It was a medical miracle. A man paralyzed from the neck down for twenty-six years was actually waving his arms above his head in welcome and giving me a firm handshake.

Jim Jatich, 55, is the world’s first bionic man. He can move his arms and use his hands despite being paralyzed thanks to wires and circuitry running through his body.

Jatich is the first pioneer in a new world in which a strange mix of medicine and machinery will allow paralyzed people to live, work and enjoy life again. It’s called Functional Electrical Stimulation and eventually will help paralyzed people in all nations.

FES is a strange blend of medicine and machinery in which a paralysis victim’s damaged nervous system is replaced by wires and circuitry.
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Nothing else has ever before allowed paralyzed people to move.

The spinal cord is a pathway carrying move commands from the brain to the rest of the body. A spinal cord injury blocks the pathway leaving the victim paralyzed.

Now scientists have restored the ability to move by going around the damaged spinal cord and stimulating the muscles directly with electricity.

Long electrode wires are surgically attached to the patient’s muscles and run through the body until they are connected to a pacemaker-like device that creates electrical impulses controlled by the paralysis victim.

Electricity travels down the insulated wires until it shocks muscles making hands open and close, arms move and legs step.

It is this amazing technology that allows Jim Jatich to gesture emphatically as he tells his story.

In 1977 Jatich, a talented engineering designer, went swimming with friends in an Akron, Ohio lake.

The last one into the dark water, Jatich dived after his friends. He felt himself hit something and then his body began to “tingle” all over. Unable to move, Jim Jatich sank to the bottom as his friends swam off unaware.

“I began to let my air out a little bit at a time with the hope that someone would see the bubbles,” recalls Jatich. Finally, just as his air ran out one of his friends pulled him out of the water after being alerted by night fisherman who saw Jim dive in but not come up.

Jim told his friends he could no longer feel his arms or legs and they should call an ambulance. A volunteer paramedic arrived an hour later and clumsily secured Jatich’s neck with a wet towel.

Doctors later told Jim his spine was fractured and he would never walk or move his arms again.

“I felt like my life was over,” recalls Jim. “I had a good career going as a designer. I would never be able to draw or use my hands again.”

While Jim was in rehabilitation he was approached by Dr. P. Hunter Peckham, a young biomedical engineer. Peckham invited Jim to join his pioneering research project called FES.

Desperate for any chance to move again, Jim quickly accepted.Little did Jatich know what he would have to endure or how important it would be for the rest of mankind.

Dr. Peckham’s idea was to restore movement to paralyzed patients by shocking their muscles. The electricity itself was low voltage and harmless enough but Jim would find that the price of movement was high indeed.

Huge needles containing barbed electrical wires were thrust over and over again into Jim Jatich’s hand in a trial and error method to find the right spot in the muscle to shock. “I’ve had over a hundred and fifty put in me over the years,” shudders Jim, “and they hurt going in.”

Jatich’s couldn’t move but he could still feel every needle go into his flesh and since it would interfere with the results no anesthetic was allowed.

“They were big cardiac needles,” recalls Jim. “Really big needles and they were putting them in sixteen at a time until they got the right spots pushing them down into muscles. It was horrible.”

The wires inside the needles were hooked up to a large computer in Dr. Peckham’s lab. The computer sent jolts of electricity through the wires into Jim’s muscles and researchers recorded the response.

This process continued day after day until the medical team found the right areas to electrocute in order to make Jatich’s hand move.

“Once they had the right spot,” says Jim, “they put their thumb over the end of the needle where the barb is in the muscle and then they pull the needle out and the electrode stays in.”

After waiting two weeks for Jatich’s torn and bloody hands to heal around the wires, Dr. Peckham and his team hooked the wires up to their computer and turned the power on.

“You don’t feel any buzzing, or pulsing, or anything like that,” describes Jim, “All you feel is the muscles expanding and contracting.”

And then it happened.

After months of being dead and still, Jim Jatich watched his hand open and close for the first time!

Soon Dr. Peckham and Jim developed a sensitive joystick control that attached to Jim’s shoulder—the one part of his body he could still slightly move. This joystick sent messages to the computer making Jim’s hand move when he shrugged his shoulder.

As amazing an accomplishment as it was, there were still a lot of problems.

“The first system stayed in the lab,” says Jim. “I’d do all kinds of experiments using my hand—writing, feeding myself, drinking from a glass—but I was tethered to a computer on the wall. When I left the lab I was paralyzed again.”

Another big problem was the wires coming out of Jatich’s skin.

“They weren’t dependable,” says Jim, “sometimes you’d put them in and a week later they were all broken. Then you had to go through putting them all in again and some of them wouldn’t come out. I still have pieces of wires in my arm that you can see on x-rays. They don’t hurt me but every couple of years one will come to the surface and you’ll see a little shiny thing poking through my skin and we’ll have to pull it out.”

Another big problem with the wires was infection. The holes in Jatich’s hands where the wires went in had to be carefully cleaned several times a day. Yet even with the most careful care Jim still had many infections that had to be treated with powerful antibiotics.

“We figured that this was no good way to do this,” says Jim. “We wanted something totally inside the body that the patient could take home with them.”

After consulting with top engineers and doctors from around the world for nine years, Dr. Peckham proposed a revolutionary surgery. Peckham would implant a small pacemaker-like device into Jim Jatich’s chest and then tunnel wires up his chest, through his shoulder, then down his arm into his hand. The pacemaker-like device was controlled through a radio transmitter by the same shoulder joystick control that Jim was familiar with and would send electrical current down the wires into Jim’s hand and allow it to move.

