Prosthetics and Foreign Policy

Ok, so this is a few months old but still amazing:

That's right, the monkey controlled a robotic arm with its mind! Then, if you combine it with a jet pack...

...you could put together quite the little techno-monkey mercenary army! (Monkey mercenaries are actually not new; Morocco sent the United States 2,000 monkeys to act as mine sweepers in Iraq back in 2003.) But aside from an army of flying monkeys, to be dispatched by the Wicked Witch of the West, prosthetics technology is making important advances these days. The monkey controlled the robotic arm through about one hundred electrodes placed directly into his motor cortex, which is responsible for physical motions. Amazingly, primate brains have enough plasticity to learn how to control a whole new arm.

Looking back through history, the First World War was an impetus and a catalyst for major advances in neuroscience. A large number of young soldiers returned home from the horrors of trench warfare with very localized brain injuries from shrapnel wounds. (What does what in the brain is often deduced from what happens when something is missing or wounded.) In our own time, over 30,000 American soldiers have been wounded in Iraq by official tallies. One of the least discussed costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are limb amputations, but this will also be a catalyst for many new medical advances, such as the first successful hand transplant.

War is a terrible, terrible thing, but then again necessity is the mother of invention. No matter what your thoughts on the man, let's hope that part of Bush's foreign policy legacy is a number of important medical advances to care for wounded coalition members and Iraqi and Afghan civilians. Machine-brain interface prosthetics and transplants seem like as good a place to start as any.