Bionic man

The day when a truly bionic man or woman can be produced by biomaterials engineers has still not been reached. If researchers have discovered anything at all in their work on artificial skin, blood vessels, bone, and blood, it is that living systems are far more complex and delicate than many scientists had believed, and efforts to replicate them with the best-known biological, chemical, and physical techniques still fall far short of the perfection obtained by nature itself. Still, impressive strides have been made in only a few decades, and one can be optimistic that another few decades from now will see the ready availability of synthetic skin, blood, and bone, along with many other synthetic body parts and materials. 

Col. Austin s legs, right arm, and left eye are replaced with cybernetic limbs which give him, the world s first Bionic man, extraordinary strength and abilities. 

As we move to still more drastic replacements, the road becomes for a while much easier to travel. At least the basic ideas of an area variously called bionics and biorobotics are familiar to us all through science fiction. Remember The Six Million Dollar Man, the popular American TV series of the 1970s based on the book Cyborg by Martin Caidin We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world s first Bionic man. Building humans better, stronger, and faster is an achievable technology, already proved with more basic artificial limbs that need not be explored in detail. 

A prosthesis is a device that has been designed to replace a missing part of the body or to make a part of the body work better. An artificial limb or part is called a prosthetic device. Doctors have had to amputate limbs to save injured patients lives for thousands of years (Figure 20-9). Perhaps you have seen a cartoon or a movie of a pirate who had a peg leg—a wooden stump from the knee down. Or perhaps you have seen fictional movies or television shows about a bionic man or woman. Significant improvements in prosthetic devices have been made in the past decade, and the future looks even better. 

Hung, George K. Biomedical En neenng Principles of the Bionic Man. Hackensack, N.J. World Scientific, 2010. Examines scientific bioengineering principles as they apply to humans. 

The 1970s saw the introduction of a very popular series of three television motion pictures, followed by a television series on the same theme The Six Million Dollar Man. The motion pictures and series starred Lee Majors as a test pilot whose airplane crashed, resulting in the loss of both legs, an arm, and an eye. Majors s character, Steve Austin, was rebuilt by a skilled physician named Dr. Rudy Wells using advanced biomedical body parts at a cost of 6 million (hence the name). In a follow-up series, Lindsay Wagner played Austin s counterpart, Jaime Sommers, in The Bionic Woman. Sommers was seriously injured in a parachute jump and, like Austin, is provided with a number of engineered body parts that give her extraordinary physical powers. 

Bionics the behaviour and structure of large-scale, man-made systems should be as similar as possible to those exhibited by natural ecosystems. 

Fischman, Josh. Merging Man and Machine The Bionic Age. National Geographic Til, no. 1 (January, 2010) 34-53. A well-illustrated consideration of the latest advances in bionics, with specific examples of people aided by the most modern prosthetic technologies. 

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