"We're trying to help these individuals using the same kinds of technologies. It's an ambitious project that may take years, even decades to develop fully," Normann predicts.

When you move your fingers on a computer keyboard, the command signals that cause your finger muscles to move originate in the motor part of the brain. The "little gray cells" fire in specific patterns that are translated to activity patterns that move down the spinal cord and send their message to motor neurons, causing specific muscles to contract. When the muscles contract, sensors in the muscles, joints and skin send the movement information back up the spinal cord to the brain.

A spinal cord injury stops that communication. The signals still begin their journey in the brain, but when they hit the injury, they stop and the muscles never get the signal. The sensory information is also blocked.

"Eventually, we want to fix all these problems. The first approach is to put the Utah Electrode Array into the motor part of the brain in order to record the muscle control signals, the commands that cause the muscles to move. These firing patterns could be used to control external devices, like a robotic arm or computer monitor or a wheelchair."

That kind of research is already under way at Brown University, Normann said.

Daniel McDonnall, a student in Normann's laboratory, is implanting the array in the sciatic nerve of animals and is achieving graceful control of the force in muscles by stimulating the motor nerves similar to the way they are normally stimulated. This work hinges on, among other things, ability to selectively stimulate these motor neurons, something only possible with high electrode-count arrays.

"We're just beginning to work on one small piece of this motor-control problem. It's an exciting application," Normann said.

"All of these technologies are in their infancy, and we're still in the earliest stages of research. There are many other applications we'd like to consider. What's really important is this technology is able to achieve highly selective stimulation of a large number of neurons. That's something not possible before. Medicine can capitalize on that."

Best to come

The quest to make a broken body whole again has taken many twists and turns. When bionic work began, no one had heard of gene therapy or stem cell research. There will, one day perhaps, be many solutions to that broken body's problems. But for now, replacement-part research goes on. In Utah alone, scientists and clinicians have grappled with not only those mentioned, but artificial lung, blood, blood vessels, joints, fallopian tubes, other limbs, kidneys, the pancreas and more. While they haven't designed all of them, they've been part of testing and fine-tuning them.

They all agree on one thing: Bionics is never better than the original human version, where fingers move independently, eyes see three dimensionally, legs can jump and the heart beats automatically.

But it's getting closer.

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E-mail: lois@desnews.com