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| The ever-adorable Baby Rhesus Macaque. |
Currently, if one loses a hand, arm, leg, et cetera, they
will receive a prosthetic. These prosthetics, while awesome monuments to our
collective achievements, are woefully inadequate in performing as an actual
hand. At the University of Chicago, researchers and engineers have managed to
create a prosthetic hand which can perceive apparently the same way a regular
hand would. To do this, they trained a group of monkeys to respond to touch.
After they did this, they hooked up electrodes to the monkeys’ brains, and sent
signals to the somatosensory cortex, in the area that receives messages for the
hand. The Rhesus monkeys, when put into a condition such that they couldn’t see
their hands, responded as they were trained. Thus, their method worked, which
means that it can now be programmed into future prosthetics. The only delay to
beginning testing on humans is that it must first pass the FDA’s inspection and
testing. Optimistically speaking, testing will begin sometime in 2014.
Themes on the Nature of Science:
Science is tentative: while the method for inducing somatic
response appears to work, it can’t be tested on humans until the FDA agrees
that it is relatively safe.
Science is based on evidence: we know that the Rhesus
monkeys have no reason to act as they were trained unless they felt pressure on
their hands, so we know that they did feel something. However, the plan is that
there will be very extensive human testing to hone the product before it is
released on the open market.
-Sebastian Wolf
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