This machinery implanted within Jim Jatich’s body, named the Free Hand System, would be portable, giving Jatich the ability to move anywhere, and would eliminate the risk of infection caused by the wires puncturing Jim’s skin.

The rewards were great but the risks were high.

No one had ever performed a surgery like this before. Jatich’s body could reject the machinery. Any mistake or design flaw could leave Jim being electrocuted from the inside out. It was a totally revolutionary procedure with unknown results.

Admits Jim, “I was willing to take the risk for the use of my hand—I was moving, I was hooked and wanted more.”

In 1986 Jim Jatich became the first bionic man.

After nine hours of intensive experimental surgery Dr. Peckham’s work was complete. When he awoke, Jim Jatich was the fist person to ever move his body not as a human being but as a machine. Wires, not nerves, allowed Jim to shake Dr. Peckham’s hand in thanks.

It was a whole new world for Jim Jatich. Before having the FES implant Jatich needed to be cared for by a full-time nurse eight hours a day but with his new bionic implants Jim was able to cut that time down to a mere two hours.

“I am on my own throughout the day,” declares Jim proudly. “Before someone would have to feed me or write something for me. Now I can answer the phone, type on my computer and feed myself. I can’t tell you what that means for your self-esteem.”

Jim had a new lease on life. But rather than thanking Dr. Peckham and his team for their efforts and leaving to enjoy his new freedom Jatich redoubled his efforts for the FES project.

“Using your hands again is such a gift you want to pass it on,” says Jim. “I keep working on this project and developing it so that everyone can benefit from it.”

Almost every day for the last 26 years Jim Jatich has gone into a medical torture chamber to be poked and prodded so that other paralysis victims can move again. Jim even had wires put into his neck to develop a system to allow paralyzed patients to move who can only clench their jaw.

Thanks to Jim’s sacrifice and endurance a whole new medical field has sprung up around FES based upon what Dr. Peckham has learned experimenting on Jim Jatich.

“We can do all kinds of stuff now,” says Jim. “We have implants that we can place in legs where patients can stand and are starting to walk again. We have an effective bladder and bowel implant that eliminates infection. We have it for the hands so you can use your hands again. We even have an ear implant so patients who are deaf can hear again.”

“Don’t give up hope,” says Jim to other paralysis victims, “it’s improving every day.”

In 1996 Jim had a new and experimental implant put into his left hand to match the one he has in his right. A magnet was surgically grafted to Jim’s wrist bone that alerts a hi-tech magnetic sensor that now allows him to control both of his hands and the rest of his arms as well. Jim now has full use of his upper body.

The new system works so well that Jatich has even gone back to work doing engineering drawings. “I am working out of my home now,” says Jim, “in the next few months I’m going to be looking for clients. Eventually I hope to set up a business where I could use other individuals with handicaps to do drawings too, but that’s in the future.”

And the future only looks brighter. Close to two hundred people who have been paralyzed are moving again thanks to FES.

But even with these amazing medical advances, FES still cannot give paralysis victims like Jim what they really want – to move like they did before their accidents. The current system is just too clumsy.

Ironically, a scientist who is working on the very opposite of FES may be the one to make Jim’s dreams truly come true.

Where Functional Electrical Stimulation makes living muscles move at the command of machines, Dr. Miguel Nicolelis has created a device that makes machines move at the command of a living brain. He calls the technology BMI, Brain-Machine Interface, and it may prove to be an even greater breakthrough then FES.

The melding of human brains and machine bodies has long been one of the favorite themes of science fiction. The thought conjures images of maniacally laughing men in white coats placing living brains into robot bodies in cheap American movies from the 1950s.

But Miguel Nicolelis is no mad scientist, he is one of the worlds top neurobiologists and co-director of Duke University’s prestigious Center for Neuroengineering. And the work he is doing is very real and very important for paralysis victims like Jim Jatich.

The ultimate proof of the success of Nicolelis’ work came a month ago when a group of excited scientists and invited guests gathered in a lab at the Duke University Medical Center to watch a robot arm grab for a piece of fruit. What made this robot so special was that it wasn’t controlled by computers or people pressing buttons. Instead, the arm moved because an owl monkey named Belle wanted something to eat.

You see, Belle is a very special monkey. Thanks to a high-tech device that monitors super fine wires sticking into her brain, Belle is the first living creature to use machines as naturally as if they were a part of her own body.

In fact, Nicolelis believes that she can no longer tell that the robot arm is any different then her own limbs – it has become part of how she sees herself. When Belle wants a piece of fruit that is in front of her robot arm she merely thinks of moving and the robot arm reaches out and grabs the banana.

“The brain is so amazingly adaptable that it can incorporate an external device into its own ‘neuronal space’ as a natural extension of the body,” said Nicolelis. “Actually, we see this every day, when we use any tool, from a pencil to a car. As we learn to use that tool, we incorporate the properties of that tool into our brain, which makes us proficient in using it.”

Dr. Nicolelis plans to use this technology to help paralysis victims move again. “Our long-term goal is to create a prosthetic device for paralyzed patients that will allow them to regain what they have lost. We hope the brain will adapt to these devices and learn to incorporate them as if they were the patient’s own limbs.”

But with the aid of the Brain Machine Interface, human beings will no longer be limited to moving just their own bodies. Paralysis victims may in the future control robot nurses that will fetch them medicine, food, or even the remote control.

Still, for Jim Jatich the real excitement lies in the possibility of uniting FES with the Brain Machine Interface. It would mean that he would no longer have to shrug his shoulder to open and close his hand – he would just think and the Brain Machine Interface would send the correct signals to the wires in his arms to make them move.

For Jim Jatich it would be like these 31 years trapped in his own body never happened.

– The End –
By Lance Laytner
Copyright Meritum Media
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