Sun - August 31, 2003

Notwithstanding the show's paucity of plot, its biggest flaw at the time lay in the notion that mechanical enhancements could make a person better, stronger, and faster than he was. Real-life mechanical attachments to aid the disabled scarcely existed until the mid-1980s, and early models struggled just to compensate for lost mobility. Forget leaping buildings; just walking was a major achievement.

But that was 20 years ago. Now that decades have passed since the Six Million Dollar man ended production, I decided to find out how cybernetics and body-enhancement technologies have developed. Here is what I learned:

"We can make him better than he was...": Restoring body functions through cybernetics

—Bionic arms: The world's first bionic arm went not to an astronaut, but to Campbell Aird, a Scottish hotelier, who lost his own arm to cancer. Equipped with advanced micro-motors and gearboxes, the arm was attached to Laird's shoulder in 1998 to restore his shoulder rotation, arm extension, wrist rotation, and gripping ability. It was covered with a skin-like substance that wrinkles and leaves fingerprints (but whose fingerprints?). Researchers at the Prosthetics Research and Development Team at Edinburgh's Princess Margaret Rose Orthopaedic Hospital said the arm would have cost about $16,500 to produce commercially.

—Bionic legs: Kat Reid, a young London teenager, received one of the first bionic legs in June of this year. Her £9,000 implant is a prosthetic implant that replaces a bone she lost to cancer. Like real bone, it can "grow" as Reid's body continues to develop. Unlike real bone, it can be operated from outside the body. When it is time to grow the leg, Reid will visit a clinic where she will insert her leg into an electromagnetic box which spins a magnetic gearbox inside the device. As this rotates at 3,000 revolutions a minute, the implant will extend fraction by fraction to match the length of her other limb. How well does it work? Reid says her walking is almost back to normal.

Meanwhile, in North America, a Quebec City company has developed a prosthetic leg to let amputees walk and climb stairs with a natural motion. The result of more than a decade's research, the leg uses mathematical models and a computer brain to match the wearer's gait. "Sometimes I have the impression my good leg can't keep up," quips one amputee. Victhom Human Bionics hopes to market the leg for $25,000, possibly by the end of 2003.

—Bionic eyes: Several companies claim they are on the verge of ending blindness.

——The Dobelle Institute, for example, is trying to create a new cornea—which regulates the light allowed into the eye—by using using a digital video camera mounted on glasses to capture images and send them to a small computer on the patient's belt. These images are processed and sent to electrodes implanted in the patient's visual cortex, which stimulate the brain to produce a pattern of bright spots that form an image. One recipient of the experimental device says it has enabled him to navigate through rooms, find doors, and even—get ready for this–drive a car. The device costs approximately $70,000.

——Optobionics Corporation of Wheaton, Illinois says six blind or nearly blind people can see light and/or shapes after having the company's artificial retina implanted. The retina converts light into the electrical impulses that are sent to the brain and an artificial one could, in theory, restore true sight without the need for an intermediating computer processor. The company hopes to ready the device for commercial sale within five years.

——NASA-sponsored researchers are working blindness from a different angle: building new electronic sensors to replace their biological counterparts—rods and cones—damaged by accidents or disease. Their photosensitive ceramic films do not degrade and are not toxic to the eye, unlike previous photodetectors implants. But don't expect to see them used any time soon. "It's a long way from the lab to the clinic," one researcher says. "Will they work? For how long? And at what level of resolution? We won't know until we implant the receptors in patients. The technology is in its infancy."

—Bionic ears: Recipients won't be using them to evesdrop on conversations in another state, but cochlear implants are already restoring the hearing of profoundly deaf people—especially those born deaf or who became deaf before language was developed. The devices use bone conduction to convert electrical energy into sound vibrations before sounds reach the inner ear. Although they apparently work well, cochlear implants have provoked anger from some members of the deaf community, who view them as both a threat to deaf culture and as an implied criticism that deaf people are disabled.

While research into bionic replacement limbs and organs will mean more opportunities for injured people in the future, the implants' relatively low cost so far proves that the Six Million Dollar Man was yet another wasteful government program.

It figures.

"... better, stronger, faster": Enhancing body functions with technology

Just because you aren't an amputee, doesn't mean you'll remain a stranger to body-enhancing technology.

—The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), taking a cue from science fiction and comic books, plans to create mechanized suits that will turn ordinary American GIs into supersoldiers who can leap great heights, lift objects many times their size, and run at high speeds. Although the capabilities of DARPA's latest models remain classified, efforts to build automated exoskeletons have been underway since at least 1965. That's the year that General Electric demonstrated Hardiman 1, a hydraulic robot as heavy as a car, that would have enabled an average person to heft a refrigerator over her head. More recently, Applied Motion, Inc.'s SpringWalker has proved that high-speed assisted motion is possible by transforming into forward motion the 95 percent of energy that we ordinarily expand moving up and down when we walk. Can a single suit harness the power of Hardiman and retain the mobility of SpringWalker? DARPA is betting that one can.

—And if you're a civilian whose pursuits involve less need for brute force, you may be interested in the research of Dr. Steven Mann, whose 30-year obsession with developing wearable computers has transformed him from a Borg-like oddity on the MIT campus in the 1970s into an ordinary-looking geek at the University of Toronto whose stylish sunglasses and running shoes just happen to possess more computing power than UNIVAC. Mann's goal is to develop unobtrusive smart clothing that weds internet-connected multimedia computing with the capabilities of a cell phone, MP3 player, dictating machine, pager, camcorder, laptop, PDA, safety device, and personal health monitor. Examples include internet-connected shoes that allow its wearer to jog with a similarly equipped partner in a remote place, while sharing images of what each sees, and eyeglasses that can replay images or slow down motion. Mann's research is truly fascinating—but as I've said here before, advances of this kind are going to require us to rewrite privacy laws over and over again.

Congress will need bionic typists just to keep up.