“Let’s start with toe-to-thumb transplants,” he answered. Miranda’s fingers clattered rapidly over the keyboard.
“Wow, look at that,” she said. “Over a hundred thousand hits. Who knew that was such a hot topic?”
“This one.” He pointed with his pinkie to one of the search results. “Click on that, please.”
Miranda used the mouse to highlight the link. As it loaded, she remarked, “You know, Eddie, if you replaced this clunky desktop computer with a laptop, you might get pretty good with the touch pad.”
Before he had time to respond, the page finished loading and a television news story began to play. The footage showed a teenage boy—a New Jersey fourteen-year-old—who’d lost his thumb and first two fingers in a fireworks accident. A close-up showed the damage to the boy’s right hand, which looked almost exactly like Garcia’s right hand. Five months after the injury, a Philadelphia hand surgeon removed the second toe from the boy’s right foot—the toe Miranda liked to call the “index toe”—and fashioned a new thumb from it. “The structures line up very well,” explained the surgeon on camera. “You have two major nerves, you have a major blood vessel, you have similar tendons. The circumference is very similar.” In the story’s “after” images, the gap created by the missing index finger and middle finger remained quite prominent, but the reconstructed right thumb was a virtual mirror image of the boy’s undamaged left thumb.
“Cool,” Miranda commented. “Very cool. That would give you back an opposable grip on your right hand.”
Garcia pointed her through a quick series of articles about toe-to-thumb transplants. The procedure might not qualify as “routine”—complex microsurgery was required to stitch together the network of delicate blood vessels and nerves—but it had been performed hundreds of times during the past few decades, with a success rate of well over 90 percent.
“Let’s change the search,” he said. “See what you find using ‘myoelectric prosthesis’ and ‘bionic hand’
as search terms.” The technical term—a reference to the use of electrical impulses from muscles in the arm to trigger electric switches and motors in an artificial hand—produced about a hundred thousand hits. The much catchier “bionic hand” yielded over three hundred thousand, including thumbnail-size photos and sketches. Miranda clicked on one of the images, a robotic-looking prosthesis called the i-Hand.
Miranda leaned closer to the monitor. “Ooh, that’s kinda sexy,” she remarked, studying the photo. The i-Hand’s fingers were formed of pale white plastic, translucent enough to reveal bonelike metal rods in the fingers, as well as hinges and tiny motors. According to several articles, the i-Hand was the first prosthetic hand to faithfully mirror the structures and movements of the human hand. One video clip showed a young woman with an i-Hand lifting bags of groceries, picking up a set of car keys, and typing on a computer keyboard. Her bionic hand was covered with a flesh-toned “skin” of rubber. “I like it better without the skin.” Miranda frowned. “Much more futuristic-looking.”
“Yes,” Garcia agreed, “very Luke Skywalker. But I suspect that the rubber provides a better grip than the hard plastic. It probably also protects the mechanism from things that could damage it. Dirt. Sharp edges. Coca-Cola.”
“Embalming fluid,” I added, thinking of the body we’d just examined. “Blood.”
“Oh,fine, ” Miranda retorted with mock indignation. “Go ahead, rain on my style parade, see if I care.”
She wiggled the fingers of one hand, then folded all of them except her middle finger. “I assume the i-Hand is capable of making this gesture, with or without the skin.” Garcia asked her to bookmark several of the i-Hand links, then asked if she’d search one more topic. “Sure,” she replied. “What?”