Bertolt Meyer is a psychologist with the University of Zurich, in Switzerland. Like the Bionic Man, the professor has a bionic hand. The robot also has 27 other man-made body parts.

“He has a great set of artificial organs already; he has an artificial heart, which is already used in patients. The artificial heart pumps artificial blood.”

The Bionic Man’s parts were borrowed from some of the world’s leading researchers. One is Joan Taylor, a professor of pharmaceutics at De Montfort University in the British city of Leicester.

“These are important not so much from the robotic point of view but from the contribution to future medicine.”

And those possibilities are huge, says Bertolt Meyer.

“This project shows that we can already replace a lot of broken parts and in the near future, technology might do away with many disabilities and with many diseases and illnesses, and society at large will benefit from them.”

But he says the Bionic Man is not a project about replacing human beings.

“There is no way to replace the human. There is no artificial brain and all of these devices are meant to interface with the human body.”

You can learn more about the Incredible Bionic Man and robotics on the Smithsonian Channel website. We have a link on our own website, learningenglish.voanews.com.

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