Bionic Man Has Fully Functional Mechanical Organs

Well, hi there! Great to see you, y'know...but then it always is. Help yourself to a perky mug of Arabica and a virtual pastry, doughnut or muffin. I have to say that eating is one of the pleasures of being human, wouldn't you say? Well some day in the future, we may not have to and I think that would be a shame. Listen to this...

With working organs and a realistic face, the world’s most high-tech humanoid made his debut in London yesterday and will be a one-man show at the city’s London Science Museum starting tomorrow.

The robot goes by Rex (short for robotic exoskeleton) or Million-Dollar Man (because that’s how much it cost to build him). Rex looks somewhat lifelike in that he has prosthetic hands, feet and a face modeled after a real man. That man is Swiss social psychologist Bertolt Meyer, who himself has a prosthetic hand. Such technology is now becoming more widely available to the general public. 

But where Rex really breaks new ground is his suite of working organs. The team of roboticists, called Shadow, that created Rex incorporated various individual body parts built in labs all over the globe. He acts as a sort of showcase to demonstrate the human organs that are currently being built in the lab and what they can do.

Rex has a heart that beats with the help of a battery, and eyes that actually kind of see: Rex’s glasses send images to a microchip in his retina, which in turn sends electrical pulses to the brain, forming shapes and patterns. But the roboticists didn’t even try to tackle the complexity of the human brain this time. 

Rex’s fist-sized dialysis unit works like a real kidney, and his mock spleen can filter infections from his “blood.” This filtering function could eventually be extremely helpful in a human, but Rex’s mock-circulatory system pumps a synthetic blood that is immune to infection.

Rex’s creators say he is the most complete bionic man to date. Altogether, scientists can now replicate a good portion of the human body’s working parts, and research on much of the rest is already underway. 

The technology is impressive, and may one day help people who need new kidneys or infection-resistant blood. But Meyer says these advances also bring up some big questions about the ethics of building people and their parts.

The future is here, eh! Bring it on. I have already said to Nong that with the problems I am having with my feet, back and neck, maybe sometime in the future, the answer will be a bionic body from the neck down. Not for a long time yet, though, eh. 

The next step after than will be a 'transformer' body that can turn itself into a vehicle and thus eliminate the need for a car. Yeah, you guessed it...we watched Transformers the other night. I wouldn't usually watch that stuff but the technology is amazing.

See ya, eh!

Bob 

PS: Bangkok already has a restaurant where the waiters are robots!