Since the dawn of the 1970′s television action show the Six Million Dollar Man, the public has been fascinated by bionics and the integration of technology into the human body. What once seemed to be a far-off science fiction fantasy, is increasingly, however, becoming real. For years, surgeons have been replacing human body parts with donor-supplied biological alternatives: transplanting, for example, a human heart, kidney or liver from a deceased individual and place it into a living donor. These procedures would have been unthinkable just 50 years ago, yet are now common place. The business of replacing body parts is not new. For example, the cultural image of a pirate with a “peg-leg” and a hook for an arm have been ingrained in our collective minds for some time. Yet vast improvements in prosthetics have been made since those days of yore. In fact, today’s modern prosthetics are complicated devices. [...]
