His name is Rex. He's six-foot-five and bears an uncanny resemblance to Dr. Bertolt Meyer, a social psychologist who's part of the team that built him. Yes, Rex looks like a man, he even has blood, but he is not human. This modern day Frankenstein was built from the latest in artificial organs and prosthetic limbs. He has a functional artificial blood-circulatory system and several artificial organs including a heart, pancreas, kidney, spleen, and trachea. The work of Meyer and a team of roboticists is being presented in a TV documentary series called “How to Build a Bionic Man.” Rex is also on display at the Science Museum in London as part of an exhibit called “How Much of You Can Be Rebuilt?” and is valued at $1 million.
Before Rex, most of science's work with fusing the sci-fi world of the 'bionic man' or 'cyborg' with humankind has involved starting with a person and using artificial parts for medical purposes. For example, a bionic arm or leg for a person who's lost a limb. But this is the first instance that a bionic man has been built in reverse, taking a machine and adding human parts. Scientists hope that one day this technology will be used to manufacture organs for transplant removing the agonizing wait for a donor.
Dr. Meyer demonstrated how Rex works in London this week:
"One of my personal favorites is the artificial blood that runs through these tubings, because this is made of nanoparticles that are able to bind oxygen and give them off, just like real blood can do, but this isn't real blood, this is nanoparticles," Meyer told reporters.
"Also the fact that they are very close to an implantable artificial kidney that will actually be able to replace a failing kidney without the necessity of a kidney transplant. So think of the great benefits technology like that would bring. I knew fairly much about prosthetic limbs apparently, but what we are close to accomplishing in terms of artificial organs -- I find that absolutely mind boggling."
Dr. Meyer himself is part bionic man and has a robotic hand on one arm. During the first part of the duco-series, Meyer visits Hugh Herr, an expert from MIT who has three sets of high-tech legs which he uses interchangeably, having lost both his legs due to frostbite when he was 17. Herr talks about the advances in bionic body parts as an improvement on the human body: “I think normal bodies are boring,” he says.
Herr also admits that he wouldn't take his old legs back if he had a choice, opening up the questions of elective bionic surgery, though both men agree we are a long way off from that.
While many of the implications of the bionic man may still be in the distant future, this creation certainly does bring up some ethical questions which we will have to answer as science continues to progress and the lines between what's human and artificial become increasingly blurred.
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