerful as the human brain. We're already looking at how you might structure a computer that could possibly become conscious. There are quite a lot of us who believe it's feasible."
He expands: "We don't know how to do it yet but we've begun looking at the techniques that we think consciousness is based on. Information comes in from the outside world but also from other parts of your brain and each part processes it on an internal sensing basis.
"Consciousness is just another sense, effectively, and that's what we're trying to design on a computer. Not everyone agrees, but it's my conclusion that it is possible to make a conscious computer with superhuman levels of intelligence before 2020."
- Damien Corless
