A Helping Hand Is Worth Millions

The quest for bionic limbs is yielding stunning results: Prototype prosthetic arms can pick a credit card out of a pocket, scratch an itchy nose and even move based on a human's brain waves.

But while these prototypes are spectacularly more advanced than anything developed before, they also show just how far researchers and engineers have to go before they can approach the sublime handiness of the hand. Our natural limbs will surely always be more flexible, sensitive and dexterous than any copy our limbs can design and build.

But that doesn't mean we should stop trying. University of Michigan materials science and engineering professor David Martin, along with colleagues from several other departments at Michigan, are working together on the basic science that could lead to bionic limbs that would impress even the 1970s TV hero Steve Austin.

They are being funded by a grant from the U.S. Army in the amount of--you guessed it--$6 million. The hope, of course, is to restore some semblance of normal life to soldiers who have lost limbs, like the scores of Iraq veterans victimized by those wretched improvised explosive devices.

The Michigan researchers are working on one of the thorniest problems confronting bionic body parts, their interfaces with human bone, muscle, nerves and skin.

Recent advances in bionic limbs are largely thanks to the U.S. military's research and development agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, which is funding a program called "revolutionizing prosthetics" that focuses specifically on arms and hands.

One of DARPA's two main contractors, inventor Dean Kamen's company DEKA, has produced a prototype that has been tested on patients in laboratories and will soon be put into trials in peoples' homes.