By Will Carlin
Some of you may remember the television show The Six Million Dollar Man. The show started off with these words: “Steve Austin: astronaut. A man barely alive. We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was. Better…stronger…faster.”
The back story of the series is the crash of a former astronaut in a space test vehicle, shown in the opening credits of the show. Austin is severely injured in the crash and is “rebuilt” in a title-giving operation that costs six million dollars. His right arm, both legs and the left eye are replaced by bionic implants that enhance his strength, speed and vision far above human norms. He uses his enhanced abilities to work as a secret agent.
The series lasted for four years (1974-78) and spawned a three-year spin-off, The Bionic Woman. The titular woman was Jamie Sommers, and her replacement parts were legs, right arm and her right ear, which allowed her to hear a whisper up to a mile away. The series never revealed how much it cost to rebuild her, but there was a hint that it cost more than the six million for Austin, because her parts had to be smaller.
Times have changed. In this fall’s NBC re-imagining of the Jamie Sommers show (now called, simply, Bionic Woman), her surgeries cost “over 30 million dollars.” In this new version, she has the original bionic parts, plus a bionic eye.
Interestingly, in the original series, Jamie Sommers was a professional tennis player when she got hurt (she is a bartender in the current version). The series, of course, was interested in her being a secret agent rather than a pro athlete, so it never dealt with what it would be like for a cyborg to play a sport.
But, as I watched the series premiere, it was all I could think about. Three years ago, when I had major surgery on my right shoulder, I remember my amazing surgeon, Dr. David Altchek, saying afterwards, “Your shoulder is going to be better than it was.” I laughed and said, in return, “Better, faster, stronger.”
And it is better. It required a four-hour surgery, five different procedures, and eleven months of rehab and many more months of training, but it likely is better now than it was when I got hurt. My surgery was reconstructive; that is, it involved trying to put things back to the way they were before the injury. There are screws and bolts, but the things that they are holding together are the original ligaments and tendons.
But what if I had been given an option to have a new synthetic kind of tendon and ligament? What if I had been told that it would increase my shoulder strength immeasurably to have them?
Sound far-fetched? Well, the same year that The Six Million Dollar Man debuted, a professional baseball pitcher named Tommy John was cruising along with a 13-3 record as a Los Angeles Dodger. Then in one pitch, he permanently damaged the ulnar collateral ligament in his pitching arm, leading to an operation, now known as Tommy John surgery.
The operation replaced the ligament in the elbow of his pitching arm with a tendon from his right forearm. The surgery, performed by Dr. Frank Jobe, was revolutionary: John returned to the Dodgers eighteen months later, in 1976, and went on to pitch until 1989, winning 164 games after his surgery—one fewer game than all-time great Sandy Koufax won in his entire career.
With his success, the surgical procedure now is commonplace in baseball, and some pitchers believe they pitch faster than they did before the surgery. So profound is this belief that some teenage pitchers with healthy arms are now opting for the surgery in the pursuit of a few extra miles per hour.
Many of you also know that I got hit in the eye by a ball during a match and suffered a torn and detached retina. Another amazing surgeon, Dr. Cynthia MacKay, put a silicon buckle around my eye (still there) and then performed numerous laser surgeries to burn the edges of the retina back together. The shape of my eye is squished from the buckle, so my vision is much worse (though fine with corrective contact lenses). But what if it had made it better? Would that give me a competitive advantage?
Some athletes think so. Numerous baseball players with 20/20 vision have opted for Lasik surgery to gain an edge in being able to see the ball. Even Tiger Woods had the surgery and reportedly believes it gives him an edge (not that he needs one).
And then there is the case of Paralympian Oscar Pistorius, a double-amputee below the knees, who is a tremendous athlete, but who also has carbon fiber attachments that allow him to sprint near the top speed of able bodied men. Many believe that the technology that allows him to train like other top sprinters might someday be able to give an edge. What then?
I have had eight surgeries due to squash, and each of them has taken something away from my game; if I had the chance to opt out of all the injuries that led to each surgery, I would.
But I can see the time coming when that attitude would be reversed—when many surgeries might lead to a new kind of physical advantage. As I watched Bionic Woman on television, I thought about how cool it would be to be able to move faster than anyone had ever before seen on squash court, and I smiled.
Then I thought of an opponent having the advantage, and I frowned. How unfair!
There’s the rub. All of us who either are athletes or root for athletes may have to deal with this sooner than we think (and it isn’t likely to cost anyone $30 million, either).
