Incredible Human Machine Page #6

is everybody's wired just a little bit differently.

The hope is that at least some wires

are still plugged in.

Sadly, Belzberg discovers

this isn't the case with Jason.

Just terrible.

Unfortunately, all five of the major nerves

that leave the spinal cord

that go to control the arm and the hand

have been ripped right out.

There is no connection with the brain.

So far, no-one has figured out how to plug

nerves back into the spinal cord.

The team will need to patch in somewhere else.

This looks fairly scarred in here as well.

So we do a somewhat heroic manoeuvre

where we go down

and we take some of the nerves

that normally feed the ribs,

normally feed the muscles in-between the ribs

and help you breathe.

We're using those nerves now

to eventually make his arm move.

Jason's nerves

don't reach from his ribs to his arms

so first they'll have to get extra wiring

from his leg.

So l'm harvesting the splicing wire now

from his leg that we're gonna use.

Trading what will become a scar and a numb

patch on his foot for a bend at his elbow.

lf the nerves take

his left arm's only connection to his brain

will be through the breathing muscles in his ribs.

That means with every breath Jason takes

his arm will bend.

Every breath.

That will only last perhaps six months.

Then the brain will relearn and stop doing that.

lt will take time before we know how

much movement Jason will get back.

Axons,. the fibres extending from the nerve cells

that carry electrical signals

grow about an inch a month.

Jason is receiving about nine inches worth.

So if all goes well, he'll have some feeling

and motion return within the year.

He went through a heck of an operation.

l'm sure he's going to have a lot of pain from it,

a lot of expense from it.

But to him, if this works,

l suspect it will be worth it.

Nerves to muscles -

the system is a marvel to behold.

But whether we're competing

at the Olympic level

or simply making dinner plans

and picking up groceries,

the whole thing would be absolutely useless

without an infrastructure.

Follow any muscle to its base, through a bundle

of strong, flexible fibres called tendons,

down to the very point where it's anchored

and you'll find one of the world's

most remarkable materials - bone.

Some 206 of these engineering marvels

are strewn throughout the body.

Strong enough to support up to 20 times

our body weight,

light enough to defy gravity - however briefly,

flexible enough to absorb unfathomable impacts

and connected in such a way as to provide

a seemingly endless range of movement.

Accounting for some 1 5 percent

of our body mass,

bones are what give us our shape.

(Squelching)

Without them, we would all look like this.

But despite the amazing strength and support

our inner frameworks provide,

they're usually portrayed

in a more sinister manner.

Descend 60 feet under the streets of Paris

to its catacombs hundreds of years old

and we get the stereotypical image of bone.

Dry, sterile,

white,

dead.

That's not exactly surprising.

This is the only way

most of us ever to get see bones.

And these are the only bits of us

that are going to be left.

This was the world's first glimpse of bone

inside a living human body.

The left hand of Frau Bertha Roentgen

as imaged in 1 895 by her husband

Wilhelm Roentgen, discoverer of the X-ray.

We've come a long way since then

and it turns out bones are anything but dry.

Deep in the centre of many bones,

in this tissue called the marrow,

some 1 20 million oxygen-carrying

red blood cells

and seven million microbe-fighting

white blood cells are born every minute

and shipped off to the rest of the body.

Toward the surface, specialised cells

continually lay down new bone

while others do the opposite

and whisk away old layers.

This is how bone grows with us

throughout our youth

and keeps itself strong long after we're grown.

lf we suck away all that marrow, we see bone

is mainly a blend of two substances -

the mineral calcium phosphate

and the protein collagen.

lt's a match made in heaven.

Without flexible collagen,

bone would be as brittle as glass.

Without calcium phosphate,

it would be as unstructured as rubber.

Together they're light enough to manoeuvre,

strong enough to shelter

our most delicate inner organs

and resilient enough to last a lifetime.

Go!

Champion gymnasts like Joey Hagerty

routinely push the limits of bone.

They train them to grow and adapt to extremes.

OK, Joe. Ready? Three...

Sports physiologist Bill Sands tries to ensure

this isn't past the breaking point.

Bone are living tissue like all other living tissues,

so the things we ask the tissue to do,

as long as we provide those stimuli carefully,

slowly, progressively,

we can usually get tissues

to withstand astonishing things.

lt is this adaptive property of bone that allows

a martial arts expert to punch through concrete.

SANDS:

You don't do that the first day, of course.

You have to build them up more

and more and more over multiple years.

The same goes for gymnasts whose bones

absorb a tremendous amount of shock.

Yeah, don't hook your toes.

Sands uses a variety of apparatuses

to measure this,.

like these inserts

that measure the forces on Joey's feet,

and high-speed cameras to record the impact.

Ready? Three, two, one.

Go.

Well, right here

he's over 1 50lbs per square inch.

Trust me, that's a big force.

The forces generally seen in gymnastics are

the biggest forces we've had recorded so far.

1 4 to 20 times body weight.

The unsung heroes of all this movement are not

our bones, but what brings them together.

lngenious devices called joints.

From our knees to our knuckles,

some 1 87 separate joints allow our bones

to slide back and forth,

side to side, up, down,

and round and round like a well-oiled machine.

While bones have an almost

miraculous tendency to heal,

joints are prone to break down.

Hey, Mark, how you doing?

The surgery that we're going to be doing today

is to go through...

Whether it's due to football,

weight-lifting or biking,

45-year-old Mark Kramer

has had eight shoulder operations

over the last decade and a half.

Pretty easy.

Today, Dr Carl Basamania and his team

at the Duke University Medical Center

will give him his ninth.

Number one:
l hope to be out of pain.

When you live with pain every day

it makes life challenging.

(Monitor beeps)

Basamania first assesses the damage to Mark's

shoulder with an arthroscopic camera.

He discovers one of the tendons

that is supposed to hold the ball and socket joint

of Mark's shoulder in place is eroding,

causing Mark intense pain.

l can show you on the X-ray,

but the ball is sitting quite a way forward now,

because there's nothing to really hold it in place.

Basamania wants more than to simply pop

Mark's shoulder back into place.

He wants to keep it there.

And to do that he'll turn to this -

a specially engineered biological material

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