In a busy lab at Duke University, Dr. Miguel Nicolelis is merging brain science with engineering in a bid to create something fantastical: a full-body prosthetic device that would allow those immobilized by injury to walk again.
On Wednesday, Nicolelis and an international group of collaborators declared that they had cleared a key hurdle on the path toward that goal, demonstrating they could bypass the body's complex network of nerve endings and supply the sensation of touch directly to the brains of monkeys.
Nicolelis and his collaborators — engineers, neuroscientists and physiologists from Brazil, Switzerland, Germany and the United States — are working toward an ambitious objective: On the opening day of the 2014 World Cup soccer tournament in Brazil, they hope to send a young quadriplegic striding out to midfield to open the games, suited up in the "prosthetic exoskeleton" they aim to build.
Nicolelis, a Brazilian-born physician and neuroscientist with a tinkerer's bent, calls that goal a "Brazilian moon shot." And as with moon shots of the past, his team has recruited a monkey — in fact, two female rhesus monkeys named Mango and Nectarine — to go first.
