Bionics

Introduction

The cult TV series the ‘Six-Million Dollar Man’ staring Lee Majors was based on the book Cyborg by Martin Caidin, (Caidin, 1970) it featured a US Air Force Test Pilot (Col. Steve Austin) who was rebuilt using bionic body parts following a near fatal plane crash.  So popular was the TV series that the ‘Bionic Woman’, a spin off from the original series was to follow a few years later.

“When Lee Majors landed on our TV screens as the Six Million Dollar Man, the show was regarded as fantasy” (Jacobs, 1998).  What was once the science fiction of 1970’s television is slowly emerging as the science fact of today.  Although still some way from the capabilities displayed by the ‘Bionic Man’ and ‘Bionic Woman’, research within the field of bionics has advanced significantly during the past 30 years.  The focus of today’s research is not however, in creating a real life ‘Steve Austin’, but in providing people with some form of physical disability the chance to overcome, or at least greatly improve the limitations to their everyday life imposed on them by the disability.

The word bionic comes from an amalgamation of the words biology and electronic.  It was first used in 1960, by an American Air Force flight surgeon named J.E Steele, at a conference in the Dayton, Ohio, USA.  Steele delivered his paper entitled "How Do We Get There?" during this conference (Steele, 1960).

Bionics is known under various terms, among them biomechanics and biomimicry.  Biomimicry, as the word implies, gives us a good clue as to what bionics is all about. Quite simply, bionics refers to the science of mimicking or copying nature, by means of integrating biology with engineering.  A prime example of how mankind imitates nature is the shape of an aircraft wing, the design has quite obviously been taken from nature and the wing of a bird.  

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