Surgeons have carried out a ground-breaking operation on a British cybernetics professor so his nervous system can be wired up to a computer.
Prof Kevin Warwick, the world's first cyborg - part human, part machine - hopes readings can now be taken from the implant in his arm of electrical impulses coursing through his nerves.
Surgeons implanted a silicon square about three millimetres wide into an incision in his left wrist and hammered its 100 electrodes, each as thin as a hair, into the median nerve. Connecting wires were fed under the skin of the forearm and out from a skin puncture and the wounds were sewn up.
The wires will now be linked to a transmitter/receiver device to relay nerve messages from the academic at Reading University to a computer by radio signal.
These signals, encoding movements like wiggling fingers and feelings like shock and pain, will be transmitted to a computer and recorded for the first time.
The procedure could lead to a medical breakthrough for people paralysed by spinal cord damage.
Prof Warwick (48) believes it also opens up the possibility of a sci-fi world of cyborgs, where the human brain can one day be upgraded with implants for extra memory, intelligence or X-ray vision.
PA