A
camera so tiny it can be implanted to combat blindness. A severed
finger that grows back again. Your mind downloaded into a computer…
The first two ‘science fiction’ medical miracles have already happened;
the third is almost certainly on the way. Welcome to the incredible new
world of ‘science fact’.

One of the most most visually striking
medical advances came to the fore last week when South African sprinter
Oscar Pistorius appealed the decision to ban him from competing in this
summer’s Olympic Games in China.

The 21-year-old, who jokingly
describes himself as “the fastest thing on no legs”, is known in
athletics as Blade Runner, after the prosthetic blades attached below
his knees which enable him to out-run able-bodied rivals while burning
25pc less energy.

The development that helped Oscar become a
world champion is mechanical; other scientists are working in a
different way to help people like him. At the MIT Leg Lab in
Massachusetts, another double amputee, Dr Hugh Herr, has spent a more
than a decade developing prosthetic limbs that combine lightweight
robotics with animal-derived muscle tissue.

His aim is to
dispense with the motor parts which make some current prosthetics heavy
and cumbersome, by developing cyborg limbs that burn glucose for energy
just like human muscle. Coined in 1960, the term cyborg refers to an
organism that combines artificial and natural systems.

As the
work of Herr and like-minded scientists advances, the advent of the
real life Bionic Man and Bionic Woman gets ever closer. Television’s
original Six Million Dollar Man, Steve Austen, had a bionic eye with a
20:1 zoom lens and infrared night vision.

Thirty years after
the series ended, what was once the stuff of fantasy has become
reality, with a team of US and German scientists recently unveiling a
bionic eye designed to allow blind people see again.

Images
from a micro- camera are fed into a computer chip implanted at the back
of the retina, which translates them into impulses that the brain can
interpret.

In a related development that brings to mind scenes
from The Terminator, engineers at Washington University’s Medical
Centre last January unveiled the prototype of a flexible, biologically
safe contact lens imprinted with electronic circuitry and lights. Just
like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cyborg, the wearer will be able to access
a range of visual data, from surfing the net to receiving traffic
information while driving, and all within the privacy of your own
eyelid.

But under the broad umbrella of a new discipline called
Regenerative Medicine, there are even more profound and far-reaching
developments in train. One of the most astounding of these concerns Lee
Spievack, a hobby-store salesman from Cincinnati who severed the top of
his middle finger on the propeller of a model airplane 30 months ago.

The
piece of missing digit, almost an inch long, was never found and a
surgeon recommended a skin graft to cover up the wound. Instead,
Spievack turned to his brother, Alan, a pioneer of regenerative
medicine at Harvard, who gave him a powder containing extract of pig
bladder. The concoction, called extracellular matrix, is a mix of
protein and connective tissue which has been used successfully by
surgeons to repair tendons.

After four months of applying his
brother’s miracle grow, Spievack’s damaged digit had grown back to its
original length and looked “like my normal finger”. Spievack says that
his regrown finger feels harder than the rest, and that the nail on it
continues to grow at twice the rate of its neighbours, but: “All in
all, I’m quite impressed.”

Explaining how the extracellular
matrix works, Dr Steven Badylak said: “Every tissue in the body has
cells capable of regeneration. Somehow the matrix summons the cells and
tells them what to do. It helps instruct them in terms of where they
need to go, how they need to differentiate — should I become a blood
vessel, a nerve, a muscle cell or whatever.”

Badylak is one of
a growing number of scientists who believe it is only a matter of time
before it is possible to grow entire limbs.

In Wake Forest
University, North Carolina, a team led by Dr Anthony Atala have begun
growing body parts in a lab they call the Medical Factory. Starting
with basic cells, they have so far grown 18 types of tissue including
muscle, whole organs and the complete pulsing heart valve of a sheep.

Another
fast-growing branch of regenerative medicine is called Body Banking,
which allows individuals to freeze their skin, eggs, cells and other
body parts for future cosmetic procedures and health interventions.
Richard Branson’s Virgin Health Bank is amongst the bodies promising
that in the not-too-distant future, participants will be able to
withdraw deposits of collagen, skin, veins, hair follicles and stem
cells to help combat the effects of ageing and the degeneration of
vital organs such as the heart and eyes.

Right now, the most
talked about advancement in medical science is the embryonic work being
carried out on face transplant procedures. The world’s first partial
face transplant operation was successfully carried out three years ago.

The doctor behind the pioneering procedure, Peter Butler, is
originally from Dublin and spent years attempting to devise a treatment
that would help those suffering from severe facial deformities. It is
still in its infancy but Dr Butler has spoken about how technical
refinements will ensure that the operation becomes more widespread –
and safer.

And it doesn’t end there.

British Telecom’s
Futurology Unit has predicted that by 2050 those who can afford it will
be able to buy immortality, of a sort. According to Ian Pearson, head
of the unit: “Realistically, by 2050 we would expect to be able to
download your mind into a machine so when you die it’s not a major
career problem.”

The BT think-tank predicts that mind downloads
will be available to the well-heeled by mid-century and become routine
for the masses by 2080, so that youngsters walking around today will
have the option of prolonging their lives indefinitely in cyberspace.
In support of their case, BT’s boffins point to the astounding
geometric progression of computer evolution.

When PlayStation 3
arrived three years ago it was 35 times more powerful than its
predecessor, with roughly 1pc the capacity of the human brain.

According
to Pearson: “PlayStation 5 will probably be as powerful as the human
brain. We’re already looking at how you might structure a computer that
could possibly become conscious. There are quite a lot of us who
believe it’s feasible.”

He expands: “We don’t know how to do it
yet but we’ve begun looking at the techniques that we think
consciousness is based on. Information comes in from the outside world
but also from other parts of your brain and each part processes it on
an internal sensing basis.

“Consciousness is just another
sense, effectively, and that’s what we’re trying to design on a
computer. Not everyone agrees, but it’s my conclusion that it is
possible to make a conscious computer with superhuman levels of
intelligence before 2020.”

- Damien Corless