Thanks Mark (our field reporter in the U.S.A) who heard this from a mate who saw this on Warp2search where CNN got it from some British site, ya you get the picture.. OXFORD, England -- A British university professor has been fitted with cyborg technology enabling his nervous system to be linked to a computer.
The ground-breaking surgery on Professor Kevin Warwick effectively makes him the world's first cyborg -- part human, part machine.
Although a long way from fictional characters The Terminator or the Six Million Dollar Man, it is hoped that readings will 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.
Similar experiments have previously only ever been carried out on cats and monkeys in the United States.
Surgeons implanted a silicon square about 3mm wide into an incision in Warwick's left wrist and attached 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 be linked to a transmitter/receiver device to relay nerve messages to a computer by radio signal.
It is possible that the procedure could lead to a medical breakthrough for people paralysed by spinal cord damage, such as Superman actor Christopher Reeve.
On Friday, Warwick, 48, denied claims that the surgery, which was carried out at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, England, was just a publicity stunt.
News source: CNN.com SCI News
