Great-Grandpa S would have loved this.

Another goody from Slashdot.org:

    Bionic Hand Wired To Nerves Can "Feel" When Touched21

Posted by samzenpuson Monday February 18, @10:30AM
from the all-the-better-to-feel-you-with dept.

An anonymous reader writes in with a breakthrough in prosthetics. "The first bionic hand that allows an amputee to feel what they are touching will be transplanted later this year in a pioneering operation that could introduce a new generation of artificial limbs with sensory perception. The patient is an unnamed man in his 20s living in Rome who lost the lower part of his arm following an accident, said Silvestro Micera of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland. The wiring of his new bionic hand will be connected to the patient’s nervous system with the hope that the man will be able to control the movements of the hand as well as receiving touch signals from the hand’s skin sensors."

 

As a youngish man, my great-grandfather worked for Missouri Pacific Railroad Company. During one unfortunate run, Grandpa S leaned too far out of the locomotive, looking toward the back, and was knocked off and under the train resulting in surgical amputation of his left arm just below his elbow. Although he had a prosthetic, I don't recall having seen it (although I had nightmares about Grandpa's arm being in the closet of our bedroom when I was three or four years old). Had Grandpa S gone through the experience, today, he might have a totally different attitude toward a prosthetic. Grandpa could do just about anything he wanted to do and worked at one job or another for another 50 years following the incident. Nothing kept him down! I still miss Grandpa S. He died during my freshman year at college.

Addition of three hours later

It was Grandpa S who showed me the lack of reverence that people held for human cells in the early 1950s. An 18-year-old who was slicing pickles at the warehouse that Grandpa supervised was showing off to a friend who had stopped by to visit - and - managed to slice tips off of three fingers on his left hand. Grandpa, after loading the guy into a taxi for a trip to the hospital, nonchalantly picked up the finger tips and tossed them out the window where they landed atop the heap of pickle-leavings that had accumulated there.

This bit of family/personal history was brought to mind by my having just heard, on Talk of the Nation (transcript not yet available online), a discussion of the cell-line of Ms Henrietta Lacks that has been propagated since 1951. The linked article mentions that, "The history of this event, described in the Johns Hopkins Magazine, is a commentary on the lack of informed consent common in medical research at the time." Lack of informed consent was not a big issue in the early 1950s. Nobody really gave it a second thought.

Note to Bogie: I was listening to Talk of the Nation while making the blue cover for your boudoir pillow. Done!

Comments

[Hattie]

Funny how attitudes have changed. Mostly for the better. I was so surprised the first time a doc asked me if it was OK to perform certain procedures, for instance, instead of simply laying hands on me.

[Cop Car]

Hattie--"Better", like "beauty", is in the eyes of the beholder. If we all agreed upon what was "better", we wouldn't need/have political parties and do-nothing congresses.