Daedalus with a Power Glove

I CAN MAKE WINGS," SAYS Dartmouth-Hitchcock plastic surgeon Joseph Rosen. He is talking about human wings—live, flapping wings on people. Like angels without the lyres and the halos. So far none of his patients has opted for the procedure. But that's really beside the point.

The notion of wing- making may seem a bit pie-in-the-sky, but it is not completely out- landish, medically speaking. The techniques are already within a surgeon's grasp: stretching and grafting skin, reshaping bone and muscle, redistributing tissue to serve different functions. These are the very methods Rosen uses in his microsurgery practice. Just last year, after a sawmill accident mangled a young boy's right hand, Rosen transformed the patient's right toe into a functional new thumb. A "thoe," Rosen calls the new digit. It works pretty well, considering its toe-like appearance.

Don't sell your stock in Delta, though. Rosen's surgery barely offers a toe-hold, so to speak, on the human-flight business. But then, the idea of human wings is supposed to be academic: planning the complicated surgical procedures allows a surgeon to think about the body in new ways.

And, lately, such flights of surgical fancy have been booked by undergraduates as well. Each fall for the last three years Ro- sen has taught some 16 Dartmouth freshmen a course at the Thayer School entitled "Artificial People: From Clay to Computers." The seminar brings the students face to face with the people who are pushing against the limits of engineering, artificial intelligence, and medicine.

The course takes off from one of the earliest tales of artificial people: the Greek myth of Daedalus, a sculp- tor,architect, and inventor who created wings from waxed feathers. During the Middle Ages, artificial people increasingly occupied the minds of alchemists and physicians. Friar Roger Bacon, a thirteenth-century clergyman and philosopher- scientist, was said to have invented a talking brass head. By the sixteenth century, alchemists were claiming that a small but whole living human being—a homunculus— could be made from putrefied semen, blood, and manure. According to medieval Jewish legend, Elijah of Chelm used the name of God to create an artificial man called a golem. Meanwhile, inventors were creating lifelike mechanical beings called automatons. By 1574 a mechanical rooster was crowing and flapping its wings atop a clocktower in Strasbourg. In 1738 Jacques de Vaucanson invented a mechanical duck that could quack, stretch its neck, and splash in water. Taking realism well beyond the playful, Vaucanson's duck could also eat food, "digest" it, and excrete the disgustingly realistic remains. The inventor went on to create humanoids that could play the flute and drums. These robots in turn inspired numerous other automatons right up to the Industrial Revolution. But it wasn't until the 1940s that artificial brains were created with the ability to make decisions. The automatons of old had become computers.

These days, as computers allow people to experience "virtual reality" with goggles and power gloves that provide the sense of being in and manipulating a computer-simulated environment, Rosen is pioneering a new breed of artificial people by using this computerized ability on human disabilities. "We're going through a shift between the physical world and software," he says. Working in a lab at the veteran's hospital in White River Junction, Vermont, he heads up a research team that is trying to coax nerve cells to grow through a porous microchip. "Let's assume we can get nerves to live happily in little holes and we can make machines live happily in the body," he says, thinking far beyond the current stage of the project. "A chip implanted in a nerve would be the ultimate power glove." The technology would make it possible for patients to regain function in damaged or severed nerves. Back at the Thayer School, Rosen is also heading up a team of designers, computer experts, and engineers to create an ambitious virtual-reality system that will allow doctors to plan surgical procedures, tailor them to individual patients, and try out alternative approaches—all before lifting a scalpel. The system may one day enable surgeons to perform surgeries remotely, linked to computerized robots thousands of miles away.

Clearly pushing the limits of today's possibilities, Rosen creates situations that lead his students to think in new ways. "In education you teach skills, then let students test them on something they're unlikely to have seen answered before," he says. Last fall he had students propose ways to improve the lives of blind people. One team came up with a scheme for implanting a microchip into the brain to provide "virtual sight." Another team, paying homage to de Vaucanson's famous duck, envisioned a seeing-eye robot chicken that could guide a blind person even better than a seeing-eye dog. ("A dog would be OK, too," the students told the class. "It would get along with the chicken"). A team suggested replacing the loss of sight by augmenting hearing with a sonar-like detection device. After commenting on all the presentations and asking how close technology is now to any of the ideas, Rosen tossed in another question: "Did anyone think of growing new eyeballs?" At the end of class, the plastic surgeon pitched one last query. "Who's going to come to class next Friday with wings on their back?"

Such a student's grades would

While teaching undergraduates,a plastic surgeon envisionsimplanting virtual realityinto real bodies.