Six Million Dollar Man

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. 

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. 

Man. Six million dollars went a long way in the 1970s, but there is today an argument that if there were sufficient interest and funds, then formidable technologies could be mobilized and many rich people could be cured or live greatly prolonged life spans. 

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