A Whole New You

SCIENTIFIC breakthroughs don’t always grab the attention they deserve. They are often in esoteric areas of speciality and it’s difficult for us plebs to understand their importance.

“A new species of salamander in Borneo? Yeah, whatever; someone’s isolated the ‘pwarkle’ — a new sub-atomic particle that only exist on Tuesdays? Give me a shout when they’re available in supermarkets.” But now and then science will make a breakthrough in an area that we can understand.

Our interest is piqued usually because it contains a word that was only previously mentioned in movies. “Lexus have made an actual hoverboard? Now THAT’s science! NASA found unusual dotted lines on Pluto? It’s Aliens!”

Another one of those TV words is ‘bionic’. Most people have some idea of bionic — either from The Six Million Dollar Man — who following an accident was rebuilt with bionic legs, an eye and an arm that gave him superhuman strength — or more recently The Bionic Woman. Last week science made a breakthrough we can all get behind (or get a new behind). Doctors gave a man a bionic eye.

I’m not going to go into the actual implications of this leap forward. Regular readers of this column will know that this is not the place to come to for journalism. Instead I’m going to idly speculate.

At the moment bionic attachments have only been made available to relatively few people and each one is rightly lauded. But what happens when it becomes so commonplace that upgrading your hand may become no more a thing than upgrading your handset?

Because when the outlandish becomes commonplace, the previously commonplace may become a little bit more outlandish. Let’s hope our bionic bits are not going to give us superpowers. It’s really impractical to have everyone with an arm with the strength of 60 men. There would be doors broken off hinges all over the place. Can openers would be hurled away as we all ripped the top off our tinned tomatoes with bionic teeth.

Maintenance is obviously an issue. You’ll go to the doctor praying that problem can be fixed easily: “Yeah you see there where it’s all corroded? That’s the original part I’m afraid. I can do nothing with that. That’ll have to go back to the manufacturer. Then the manufacturers are humming and hawing because it’s “out of warranty”. Meanwhile you’re stuck with a hand that is permanently frozen in an obscene gesture which obviously leads to constant road rage incidents and awkward incidents during the sign of peace at mass.

For less serious issues, the doctor’s visits would be replaced by a trip to the bio-mechanic. Standing around a draughty garage while he’s working on another lad's foot — shooting the breeze about how the toes always go on these models.

And how, to be honest, you’d better off staying away from the French brands anyway. German or Japanese are the only ways to go.

Would we upgrade our bionic bits as a show of wealth? Flaunting our 191-C reg’ ear?

As more bionic bits start to be manufactured and installed, some sort of regulatory mechanism would be needed. We already jokingly refer to going for an NCT when we sign up for a full medical checkup. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before we get a letter in the post telling us our body needs to go through the NBT at a location of our convenience. It won’t be any less nerve-wracking than its automotive equivalent.

I have an image now of family looking anxiously through the glass as their grandfather’s bionic backside is tested for emissions.

You might laugh at this now but if all of this comes to pass, you’ll be laughing on the other side of your face.

If that’s where they installed your new mouth.