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LINKSThe Bionic Man Revisited
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About thirty years ago, science fiction came up with the bionic man. A former astronaut was nearly killed in a plane accident and had one arm, his legs and an eye replaced with electronic implants.
Today we're taking a very different approach to designing implants to treat injury.
Dr. Michael Lee, the director of the school of bioengineering at Dalhousie University says our attitudes to medical implants have changed in the last forty years. Back in the sixties we were making implants that were inert, today we're making ones that interact with the body, trying to encourage natural healing.
 Photo courtesy of the University of Southern California website |
Dr. John Davies, a professor at the University of Toronto and chief scientific officer for Bonetech is using these natural approaches to develop tissue engineered products to repair broken bones.
As well as replacing body parts, there needs to be a way to repair broken wiring in the body. Both Dr. Vivian Mushahwar and Dr. Arthur Prochazka, both from the University of Alberta, are using electrical stimulation to reactivate nerves and restimulate muscles. Dr. Mushahwar is developing wires that go inside the spine to recover walking and bladder function. Dr. Prohaska has created a bionic glove that allows patients to recover their ability to grip.
Finally, Dr. Mark Humayun from the Keck Medical School at the University of South California is building a bionic eye. So far it's fairly limited, but Dr. Humayun hopes his device will soon give patients the independence they lost when they went blind.
 Photo courtesy of NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/Los Alamos National Laboratories |
This week NASA scientists announced that the Mars Odyssey orbiter's sensitive instruments had detected water ice bound up in the shallow surface of the planet. The instruments were capable of detecting the hydrogen in water up to a meter into the surface of the planet. They discovered that in the southern latitudes, the soil was a kind of permafrost, containing up to 50% water. We discussed the findings with Dr Steve Saunders, Project Scientist for the Mars Odyssey Mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California
 Photo courtesy of J. A. Thomas, Winfrith Technology Centre |
Untangling the complicated relationships in the insect world can be difficult, but Dr. Graham Elmes of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology of the Natural Environment Research Council in Dorchester, UK, is up to the job. He's discovered the secret that a parasitic wasp uses to break into the nest of an ant colony that is hiding the butterfly caterpillar it wants to lay its eggs in. The secret is a particularly diabolical form of chemical warfare.
Organs for transplants are in desperately short supply throughout North America. So doctors have come up with a new source of organs - from a group called "non heart-beating organ donors". And that's presented some troubling ethical questions for physicians, and for our own regular columnist on these matters, Dr. Miriam Shuchman, who teaches medical ethics at the State University of New York in Buffalo, and is a medical journalist in Toronto.
L.D. Mellor of Toronto asks, "Why does a hard blow to the head produce unconsciousness?"
For the answer we go to Dr. Alain Petito, a neuropsychologist at McGill University in Montreal.
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