LONDON: Surgeons have carried out an operation on a cybernetics professor so that his nervous system can be wired up to a computer, according to news reports Friday.
Professor Kevin Warwick, the world’s first cyborg – part human, part machine – hopes that readings can now be taken from the implant in his arm of electrical impulses coursing through his nerves.
These signals, encoding movements like wiggling fingers and feelings like shock and pain, will be transmitted to a computer and recorded for the first time, the Press Association reported.
It is hoped that the procedure could lead to a medical breakthrough for people paralysed by spinal cord damage, like Superman actor Christopher Reeve.
Warwick believes it also opens up the possibility of a sci-fi world of cyborgs, where the human brain can one day be upgraded with implants for extra memory, intelligence or X-ray vision.
The two-hour-long operation was carried out by a team led by consultant neurosurgeon Peter Teddy under local anaesthetic at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford.
Surgeons implanted a silicon square about 3mm wide into an incision in his left wrist and hammered its 100 electrodes, each as thin as a hair, into the median nerve.
Connecting wires were fed under the skin of the forearm and out from a skin puncture and the wounds were sewn up.
The wires will now be linked to a transmitter/ receiver device which would relay nerve messages from the academic at Reading University to a computer by radio signal.
Warwick, 48, was relieved to find he could still move his fingers afterwards, after fears the operation might paralyse his hand.
Similar experiments have previously only ever been carried out on cats and monkeys in the United States.
It is hoped the culmination will be the wiring up of his nervous system to his wife Irena’s to see if, when he wiggles his fingers, hers move too.
“What we’re doing is historic and momentous,” Warwick said. “It is going to change the world.” – dpa
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