FDA Approves “Bionic Eye”

“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

Now Available for Instant Download! Click for details.

In the United States, the Federal Drug Administration has now approved the Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System, created by Second Sight. It is billed on the company’s site as:

…the world’s first and only approved device intended to restore some functional vision for people suffering from blindness. Argus II is approved for use in the United States and the European Economic Area.

The product page is here.

The Argus II (from the Second Sight product page)

You can watch a video on the New York Times site here.

Screenshot from NYT video

An animation on the this page of the Second Sight web site demonstrates the principles involved.

An paper on the interim results of an international trial has been published in Opthalmology (abstract).

See previous Homo Artificialis posts regarding vision:

• Embryonic Stem Cells Improve Vision for Two Women
• Teenage Honduran Builds Open Source Eye-Tracking Computer Interface for the Disabled

Artificial Cerebellums for Robots With Fine Motor Control

“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

Now Available for Instant Download! Click for details.

Researchers at the University of Granada in Spain have developed an artificial cerebellum — really a biologically-inspired adaptive microcircuit — that provides finely tuned motor control for robots that can operate more safely in an environment shared with humans.

University of Grenada research team.

The safety issues arising from shared human/robot environments is a subject we’ve dealt with previously on this page, notably in the posts:

• The Skin We Live In: Skin for Robots, the Mechanics + the Meaning, and
• Robot Sex Week (Part IV): Touch-A Touch-A Touch-A Touch Me, I Wanna Be Dirty.

In related work, an early (1998) thesis on artificial cerebellums by Russell L. Smith (prefaced with a hobbit walking song) can be found in PDF here, with accompanying animations in MPEG format here.

More recently, researchers in Israel implanted an artificial cerebellum in a rat. As reported by New Scientist:

Matti Mintz of Tel Aviv University in Israel and his colleagues have created a synthetic cerebellum which can receive sensory inputs from the brainstem – a region that acts as a conduit for neuronal information from the rest of the body. Their device can interpret these inputs, and send a signal to a different region of the brainstem that prompts motor neurons to execute the appropriate movement.

“It’s proof of concept that we can record information from the brain, analyse it in a way similar to the biological network, and return it to the brain,” says Mintz.

The New Organ Prize [video, links]

“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

Hey dude or dudette! Remember to click on the Luck & Death banner, above. For a limited time — getting shorter every day — you can order a special edition of the book at the regular retail price of $5.00. Free sample chapters are available, as is an MP3 sample chapter for your iPod or other device. If you enjoy this site, try it!

Those of you who are space geeks like me will be familiar with the X-Prize, which helped move space tourism (and cheap space flight generally) from being a great idea to being a reality that is in the process of being constructed.

Now the Methuselah Foundation, which is dedicated to extending healthy human life, has initiated the New Organ Prize (embedded video below).

The prize has two categories.

One is for banking organs: the winner must preserve a complex organ for 30 days — thousands of people die because the best we can do now is less than a day.

The other is for creating organs: the winner must build a complex whole organ from a person’s cells, transplant it, and have it function for two years.

As with the original X-Prize, the New Organ Prize is set at $10 million.  And the fact is that X-Prize competitors were sufficiently incentivized with that prize for many of the teams to spend far more than $10 million on their projects.

Prizes like this — when combined with prestige and the prospect of future profits from new technologies — appear to be enough, in at least in some cases, to spawn teams that will meet the project’s goal.

Artificial womb reveals embryo’s growth

“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

News article here and original paper here.

Team leader Kevin Shakesheff’s faculty page here.

Shakesheff  was named one of Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35 in 2002 (at which time he was 32).  Of course Sergey Brin and Larry Page were selected the same year and no one ever heard of those guys again.  You can find last year’s 35 here.

Shakesheff’s Technology Review bio summarized his main interest as follows:

The human immune system defends against foreign objects with vigilance, but Kevin Shakesheff wants to create lasting peace between synthetic surfaces and the biological world. He is building polymer scaffolds, on which living cells can grow, to form the backbones of what will one day be transplant-ready organs, as well as drug delivery vehicles that can steer themselves to target sites.

You can hear him lecture on regenerative medicine  at the Bio-Dundee Conference in 2011below.  The sound is tinny and the camera stays on him rather than showing his slides, but the lecture is interesting.

First ever innovation credit to develop artificial cornea

“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

Read the article here.

Fifty Years of Work on the Artificial Placenta: Milestones in the History of Extracorporeal Support of the Premature Newborn

Abstract only (unless you subscribe to Artificial Organs) but even that is worth it: see it here.

Toray is building ‘artificial kidney’ factory in China

Read it here.

Research approved for first artificial testicle to produce human sperm

Read it here.